By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : Indian-Americans are by far the strongest supporters of US President Barack Obama, giving him an edge of 68 percent to five percent over his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, according to a new survey.
Thus, while two Indian-American Republican Governors, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, are among the strongest critics of Obama, they seem to be in a relatively small minority of the community who support Romney, says the survey.
Asian Americans give significantly higher job approval ratings to Obama than the national average (59 percent vs. 50 percent, respectively), and they have a considerably less favourable impression of Romney than the national average (30 percent vs. 45 percent, respectively), according to the National Asian American Survey (NAAS).
Approval of the president’s job is particularly high among Indian Americans (82 percent), and is conspicuously low among Filipinos (45 percent) and Samoans (41 percent), says the survey of Asian and Asian Pacific Islanders (AAPIs).
Obama’s relatively high approval rating among AAPIs is also matched by higher favourability ratings than the national average, it says, noting while 51 percent of the national population has a favourable impression of Obama, 59 percent of Asian Americans do so.
The favourability rating is particularly high among Indian Americans (88 percent) and Korean Americans (76 percent), and is particularly low among Vietnamese Americans (20 percent) and Filipino Americans (46 percent).
One in six Asian Americans (17 percent) lives in a battleground state with Indian Americans and Korean Americans constituting a larger share of the battleground states than their national averages, the survey notes.
Asian Americans also have a more favourable impression of Democrats in Congress than the national average (43 percent vs. 34 percent, respectively), it notes.
The survey, based on a national poll conducted July 31-Sep 19 through telephone of 3,034 people, included 386 Indian-Americans.
It was the collaborative effort of Karthick Ramakrishnan at University of California-Riverside and Taeku Lee at University of California-Berkeley.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])