During MSNBC’s election night coverage, host Joy Reid, having just learned that Donald Trump had won the swing state of North Carolina, launched into a tirade against white women. “Black voters came through for Kamala Harris. White women voters did not,” said Reid. “This will be the second opportunity that white women have to change the way that they have to interact with the patriarchy,” she continued, referring to the 2016 presidential election.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan also blamed Harris’s loss on white women, writing on X: “Per the exit poll, a majority of white women voted for Trump. Again.”

In an article for The New Republic titled “White Women Doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats—Again,” writer Malcolm Ferguson criticized Democrats for holding black men responsible for Trump’s victory instead of white women. “There was so much liberal hand wringing over Harris’ perceived issues with black male voters,” wrote Ferguson. “And yet Harris won three-quarters of black men, while a much larger, much more powerful group of voters (white women) rejected the party begging for their votes for a third time.”

According to NBC exit polls, a majority of white women (53 percent) did vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, up from 44 percent in 2020 and 39 percent in 2016 per Pew. But white women’s 14-point shift in Trump’s favor over the course of eight years is hardly the only reason Trump won. Nor is it even the most interesting story, as Reid and her fellow race essentialists seem to believe. Rather, Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win both the Electoral College and the popular vote in large part because many racial minorities—blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians—voted for him.

Exit polls are not always reliable, but in the days following a presidential race, they can help shed light on what might have happened. In this case, the same exit polls that showed Trump’s victory among white women revealed that 77 percent of black men voted for Harris, down from 87 percent who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. These polls also demonstrated that a mere 43 percent of Latino men voted for the vice president, down from 57 percent who voted for Biden. Asian Americans preferred Harris to Trump by only 15 percentage points, the lowest margin of victory for a Democratic presidential candidate with this racial group in several presidential cycles. The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research reports that in 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama won Asians by 27 and 47 percentage points, respectively; in 2016, Hillary Clinton won Asians by 38 percentage points; and in 2020, Biden won Asians by 27 percentage points.

Much of the coverage of Trump’s gains among racial minorities has focused on the in-roads he made with Hispanics. This is worth studying, of course. Yet, given that Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., their voting patterns merit close scrutiny, too.

The Asian population in the U.S. is incredibly diverse. Pew reports at least 19 Asian ethnic groups here, with the six largest being Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. To understand the breadth of Trump’s appeal to Asian Americans in 2024, then, we should consider the political attitudes and behavior of each ethnic group separately.

Harris is the daughter of an Indian immigrant and identifies, in part, as “South Asian,” so let’s begin with Indian Americans. Last month, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released the results of its 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey (IAAS). Among other things, this nationwide survey of 714 Indian Americans found that 60 percent of the group intended to vote for Harris, compared with 31 percent who planned to vote for Trump. The 2020 IAAS similarly found that 68 percent of voters intended to vote for Biden, while 22 percent intended to vote for Trump. As with the black and Hispanic vote percentages in the presidential election, the main takeaway here is not that more Indians preferred the Democratic candidate to the Republican one in 2020 and 2024; that is to be expected, given the group’s socially liberal disposition. Rather, the story is that more Indians planned to vote for Trump in his match-up against Harris than in his contest against Biden.

Indian Americans’ shift toward Trump in the IAAS was particularly pronounced among men between the ages of 18 and 39. In 2024, more members of this group said that they intended to vote for Trump than for Harris (48 percent versus 44 percent). Yet in 2020, young Indian men preferred Biden to Trump by a margin of 47 percentage points (70 percent versus 23 percent). Even Indian women in this age range said that they were more likely to vote for Trump in 2024 (29 percent) than in 2020 (19 percent).

In a similar vein, a comparison of the results from the 2020 and 2024 Asian American Voter Survey (AAVS), a nationwide poll of the six largest Asian-origin groups in the U.S., reveals that Trump was viewed more favorably this time around by Japanese (27 percent in 2024 versus 24 percent in 2020), Korean (35 percent in 2024 versus 26 percent in 2020), and Chinese (24 percent in 2024 versus 20 percent in 2020) registered voters.

Did these ethnic groups’ more favorable views of Trump make them more likely to vote for the former president, compared with 2020? In New York City, home to the largest Chinese population in the U.S. and many other Asian-origin groups, the answer appears to be “yes.”

Trump either won outright or made significant gains in several election districts throughout neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn that are home to large Chinese American populations, including Flushing, Bensonhurst, and Sunset Park. He performed better in the Queens neighborhoods of Bayside, Douglaston, and Little Neck, where many Korean Americans live. Areas of the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens, where 16.2 percent of the population is South Asian and 7.2 percent is Indian, also shifted in the president-elect’s direction. Trump even improved on his 2020 performance throughout parts of the Kensington neighborhood in Brooklyn, nicknamed “Little Bangladesh.”

Karthick Ramakrishnan, an Indian-American political scientist and founder of the progressive polling organization AAPI Data, told NBC News last week that Asian Americans viewed Trump more favorably in 2024 than in 2020 and 2016 because of their concerns about the economy, an explanation that both the IAAS and AAVS seem to confirm. In this way, Asian American voters are not all that different from their black and Hispanic peers; polls conducted in advance of the election by UnidosUS and the Black Economic Alliance also found that these groups cared more about the economy and inflation than progressive policy priorities, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and abortion.

On the local level, soft-on-crime policies in Democratic bastions such as New York City likely led several Asian New Yorkers to cast a ballot for Trump. Education probably played a role in Gotham, too. State and local Democrats have spent years attacking New York’s specialized high schools, which many Asian-American parents, particularly immigrant parents, view as a golden ticket to a better life for their children.

Nationally, the Biden administration has been a staunch defender of racial preferences in university admissions, a policy that the Supreme Court struck down in 2023 for penalizing Asian Americans in violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. (In an official statement, Harris described the ruling as “a step backward for our nation.”) Worse still, less than two weeks after taking office in January 2021, the administration dropped a Trump-era lawsuit against Yale University, which 130 Asian-American organizations had accused of anti-Asian discrimination in undergraduate admissions.

Asian Americans’ dissatisfaction with Democratic positions on the economy, crime, and education reflect their broader dissatisfaction with progressive assaults on merit, fairness, and the American dream—ideas that many Asian American groups hold dear. In fact, a May 2023 Pew study found that a majority of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans believed that they are on their way to achieving or have already achieved the American dream.

This doesn’t mean that Asian ethnic groups are leaving the Democratic Party en masse. Majorities of these groups still identify more with Democrats than with the GOP. More than anything, Trump’s performance in the 2024 presidential election reveals that, when it comes to Asian Americans, opportunity knocks. Republicans and Democrats should take heed.

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