US election snapshot: Asian turnout increases in early voting
A daily roundup of the top news items about the race for the White House compiled by South China Morning Post reporters on the campaign trail
Asian focus: Early Asian vote up slightly, but black turnout low so far
Asian American turnout in early voting has been slightly boosted this year, according to several academic and media analyses.
The collective category of mixed-race, Asian and other-race voters accounted for 209,000 ballots after the first full weekend of in-person early voting ended Sunday. That is already three quarters of the entire 2012 early-voting total.
But the development that has been more widely noted in US media is the low turnout so far among African-Americans, who had cast 421,000 early and absentee ballots as of Monday morning, accounting for only 55 per cent of the total such ballots that black voters cast in 2012, according to an analysis by Associated Industries of Florida, a conservative-leaning business group. Black voters turned out in force in 2008 and 2012 to help elect Barack Obama as the first African American US president.
On the other hand, there has been off-the-charts enthusiasm among Hispanic voters this election. As of Monday morning, Hispanics had cast more than 507,000 ballots by mail and in-person early votes, equivalent to 97 per cent of the total combined early ballots that Hispanics cast in the entire 2012 election.
Hispanics have expressed a strong tendency to favour Democrat Hillary Clinton, amid Republican Donald Trump’s threats to deport illegal immigrants en masse and build a wall on the border with Mexico.