The Surprising Stability of Asian Americans’ and Latinos’ Partisan Identities in the Early Trump Era

Abstract

Two prominent, compatible theoretical accounts contend that Asian Americans and Latinos are not strongly connected to America’s political parties and that their partisanship is responsive to identity threats. Donald Trump’s political ascent presents a critical test, as Trump reoriented the Republican Party by foregrounding anti-immigrant hostility. Here, we test these perspectives using one of the first-ever population-based panels of English-speaking Asian Americans and English- or Spanish-speaking Latinos fielded in 2016 and 2018. Across various empirical tests, we uncover surprising strength and stability in respondents’ partisan identities. In a period of pronounced anti-immigrant rhetoric, these groups remained steadfast in their party affiliation. We also show that panethnic identities were stable over this period and that partisanship can predict subsequent panethnic identities more consistently than the reverse. By 2016, panethnic identities were already stably integrated with partisanship, with little evidence of situational shifts in response to identity threats.