TALLAHASSEE – As Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month draws to a close, new polling commissioned by the Florida Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Progress (FLAAPP) coalition provides insights into the attitudes of AAPI voters throughout Florida.
Overall, Florida’s AAPI voters are ethnically diverse, highly educated, and about evenly divided between United States and foreign-born. Among those surveyed, 23% self-identify as Indian, 20% as Filipino, 15% as Chinese, 13% as Vietnamese, 5% as Korean, and 24% as other AAPI groups, about two in three have a college education, and 45% report being born in the United States and 50% as foreign-born.
For AAPI voters in Florida, opposition to the state’s six-week abortion ban is strong (61% oppose / 29% support), with 66% believing that abortion should be legal in all or most cases (28% legal in all cases / 38% legal in most cases) while only 26% believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases (7% illegal in all cases / 19% illegal in most cases).
“What this survey makes clear is that reproductive freedom in our health care decisions is a non-negotiable issue for AAPI Floridians,” stated May Thach, Senior Florida Organizing Manager for the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF). “For many AAPI Floridians, supporting access to legal abortion means having the ability to make decisions about our reproductive health that gives us full agency over our lives, our families, and our communities.”
When asked to choose from a list on the importance of some top issues facing the state, Florida’s AAPI voters expressed concern over inflation, jobs, and the economy (54%), health care (35%), education (34%), public safety and crime (32%), housing (31%), immigration (26%), and abortion (24%).
On how to address those issues, a majority of AAPI voters in Florida believe that gun laws should be more strict (58% should be more strict / 27% are about right / 8% should be less strict), a supermajority believe in increasing regulations to lower the cost of health care (60% more regulation to prevent insurance companies from price gouging / 29% fewer regulations allowing competition and the free market to bring down costs), more than half support using tax dollars solely for public schools (54% used solely to fund public schools / 38% used wherever parents send their students, whether public or private schools), and opinions are split on how to address immigration (35% better border security and stronger enforcement of our immigration laws / 21% creating a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are already here / 41% both of these, equally).
However, while 87% of those polled believe it matters to them who wins in the November election, 65% agree with the statement “I don’t feel represented in state and local government.”
“AAPI Floridians are active, engaged, and invested in support of their communities and the future of our state, but it is clear that they are often feeling as if their voices are not being heard in the political process,” said Hannah Locop, Coalition Director for FLAAPP. “As the fastest growing voting bloc in Florida, it is vital for our elected officials to make the effort to reach out to our AAPI communities to ensure that we are involved in finding solutions for the issues facing the state in order to build a brighter future for all of us.”
Above are some highlights from the data. A pdf of the full memo can be found here.
