Party and Prejudice: Are Asian American Candidates Better Suited to Win in White Districts?

ABSTRACT Recent work on Asian American descriptive representation has found that Asian American officeholders are more prevalent in racially diverse districts when compared to Black or Latino representatives, but still face substantial obstacles in very white electoral districts. This work, however, models Asian American representation by observing officeholders only, ignoring both the competitive election environment and Asian American losing candidates, biasing its inferences. We reassess these conclusions using a candidate‐centered approach in thousands of state legislative races in 2018 and 2020. Our results demonstrate that Asian American, Black, and Latino candidates all perform substantially better in white districts than officeholder models predict, and that any differences between minority groups in white districts are due to the partisan match between candidates and their districts. The findings speak to the need for researchers to model vote choice as a candidate‐centered process, paying careful attention to the actual choices on voters' election day ballots.