Gavin Newsom and Larry Elder want votes from Asian Americans. Are they a recall swing vote?
In the closing weeks of California’s recall election, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and top-polling Republican candidate Larry Elder each made distinctly different pushes to get votes from the state’s fastest-growing ethnic group: Asian Americans.
Newsom last week became what’s believed to be the first California governor to appear at a Korean church, where he emphasized the importance of diversity in the state.
“I’m really proud of being a governor of a majority-minority state that at best doesn’t just tolerate diversity but celebrates diversity,” Newsom told the congregants of Young Nak Church of L.A., one of the biggest Korean churches in the country.
Elder, meanwhile, has been speaking to Asian American small business owners and blaming Newsom for the COVID-19 restrictions that crimped their profits.
“It was Gov. Gavin Newsom who hurt Korean small businesses,” Elder told Korean American media outlets when he visited Los Angeles’ Koreatown last week. “He must be recalled.”
The attention each candidate is paying to Asian Americans communities reflects their growing clout in California politics. In 2003, when the state had its last recall election, Asian Americans made up just 7% of California’s electorate. Now, the population makes up 17% of California’s electorate.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders tend to vote Democratic and polls show the majority of them oppose the campaign to recall Newsom. The latest UC Berkeley poll found that the population opposes the recall by a margin of 70% 29%.
But California polls tend to have a small sample size for Asian Americans and they might not accurately reflect the diversity of viewpoints within disparate communities. Asian Americans, for instance, had a big part in flipping two Congressional districts in Southern California to the Republican Party in 2020, when GOP Reps. Young Kim and Michelle Steel won office.
Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science at UC Riverside and founder of API Data, said last year’s victories for Kim and Steel might not foreshadow a surge of Asian American votes for Elder because of the peculiarities of a recall campaign’s timing and focus.
“When you look at Steel and Young Kim, those were all national issues candidates were running on,” he said. “They weren’t running on the future of California.”
Ramakrishnan also said Asian Americans saw big turnout increases in 2018 as well as 2020, especially among the younger voters. That could continue and be a good sign for Newsom since the population as a whole traditionally votes more Democrat, he said.
“We know we can make a difference,” said Tammy Kim, vice mayor of Irvine and the Southern California chair of California Democratic Party’s Asian Pacific Islander Caucus. “We are the margins of victory.”
Gavin Newsom’s pitch
Newsom allied with many prominent Asian American Democrats, from Attorney General Rob Bonta to Congresswoman Judy Chu, who represents a district in the San Gabriel Valley where Asians make up a plurality of voters.
Speaking at a recent press conference, those Democrats highlighted Newsom’s signing of a $157 million program to address discrimination and hate against Asian Pacific Islander communities. The money in part supports community organizations that provide victim services.
Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, called the budget item “a historic, unprecedented investment” to combat violence and address the needs of the victims.
“This is a testament to how committed he is to the community,” he said.
The Democrats at the press conference also repeatedly referred to Elder’s support for former President Donald Trump, who they felt stoked an anti-Asian sentiments when he called COVID-19 “the Chinese virus.”
If Elder “carries on many of the same policies that Donald Trump did while he was in office, he will ratchet up the rhetoric against our community like Donald Trump did,” said Varun Nikore, president of the AAPI Victory Fund which seeks to mobilize progressive Asian American and Pacific Islander voters. “He will cause cases of hate and violence to increase even at higher levels than at present times.”
Kim, who has hosted several phone banks events aimed at Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, said she’s framing the recall as a threat to democracy. That resonates a lot with Korean Americans, whose home country didn’t secure democracy until 1987, she said.
“He’s been good for our community and looked out for it more than anyone else. But sometimes that’s the argument that no one cares,” she said. “When you talk about from the standpoint of our democracy and our vote counting... that’s the message that resonates the most with our community.”
Larry Elder on business and affirmative action
Elder has endorsements from Asian American elected officials of his own to tout, from Rep. Steel, who represents the biggest Vietnamese American community in the country, to Yorba Linda Mayor Peggy Huang.
Supporters of Elder and the recall campaign say getting rid of Newsom is a chance to support small businesses and rebuild the Asian Pacific Islander community that has been hit hard during the pandemic.
Republican Amy Phan West cast Newsom’s remark last year that the first community spread of COVID-19 began at a nail salons as damaging to Vietnamese American since they make up about 75% of workers in U.S. nail salons. Newsom had declined to give details about his remarks, citing health privacy.
“That’s a slap in the face,” she said. “In shutting us down and saying we are non-essential, Asian community should be super mad, and we are. Who are to tell us we can’t work to put food on the table for our families?”
Recall supporters also cite Newsom’s support for a ballot measure last year that would have reinstated affirmative action in public university admissions, government hiring and government contracts. The measure, Proposition 16, failed 57% to 42%.
The majority of Asian Americans as a whole support affirmative action according to a national 2020 voter survey. The same survey found more Chinese and Korean Americans opposed Prop. 16.
Betty Tom Chu, the first Chinese-American woman to pass the bar admission in California, said Newsom’s support for Prop. 16 has added to the “explosion of anti-Asian hate.”
“The rationale behind using race is to have diversity, but discrimination to fight discrimination historically is still discrimination, and it’s unfair,” said Elder, speaking with Chu at a press conference in August.
This story was originally published September 12, 2021 at 8:25 AM with the headline "Gavin Newsom and Larry Elder want votes from Asian Americans. Are they a recall swing vote?."
