Asian American voters moved sharply away from President Trump and the Republican Party in the 2026 midterms, according to new survey data from more than 10,000 voters. While Democrats won broad support across communities of colour, the shift was especially pronounced among Asian American and Pacific Islander voters.
The survey, conducted by BSP Research and the African American Research Collaborative from October 20 through Election Day, found that Asian American voters backed Democratic candidates over Republican candidates 64% to 33%. Of the 10,141 voters surveyed, 2,130 were Asian Americans.
The most striking finding was the scale of defection from Trump’s 2024 coalition: 17% of AAPI voters who supported Trump in 2024 voted for a Democrat in 2026. That represents a substantial loss for Republicans among a community that had shown increasing willingness to back Trump two years earlier.
Among AAPI respondents, 56% said they voted for Democrat Kamala Harris and 34% for Republican Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. In this year’s House races, support for Democrats rose to 64%, while Republican support remained relatively unchanged at 33%.
The poll found that the cost of living was the dominant concern across racial groups. Among AAPI voters, inflation ranked first, cited by 53% of respondents who could select up to three issues, followed by jobs and the economy at 37% and healthcare costs at 33%. Asked specifically about the cost of living, half cited food and grocery prices, 38% cited petrol prices and 34% pointed to healthcare costs.
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The results align with a separate survey by the Civic Health and Elections Project by NORC at the University of Chicago, which polled 3,000 Asian Americans and 200 Pacific Islanders. It found that 70% of Asian Americans and 49% of Pacific Islanders voted for Democrats for the U.S. House of Representatives, according to Karthick Ramakrishnan of AAPI Data.
Taeku Lee, a researcher at BSP and a professor at Harvard University, said voters of colour returned in 2026 to a coalition that has been building since 2008. In response to a question from AsAmNews, he described it as “a pendulum that was swinging towards a majority minority electorate for several elections now. It’s a massive swing back to that building coalition and that building electorate.”
Lee also highlighted the growing participation of younger voters. One in eight AAPI voters cast their first ballot in 2026, while one in three first voted in 2022 or later. Among voters aged 40 and younger, more than half had first voted in 2022 or later.
Many Asian American voters had left that coalition in 2024, when they supported Donald Trump, often over dissatisfaction with the direction of the economy. Clarissa Martinez of the Latino Voice Initiative said minority voters can bond over shared challenges and priorities, and that Democrats in 2026 capitalised on fears of economic uncertainty and voters’ ability to make ends meet under Trump.
“But if Democrats just do a victory lap and think that they don’t have to do anything, you will see a constant in this. Voters kind of coming back to demand responses. Part of that has to do with voters being consistent in their message. What are the actions that parties are taking to respond to that message,” Martinez asked.
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For Republicans, the data suggests that the inroads made among Asian American voters in 2024 may be fragile. Mary Lou Akai-Ferguson of the Asian American Power Network said the coalition’s return should not be taken for granted by either party.
“What I’ve been hearing again and again, both from the data and also from our folks on the ground, is that it wasn’t necessarily that people were so excited about the Democrats and really felt like they were given a vision that they wanted to vote for. It was a lot of what we are voting against. We are feeling a lot of pain. We were feeling a lot of attack, and we know that we need to stand up and exercise our right to vote.”
John Yang, executive director of the civil rights group Advancing Justice (AAJC), said the findings confirm what the group hears from communities: voters are rejecting abuses of power and demanding government accountability.
“When you look at all of the data, it is clear that the Asian-American community is not a wedge,” Yang said. “But rather that we support and are in alignment and are in solidarity with other communities of colour on all of these important issues.”
