Division and Diversity: The Asian American Vote and the Failure of Prop 16

Illustration: Kai Sase Ebens for the Davis Political Review

In the typically progressive haven of California, Proposition 16, a ballot initiative that would have allowed the state government to consider race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin in its decision making in order to improve diversity in public education, public employment and public contracting, recently failed in the November general election, with roughly 56 percent of voters opposed. Proposition 16 would have repealed Proposition 209, the initiative that essentially ended affirmative action in California when it passed in 1996. As a result of Proposition 209, enrollment of black, Latinx and Native American students dropped at UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC-wide. While opponents feared Proposition 16 would have allowed for race or gender-based admission quotas at California’s public universities, these kinds of quotas were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Regents v. Bakke.  Instead, Proposition 16 simply would have allowed race to be considered as an additional factor in the holistic admissions process.  Proposition 16 deeply divided communities across California, in particular, the Asian American community. 

While Asian Americans are generally considered to be Democratic-leaning, Asian American voters are not a monolith, as Asian Americans come from a variety of cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. As such, while many progressive Asian American elected officials and community groups supported Prop 16 in its effort to promote diversity, many Asian American voters actively opposed the proposition. The fissures began with the debate over ACA 5, the legislative act that put Proposition 16 on the ballot. While ACA 5 was being considered in the California Legislature, a petition opposing the measure gathered almost 150,000 signatures.  As a result of the heated debate, ACA 5 passed both the Assembly and the Senate with near-total Republican opposition and notable abstentions from Assemblymembers Kansen Chu and Ed Chiu, two otherwise progressive Chinese American legislators. As Asian immigrants stand to become the largest immigrant group in the United States by 2055, political activists need to better understand the complexities of the Asian American community. A better understanding of the fissures within the Asian American community as a result of Proposition 16 and the broader ideological divide it reflects can inform party activists on both sides on how to better appreciate and speak to the diversity within the Asian American community. 

The opposition to Proposition 16 amongst the Asian American community stems from the trend that Asian Americans are overrepresented in California’s public universities. For example, according to the Los Angeles Times, Asian Americans made up “40.3% of in-state freshmen last year compared with their 19.9% share among California high school graduates eligible for UC admission.” As a result, Asian Americans appeared to stand to lose the most if race was considered as a factor in admission to California’s public universities. As such, some Asian American parents fear that race-conscious admissions policies could put their children at a disadvantage. While this may be the case for certain ethnic groups within the Asian American community, not every Asian ethnic group is overrepresented in public California universities. While 54 percent of Asian Americans in California have a college degree, less than 25 percent of Laotian, Hmong and Cambodian Americans in California have graduated from college. These groups actually would have benefited immensely if Proposition 16 passed given that the goal of affirmative action is to spread educational opportunities to groups who have had less access to these opportunities historically. 

Beyond affirmative action, in terms of party identification and political ideology, while Asian Americans as a whole are Democratic-leaning, certain ethnic groups within the Asian American community tend to identify as Republicans and hold more conservative ideologies. Given that the California Republican Party was an opponent of Proposition 16, the conservative bent of some Asian Americans likely also contributed to the failure of the affirmative action initiative. A particularly strong example of this phenomenon is Vietnamese Americans. Most Vietnamese immigrants are staunchly anti-Communist, so the casting of Democrats as socialists effectively lead a plurality of Vietnamese American voters to identify as Republicans, the only ethnic group with a plurality identifying as GOP members in this survey of Asian American voters conducted by APIA Vote. As such, Vietnamese American voters in California have remarkable similarities with Cuban American voters in Florida, who also tend to identify as Republican as a result of their strong anti-Communist views and Catholic faith. Rather than reliable Democratic voters, some segments of the Asian American community hold more conservative views, a phenomenon that also likely contributed to Proposition 16’s demise. 

While the model minority myth suggests that all Asian Americans are overrepresented in California’s higher education system, some Asian ethnic groups would benefit from affirmative action policies. While Asian Americans as a whole may lean Democratic, plenty of Asian Americans identify as Republicans. The inaccurate portrayal of Asian American voters as a monolithic voting bloc appears to stem from party activists looking to replicate the strength and reliability of African Americans as a critical constituency for the Democratic Party. Writing for The Washington Post, Theodore R. Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice said, “the bloc has almost always voted together in the push for civic inclusion and racial equality.” While the unique history of African Americans fosters solidarity at the voting bloc, the same should not and cannot be said of every racial group. Appealing to Asian American voters begins with understanding that there is not one kind of Asian American.