Interestingly enough Bush Sr., Reagan, and even Bob Dole in 1996 won the Asian vote.
I think a lot of that has to do with the inner-city riots that took place in the 1980s and early 1990s. Particularly after the Rodney King incident, there were a lot of Asian-owned stores and restaurants that got damaged and ransacked by the black rioters. Add to that the fact that Asians generally view black people as not entirely civilized (this is true both among Asian-Americans and among Asians in Asia), and they likely wanted to vote for the party they associated with "law and order" and against the party that blacks tended to support.
I don't think so.
While some Korean-Americans may have had a reaction to the riot, this was probably not a key issue for most Asian-Americans. Asian-Americans do not make their voting decisions as a reaction to the votes of African-Americans or based on prejudice against African-Americans. That assertion is absurd. Maybe that's how white politics of resentiment works in Mississippi or Texas. But that's not how Asian-Americans--or most white voters for that matter--make voting decisions in California or New Jersey or Hawaii or New York.
Some of the factors that could have lent to support of the GOP include that Asian-Americans tend to be fairly pro-incumbent. Asian-Americans also tend to be fairly pro-business and are disproportionately professionals, thing old-school GWB/Rockefeller Republicans. Clinton ran a populist campaign in 1992. It was in 1996 that there was the big Northern suburban realignment to Democrats, which probably resulted in a huge shift in the way Asian-American professionals and business owners voted. Plus Bush has a pretty successful foreign policy...plus Reagan/Bush were pro-immigrant. And there were fewer young Asian-American voters who tend to be fairly liberal, often moreso that their parents.
Its crazy to think that anyone voted against Clinton because he had support from blacks. That's using 2012 anti-obama race politics to interpret 1992 election results. If Asians voted for Obama so overwhelming when the race issue was front and center, why would anti-African-American sentiment have been a key voting issue in 1992?!?
I fully agree with you, but one could argue that Obama did well among Asians due to his Hawaiian and Indonesian upbringing and lifelong connection to that community including his half sister who I believe has the last name of Ng.
Strangely one of his half-brothers (who is not Asian) is living in China.
