FoleyFunctional

I listened to an NPR talk show one day while I was driving. It was talking about the Proposition 8 being passed in California (a vote on banning gay marriage). People blame the black population on passing the ban because 70% of the black population voted for the ban. The talk show host went on to describe the percentage of white, and hispanic voters that voted for the ban. They failed to mention the Asian American vote. I thought that was a bit odd because I know that Asian Americans make up a large population of California. I went off to do some research

It turns out, Asian Americans make up 12.3% of the California population, whilst blacks are just 6.2% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#Population)

Asian Americans make up 6% of the vote in California. Blacks make up 6% also (http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/jtf/JTF_LatinoVotersJTF.pdf)

I remember from the talk show, Hispanics and Blacks were more likely to vote for the ban. I had to do my own research to show that 57% of Asian Americans were more likely to vote against it (http://newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=1934)

From this site (http://cagaymarriage.blogspot.com/2008/10/survey-asian-americans-overwhelmingly.html) a member of the NAAS survey team says “…Asian-Americans tend to be more sensitive than other Americans to laws that exclude certain groups…”.

I don’t think it was responsible for the NPR talk show host to not even mention briefly the Asian American vote for Proposition 8. At least give the Asian American population credit for voting against the ban. It would have taken 5 seconds of radio talk time. I can understand in other markets where the Asian American population vote is minute that it may not be worth mentioning (though I think no matter what, it should be mentioned!). That seems to be the stand point of a lot of politicians and decision makers – Asian American voice is small and their opinions can be excluded.

But when the weight of the Asian American vote is the same as blacks, there is no excuse for that.

The Asian American voting survey is drawn from the National Asian American Survey (коли под наемhttp://www.naasurvey.com/) and the largest scientific poll of Asian-Americans ever done. A copy and paste about the survey:

Beyond the pattern of underrepresentation in political voice and representation, it is
notoriously difficult to establish firm facts about which Asian Americans vote, why they vote, who they vote for, and whether the Asian American vote is a partisan or a swing  vote.  This is primarily due to a lack of good data on Asian American political behavior.
A typical pre-election survey or exit poll will contain only a handful of Asian Americans, is biased toward those who are more educated, well-off, US-born, English proficient, and otherwise assimilated into life in the U.S.  Even academic, media polls, and exit polls that explicitly survey Asian Americans are limited because they typically focus on just one or several cities, or they disproportionately sample particular ethnic origin groups, or because interviews are only done in English or a limited number of Asian languages.
The 2008 National Asian American Survey aims to fill this important gap in our
understanding of this potentially rising force in the American electorate

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