The silken scarves that Ben and Josh Romney wore as they toured

The silken scarves that Ben and Josh Romney wore as they toured a suburban shopping mall of Vietnamese businesses this month were bright yellow, with thin red stripes. They weren’t fashion statements; they were political accessories. As the Romneys pitched their father’s presidential bid, the scarves epitomized the kind of granular attention to detail that campaigns now pay to Asian-American voters: The vibrant colors identified their opposition to Vietnamese communism and their support for the local Vietnamese-American community.

Asian-Americans constitute only about 6 percent of Virginia’s population, but they have become a coveted constituency in a state at the center of the battle for the presidency and the Senate. And the Eden Center shopping mall in the Washington suburbs has become something of a ground zero in the battle for their votes.

Two of the Romney brothers stopped by this month. So did volunteers for President Obama’s campaign, which organized a voter-registration drive during the mall’s recent Moon Festival. Republican Senate candidate George Allen made a whistle-stop in September, and his wife, Susan, toured several Eden Center businesses over the summer. Democratic Senate candidate Tim Kaine whirled through for an economic roundtable earlier in the year. “They’re all coming down to our community,” says Hung Hoang, a 48-year-old barber who has worked in the mall for two decades. “More, more, more than before.”

Blame Bob McDonnell, at least in part. During his 2009 campaign for governor, the Republican made an unprecedented push for these voters, airing Asian-language television and radio ads and stuffing mailboxes with literature in Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Tagalog, a Filipino language. McDonnell spun through the Eden Center no less than three times. Ultimately, he flipped the state’s most Asian-American-heavy precincts en route to a rare Republican win in Fairfax County, home of the Eden Center and the epicenter of Virginia’s Asian-American population. In one of those precincts, where more than 45 percent of voters have Asian ancestry, Obama won with 63 percent; McDonnell got 52 percent there, a National Journal analysis showed. The lesson: With a bit of effort, the Asian-American vote could be had by either political party.

Long an ignored slice of the electorate, Asian-Americans are increasingly flexing their political muscles this year, as candidates and as constituents. Asians, not Hispanics, were America’s fastest-growing minority group in the last decade, and many now live far beyond the traditional enclaves of California and Hawaii. As a result, they are being courted and catered to in key battlegrounds such as Nevada and Virginia. Asian-Americans hold the governorships in the seemingly unlikely states of Louisiana and South Carolina. They are running for Congress in record numbers in 2012.

And, demographers and political strategists agree, it’s just the beginning.

DEMOGRAPHY AS DESTINY

“We’ve got to get communicating,” says Shawn Steel, a Republican National Committee member and an outspoken evangelist about the importance of the Asian-American vote. He talks in the urgency of now, even if he’s speaking about a slow-moving demographic trend that has been decades in the making. In 1965, the year America last rewrote its immigration rules, Asian-Americans were less than 1 percent of the population. Today, that figure is nearing 6 percent and spiraling upward. The number of Asian-Americans jumped from 11.9 million in 2000 to 17.3 million in 2010, a 46 percent growth rate that outpaced even that of Hispanics, according to the Census Bureau. “I’m on fire about this,” Steel says.

A former chairman of the California Republican Party, he knows what it’s like to miss a demographic wave. As the Latino population swelled in California, it turned Ronald Reagan’s state into a Democratic stronghold. If Republicans were swept away by the Latino wave, Steel reckons, they’d better not miss the coming Asian-American one. “We’ve got to get on it,” he says, “and we’re running out of time.”

The Latino population wave, of course, has long since surged past California and other border states to far-off places like Iowa, North Carolina, and Utah. The breadth of the diaspora is one reason that Latinos are now so politically powerful: The Hispanic vote is a potential difference-maker almost everywhere.

Asian-Americans are following a similar trajectory, only a few decades behind. Every state saw its Asian and Pacific Islander population jump by at least 30 percent between 2000 and 2010 (except Hawaii, which was already majority Asian-American). The Asian population surged by 71 percent in Virginia, 95 percent in Arizona, 85 percent in North Carolina, and 116 percent in Nevada, according to census figures.

Thank an influx of Asian immigrants. Despite the nation’s focus on Latino immigration, Asians actually outnumbered Hispanics in 2010, according to the most recent data available from the Pew Research Center—a reversal of past trends. Nearly two-thirds of Asian-Americans are foreign-born.

Because there were so few Asians to begin with, the rapid growth rate can be misleading in some places. But not everywhere: In Nevada, for instance, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders now make up about 9 percent of the population—more than the state’s much-discussed Mormon community.

It’s one of the reasons that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hosted a get-out-the-vote rally with Filipino boxing sensation Manny Pacquiao in Nevada two years ago. And why this year’s Senate combatants there, GOP incumbent Dean Heller and Democratic challenger Shelley Berkley, have clashed over who would better represent Filipino veterans. In Clark County, home to Las Vegas and most of the state’s population, ballots will be available for the first time in three languages: English, Spanish, and Tagalog.

Three converging trends have magnified the importance of the Asian-American vote, says Bill Wong, a Democratic political strategist in California. The first is rapid population growth. The second is that political campaigns can be won and lost on a razor’s edge. The third is that Asians are swing voters. “We’re large enough to be relevant, and the margins are small enough to make it matter,” he says. Or, as Mee Moua, president of the Asian American Justice Center and a former Minnesota state lawmaker, likes to say, “Those who ignore us do so at their own peril.”

The GOP is learning to play this game. Govs. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, both Indian-American, are considered among the party’s brightest rising stars. And one of Mitt Romney’s top policy advisers, Lanhee Chen, is Taiwanese-American.

Still, there have been hiccups. Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee accidentally featured a stock photo of Asian kids on a website for Latino outreach. And GOP Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra of Michigan was widely criticized for an ad that featured an Asian woman riding a bike through rice paddies and speaking in broken English about how Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow shipped money and jobs to China. “Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good,” says the Asian actress in the ad, who later apologized for playing into stereotypes.

As TV ads set to ominous music hammer China as the enemy of American jobs, Steel—whose wife of 30 years, Michelle Steel, is Korean-American and an elected California tax board member—frets over the “cluelessness of Republican consultants who refuse to expand their minds” and grasp the importance of outreach to Asian-Americans. “For Democrats, this comes natural,” Steel says. “Give them a new community and they’re all over it. They’ve done this for 150 years, ever since Tammany Hall welcomed the Irish.”

UP FOR GRABS

Every year, the United States becomes less and less white. In the 2012 election, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney could win a record share of the white vote—as much as 60 percent—and still lose. Already, African-Americans are solidly in the Democratic coalition, and each cycle seems to move the Latino vote further in that direction. Asian-Americans have been following them steadily into the Democratic Party (in presidential politics) for two decades. In 1992, Bill Clinton garnered only 31 percent of the Asian-American vote. By 2008, Barack Obama had doubled that mark, pulling a high of 62 percent. In every presidential race in between, exit polls showed Democrats steadily increasing their vote share.

But the Asian-American political story isn’t fully written just yet. Studies show, and political strategists on both sides of the aisle agree, that the community remains persuadable by either party. The National Asian American Survey showed that 32 percent of likely voters in this group were still up for grabs in September—at a time when most surveys found only 5 to 10 percent of the total electorate still undecided. (The survey, which conducted more than 3,000 interviews in 11 Asian languages in August and early September, found that Obama led Romney 43 percent to 24 percent.) “There is all this talk about how everyone has made up their minds. That’s absolutely not true for Asian-Americans,” says Karthick Ramakrishnan, the survey’s director and a professor at the University of California (Riverside).

Yet both parties do a relatively poor job of reaching out to them. A sizable majority of Asian-Americans said in a different poll this spring that neither political party had contacted them in the past two years. The survey, conducted by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, even over-sampled the swing states of Florida, Nevada, and Virginia. Still, among self-identified partisans, only 23 percent of Asian Democrats and 17 percent of Asian Republicans said they had been contacted this cycle. “That’s lower than we’ve seen for other populations,” Lake says.

Among coveted independents, nearly 60 percent of Asian-Americans said they’d heard nothing from either major political party. This is what drives Shawn Steel bonkers. “You’re going to melt TV sets all over America with your ads,” he says of the presidential contest, yet “there is still a fresh opportunity to go after Asian-American voters.”

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-power-of-the-asian-american-vote-is-growing-and-it-s-up-for-grabs-20121025?page=3