Asian American voters leaning toward Biden, though support has declined, survey finds

July 10, 2024, 6:00 AM EDT

By Kimmy Yam

Asian American voters favor President Joe Biden over Donald Trump, a new survey has found. But experts say that doesn’t mean Biden has clinched the Asian American vote. 

The survey, examining Asian American voter attitudes conducted April 4 to May 26, suggests just under half of Asian American voters, 46%, would choose Biden, while less than one-third, 31%, would vote for Trump if the election were conducted at the time of the survey. Nearly a quarter of the voters surveyed would prefer a third-party candidate, said they were undecided or refused to answer. 

The 2024 Asian American Voters Survey still shows an 8-point shift away from Biden since 2020. Biden’s 15-point margin contrasts with the nearly 30-point edge he held over Trump among those voters in the 2020 election, according to an NBC News exit poll.

The new survey most likely points to a lack of enthusiasm for Biden, underscoring “trouble” for his campaign, said Janelle Wong, senior researcher at the nonprofit group AAPI Data, one of the organizations involved in the report.

“Polls tend to overestimate turnout in general, and in this situation, there is real indication that Asian American voters are not fired up for Biden,” Wong said. “Although we are not seeing a mass movement toward Trump in our community, we are seeing a potentially problematic trend for the Biden campaign among this fairly loyal bloc of Democratic-leaning voters.”

The survey — released Wednesday by the nonpartisan groups AAPI Data, APIAVote, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and AARP — polled 2,479 registered voters by telephone and online. It reported an overall margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points, though that was much higher for individual groups, including Chinese Americans.

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