US election: Filipino-Americans lean towards Biden, but Trump still exerts a pull

The contentious rhetoric between the two camps mirrors that playing out across the country, with even close-knit families divided

While the Trump administration’s poor handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has seen support for Biden grow, those who favour the president see parallels with the Philippines’ Duterte

Reading Time:5 minutes

US President Donald Trump (left) and Democratic Presidential candidate and former US vice president Joe Biden during the final presidential debate on October 22. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:30pm, 31 Oct 2020Updated: 10:45pm, 31 Oct 2020

To Filipino-American civic leader Rodel Rodis, the choice is clear when the United States goes to the polls on November 3: “We should support Joe Biden because our lives depend on it.”

The co-founder of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) said in an October 17 Zoom forum on the upcoming election that he “chose life” by supporting the Democratic Party candidate, and did not back President Donald Trump’s plan of herd immunity to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, which has hit the US harder than any other country.

Rodis is among the 1.96 million Filipino-Americans eligible to cast a ballot this year, the second-largest minority voting bloc behind the country’s 2.57 million Chinese-Americans, going by data from the Pew Research Centre.

Asian-American voters, who number around 11 million, account for 5 per cent of those who can vote in Tuesday’s election. The majority identify as Democrats, according to the latest Asian-American Voter Survey, released in September, which found that 54 per cent of voters from the segment favoured Biden while 30 per cent supported Trump. The remainder were undecided or supported another candidate.

We need a leader who will bring us together, not divide us into warring camps

Most Filipino-American voters also lean blue – with 52 per cent counting themselves as Democrats and 34 per cent inclined to vote Republican – but that political divide has widened, mirroring the polarisation playing out across the US.

04:54

The US Electoral College: how does it work and why does it exist?

Lila Ramos Shahani, who speaks on gender, race, education, culture and other issues as a volunteer for the Biden/Kamala Harris campaign, pointed out during the October 17 forum that the rhetoric between “Trumpers” and Democrats has grown quite contentious.

“We need a leader who will bring us together, not divide us into warring camps. Joe Biden is that leader,” said Shahani, a niece of former Philippine president Fidel Ramos who resigned last year as the secretary general of the Philippine National Commission to Unesco, a position to which she was appointed by the Southeast Asian nation’s President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.

Shahani, a dual Filipino-American citizen who now lives in Seattle, Washington, said Biden had values that Trump lacked – “integrity, character, empathy” – and expressed approval for the former vice-president’s plan to expand the Affordable Care Act to provide health care for 97 per cent of Americans, a key issue during the Covid-19 pandemic. There are 8.7 million cases in the US, and more than 225,000 deaths.

IT’S COMPLICATED