Many Asian Republicans blame Trump, not GOP, for discrimination

The disconnect could be a function of Trump’s outsized persona within the party and his explicit use of racist terms about the pandemic, according to Asian American activists and academics. From “kung flu” to “China virus,” Trump’s rhetoric around the pandemic became a major factor in pushing Asian Americans to get more politically engaged in 2020. Early and absentee voting by AAPI voters in swing states increased by 300 percent last year, more than any other group, NBC News reported.

In fact, Trump was the second-most cited catalyst for anti-AAPI discrimination in the poll, behind the fact that Covid-19 was first detected in China, which 63 percent of respondents said was a “major reason” for discrimination.

Asian Americans generally tend to identify as independents and form opinions on a candidate-by-candidate basis rather than for an entire party relative to other communities, which could explain why voters were more readily willing to name Trump than the party at large, said Christine Chen, executive director of APIAVote, a nonpartisan group focused on engaging AAPI voters that presents data to campaigns from both parties.

“A lot of them aren’t necessarily wedded in terms of the actual parties but it’s really about individual candidates and the relationships. And that has been consistent,” Chen said. “So it really has been about how those campaigns and candidates have outreached to the community. How they have actually developed relations.”

Though Republicans have largely stood by the former president, there has been far more prevalent dissent against his Covid rhetoric among AAPI Republicans. Among the most notable was from Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.), who was elected to Congress in 2020 and denounced Trump’s “continued use of terms associating COVID-19 with the #AAPI community” as “hurtful to many across our diverse nation. As I have said in the past, no American of any race or ethnic group, is responsible for this virus.”

“Words have consequences, which is why I spoke out against the use of insensitive rhetoric such as ‘kung flu.’ Our leaders must work to unify, not divide, and this rhetoric does not do that,” Kim wrote in a March op-ed.

Beth Fukumoto, who served as the Republican leader in the Hawaii State Legislature from 2014 to 2017, said she’d seen some earnest GOP efforts to reach out to Asian American voters before Trump landed the party’s presidential nomination. Both state and national Republican leaders were piqued by the rapid growth of the AAPI electorate, Fukumoto said, and showed genuine interest in appealing to Asian voters. But that changed when Trump became the face of the party, she said.

Fukumoto left the Republican Party in 2017 and registered as a Democrat. When asked if she would rejoin the Republicans if the party were to…