Electoral analysis reveals domestic policy issues dominate voter choice over foreign affairs among East Asian immigrants, highlighting the primary salience of local concerns in local elections.
Do American voters of East Asian immigrant backgrounds decide their vote choice based on international issues related to their home countries, or are immigrant-dense communities focused on domestic issues like most American voters? We evaluate these questions using two state senate elections (2022 and 2024) in a highly dense immigrant district (17th State Senate District, Brooklyn, New York), comparing the electoral impact of a high-salience international issue (Taiwan) against a divisive domestic issue (a proposed homeless shelter). We develop measures for both factors and test them with precinct-level data. We find that despite the high share of immigrant-background voters and growing attention to the Taiwan issue in American politics in recent years, the homeless shelter issue dominated the subnational electoral politics of this district. We buttress these results with two analyses of East Asian CMPS respondents, finding that domestic economic issues are more important to these voters than international concerns.
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Collingwood et al. (2026) studied this question.
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