Former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House comes with unprecedented support from Asian American voters.

About 39% of Asian American voters turned out for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, up from 27% in 2016. Despite his racist, xenophobic record, including anti-Chinese rhetoric early in the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a spike in violent attacks against East and Southeast Asian Americans more broadly. This shift occurred even though his opponent, current Vice President Kamala Harris, could have become the first Asian American president. Instead, similar to other racial groups, Asian Americans appear to have primarily been motivated by economic concerns, particularly inflation and a higher cost of living.

The Democratic Party’s decisive defeat reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of voters of color. Their blinkered belief that “demography is destiny” assumed voters of color like Asian Americans would fall in line simply for not being Trump. However, the 2024 election confirms a growing rightward drift among Asian voters over the last two decades. Liberal politics, as represented by the Democratic Party, no longer resonate with Asian Americans, especially in California, where nearly a third resides.

Understanding why Asian Americans are increasingly drawn to Trump and reactionary politics requires examining the “American” part of the term. As scholar and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie writes in her new book, UNASSIMILABLE: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, the term “Asian American” emerged as a radical formulation during the civil rights movements, grounded in solidarity with other racialized groups and a commitment to anti-imperialism. Today, however, it stands “reduced by the mainstream politics of representation and inclusion.”

According to Mabute-Louie, Asian Americans constantly face being regarded as a “racial danger to American society.” This places them under constant pressure to assimilate to whiteness, become an ostensibly successful “model minority,” and reap the benefits of serving as “an ideological weapon against [ostensibly unsuccessful] Black and Latino communities.” However, whether during Japanese American mass incarceration in World War II or the anti-Asian racism of the pandemic, belonging will always be conditional and easily revoked. In this insecure political space, with no meaningful left alternatives, Asian Americans are incentivized to uphold the existing white racist, capitalist order and garner whatever material benefits they can get. This is at the expense of others, both outside and inside their communities.

Consider the Asian, predominantly Chinese, American right’s fight over access to elite universities. As Mabute-Louie writes, Asian American representation in colleges exponentially increased through selective immigration policies, community educational resources, and affirmative action policies. However, high numbers of Asian students did not lead to institutional power in supposedly liberal universities, and instead fostered education as a zero-sum game.

Rather than challenge the scarcity of educational access, more Asian Americans believed that they were being discriminated against if they or their children could not get into top schools. Though a majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action, enough prioritized their own assimilation and allied with white conservatives to end affirmative action policies last year. This will hurt all communities of color, including Asian Americans, but especially underrepresented Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders who are often grouped with Asians.

The Asian American right is not just a tool of the white conservative establishment, but rather as organizer Promise Li notes are “active co-conspirators” in securing what they perceive as their American societal privileges and reactionary ideological preferences. This is evident in other reactionary forces Mabute-Louie identifies among Asian Americans, such as conservative evangelical Asian churches spreading a broader hostility to trans and queer rights among their congregants. Similar to their white counterparts, concerns over crime and safety have led many Asian American conservatives to organize against police reform, shelters for the unhoused in their neighborhoods, and buy into narratives of Black criminality and support for the American carceral system.

The truth is, as Asians have assimilated into America, they have adopted many of the fascist policy preferences of Trumpism. And like the Democratic Party, Asian American organizers who want to chart a different path for their communities must offer an affirmative vision counter to the one conjured by the right. As the title of her book indicates, Mabute-Louie offers a solution by proposing going beyond “Asian American” and instead becoming “unassimilable” as “Asians in Diaspora.” This rejects seeking acceptance by the US empire and whiteness, and allows Asians to define their own belonging based on values including decolonial love and revolutionary solidarity with other communities.

This vision already has historical precedent in a rich history of multiracial organizing for better labor conditions that many Asian communities engaged in with Black, Latine, and other communities against the white supremacist, capitalist order. As Mabute-Louie declares, “may we refuse to belong here, together.”

Muizz Akhtar (they/them) is a writer and freelance journalist based in Houston, Texas whose work has appeared in Vox, the San Antonio Express-News, and Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. They previously worked in Asian American community nonprofits and are passionate about addressing public health, climate change, and racial justice issues, particularly through the lens of urban planning.