The Democrats learned on their political machine to survive the 2022 midterms and turned out their base, white female college graduates and black voters, but the overall shift is continuing and it’s worrying the Times.

In the past two elections — 2020 and 2022 — Asian Americans have moved toward the right, according to election returns and exit polls. Democrats still won Asian voters by a wide margin in last year’s midterms but by less than in the recent past:

While Zeldin’s stunning numbers among Asians in New York City have been widely discussed, Texas has not.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent, beat Beto O’Rourke among Asian voters, 52 percent to 46 percent, and Texas House Republicans also did well, according to polls by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. In statewide races in Florida and Georgia, the Republican candidates received at least one-third of the vote, substantially more than in previous elections.

One question though is to what extent is this a tilt among immigrants that isn’t sustained among their more aspirational kids and grandkids? The GOP used to perform well with Vietnamese, but those numbers got shakier with the next generation. The same goes to some degree for Cubans, Russian and Middle Eastern Jews, and some Latin American immigrants. These are groups where the immigrants tend to click with Republicans over a strong foreign policy, opposition to Communism, terrorism, etc and suspicion of socialism, but then they scrimp and save to send their kids to the Icy League with the same results as American Jews.

The Times suggests that it’s a class issue. And class issue among high-performing immigrant groups suggests first-generation arrivals.

Nationally, the rightward drift of Asian voters is connected to a new class divide in American politics. The Democratic Party, especially its liberal wing, has increasingly come to reflect the views of college-educated professionals. This development has had some benefits for Democrats, helping them win more suburban voters and flip Arizona and Georgia in recent elections.

To a growing number of working-class voters, however, the newly upscale version of the party has become less appealing. The trend has long been evident among white working-class voters, and many liberal analysts have claimed that it mostly reflects racial bigotry. But recent developments have weakened that argument. Class appears to be an important factor as well. Since 2018, more Asian and Latino voters have supported Republicans, and these voters appear to be disproportionately working-class.

The Left’s reach remains quite potent among upper-middle-class professionals, but it’s a trade-off as both Republicans and Democrats are discovering. You pursue working-class voters and you turn off some of the suburbanites. You pursue middle-class voters and you turn off some of the working-class voters.

You can’t have it all.

That’s why the Dem dream of a permanent majority doesn’t work unless they seize control and thoroughly rig the system to the extent that elections are permanently irrelevant so that no amount of backlash can topple them. Despite what some people think, they haven’t actually managed that anywhere, not even in California, but they do have plans for it and give them enough time to nationalize elections and let the DOJ and its slate of Federal judges and secretaries of state determine how every election should run, it will be over. Or not.

The assumption that a backlash can be neutralized by manipulating elections is historically foolish.

People are not counters in a Marxist jelly bean demographic counting contest. Asians are reminding them of that.