Trump did much better with foreign-born Asians than US-born Asians, especially those with low English proficiency levels. That accounts for the slight swing towards Trump among SOME Asian ethnic groups (mostly Vietnamese-Americans).
Of course, Biden still got the overwhelming majority of the Asian vote in CA (74%) and nationwide (68%).
How ironic is this? That Donald Trump, who talked about "s***hole countries", who made demands for America to "Build the Wall", who implemented an immigration ban on Muslim countries, who introduced a greatly expanded "family separation" policy, who made negative comments about a Hispanic judge and a Muslim Gold Star family, who talked about "his African-American"...did better with nonwhite voters than in 2016 and posted the best performance for a Republican among them in years? And the "slight" swing towards Trump translated into a much more considerable one downballot, with the victories of Young Kim and Michelle Steel.
Any other Republican incumbent would've made even bigger gains among nonwhites relative to the Obama era. Someone like Rubio would have drastically higher baseline support among CA Latinos and Asians, although they might not have the same kind of incumbent charisma 45 has.
Really not seeing this as a given or I'd have expected trends to be stronger downballot as opposed to at the top of the ticket. Certain candidates like Steel did manage this (especially Asian ones, it seems?), but I'd have expected a better showing for Gimenez, Cornyn, etc. and to a lesser extent John James. Instead, Republican candidates tended to do better amongst white suburbanites. This election and its statistically improbable turnout spike should stick a fork in the assumptions that most Republican candidates were better than Trump on a whole host of messages (except message discipline, of course).
Among other issues, almost everyone in the 2016 Republican field would have made a more concerted effort to cut the welfare state as president and that would probably have led to a nastier kicking amongst voters of all races.
