Asian Americans showed strong support for New Jersey Senate candidate Andy Kim in the state’s primary this week, an exit poll showed.
The survey, conducted during Tuesday’s primaries, revealed that among the Asian Americans who voted in the Democratic Senate Primary, more than 77% voted for Kim — slightly more than he got in the total vote, which he won with 75% overall.
Jerry Vattamala, director of the Democracy Program at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of the nonprofits that conducted the poll, said the results show that while the Asian American community in New Jersey is diverse, there’s still “some degree of block voting.”
“We know the Asian American electorate is its fastest growing,” Vattamala said. “It’s still relatively small in a lot of places, but they can make the difference of who wins or loses in close races, especially when they’re voting as a bloc.”
Patricia Campos-Medina was a distant second to Kim, clinching 16% of New Jersey voters in the primary.
The nonprofits AALDEF and AAPI New Jersey polled 150 Asian American voters across Bergen, Hudson and Middlesex Counties, the three counties with the highest Asian American populations in the state. They surveyed voters in English in addition to Chinese, Gujarati, Hindi, Korean, Tagalog and Urdu, and found that more than 78% of respondents had voted in the Democratic Primary. And over 22.2% of those surveyed said this was the first primary election they had voted in.
Vattamala said that the relatively high share of first-time Asian American primary voters is in part due to several controversies surrounding the Democratic race, including debate over the state’s “county line” ballot design. On such ballots, party-endorsed candidates appear bracketed together in a single column on the primary ballot, while nonendorsed candidates are off to the side.
While Kim himself has been on the line before, he filed a lawsuit in February seeking to end the…
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