Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics
Political Fracturing within the Asian American Electorate
2026-09-08
Racial minority political influence may be jeopardized when constituent subgroups disagree on policy priorities and on the political parties that best represent their interests. In this study, we examine the prevalence of political fracturing— the formation of pluralistic subgroups that coalesce around political ideology, identity, trust, engagement, and issue opinions within broader racial groups—within the Asian American electorate, an increasingly influential minority group. We capitalize on granular data from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey to assess the prevalence and characterizing features of political fracturing, and we test several possible explanations of political fracturing among Asian Americans, especially those that relate to ethnic variation within the Asian American electorate. Latent class analysis uncovers three distinct classes of roughly equal sizes that broadly align with liberal, conservative, and politically ambivalent groups. Logistic regressions reveal that class membership is predicted by respondent ethnicity, and that age, education, income, and religious identification partly explain effects from ethnicity. These findings uncover evidence of political fracturing among Asian Americans that is not captured by isolated analyses of issue opinion and political participation and suggest that a focus on broad racial categories in minority group politics research may mask considerable political subgroup heterogeneity within minority racial groups.