Well, just after blogging about The Los Angeles Times writing about Vietnamese Americans leaning more towards Senator John McCain, the San Jose Mercury News reports that “Young Vietnamese Americans turn away from GOP“:
“… But more than three decades after communist tanks rolled into Saigon, young Vietnamese-Americans are abandoning the Republican Party in droves, according to a Mercury News computer analysis of nearly 30,000 new Santa Clara County voters. By plugging Vietnamese surnames into a data base, the analysis shows that Vietnamese-Americans aged 30 and under are registering Democratic over Republican by nearly 4 to 1… “The young Vietnamese who were born in this country are the same as the other American kids. They all go to school together. They’re open-minded and they’re part of the new generation of young voters. They have different ideas than the older Vietnamese.””
As far as this presidential race is concerned, I can definitely see a generational change in terms of who supports McCain versus Obama. Clearly, in the Democratic primary, the youth vote much preferred Obama over Clinton where seniors definitely preferred Clinton over Obama. Santa Clara County / Silicon Valley is pretty liberal and Democratic, so it is no big surprise that young Vietnamese American in the Bay Area are overwhelmingly supporting Obama. But it is surprising to see the ratio of registered Vietnamese American Democrats to Republicans being 4:1!
