A large portion of Asian American voters are either planning to vote for Barack Obama or are still undecided, the National Asian American Survey released today finds.
Researchers from, Berkley, USC, UC Riverside and Rutgers randomly interviewed 4,394 Asian American adults by phone from August 18 to September 26. The survey was offered in eight different languages.
Among likely Asian American voters, registered voters who are planning to cast their ballot next month, 41 percent said they’d vote for Obama while 24 percent said they would vote for John McCain. Thirty-four percent said they were undecided. The full report can be found here.
In the 12 battleground states Obama is slightly stronger with 43 percent of likely voters surveyed saying they would vote for Obama and 22 percent saying they’d vote for McCain. Thirty-five percent of Asian American likely voters surveyed in those states remain undecided.
Vietnamese American voters are the only group of Asian American’s who would vote for McCain over Obama. They support McCain by a margin of 51 to 24 percent. One percent of Vietnamese voters say they will vote for another candidate and 24 percent remain undecided, the survey shows. The entire table from the report can be found here.
Vietnamese Americans tend to vote Republican more then any other groups of Asians because they are viewed as the most anti-communist historically, said Jane Junn a political science professor at Rutgers University who helped write the report.
Among Vietnamese American’s “Democrats are seen as softer on the Communist Party,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan a political science professor at UC Riverside.
The researchers will continue to give interviews through October until 5,000 people are surveyed.
Do Seniors’ Deserve This?
While the cost of living has quadrupled, the group of people most negatively affected group in the society is the seniors, who are on fixed income. And some of us who had managed to invest in stocks and lived on interest income during the boom years in the mid to late 1980s have just witnessed the major evaporation of our life saving. We not only lost the interest income but the principle as well. Surprisingly, it does not appear that the down slope of our standard of living would soon improve. On Sunday, I could not believe listening to statements by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Sen. McCain’s senior policy adviser that if elected, Senator McCain intends to reduce medicare and medicaid spending to offset tax cuts pay for his proposed health plan. He further elaborated by saying that the savings would come from eliminating or reforming payment policies to lower the overall cost of care. He will also increase medicare premiums for the wealthier seniors. The more I think about I get very distressed that the ills of this generation are being pushed to its seniors and future generations. It is not fair.