How do Vietnamese decide who to vote for in America?

By Benjamin Trinh (Trịnh Hoàng Ân) — 6/11/2026

At the dinner table, my extended Vietnamese family talks about the usual topics: how our day went, gossip about a distant cousin, and politics. My uncle Bình and I were talking the other week about how, without America’s generosity in allowing Vietnamese families to arrive throughout the ‘70s and onward, we wouldn’t have had the prosperous life we have now, and our English surely wouldn’t have been as good. We have a lot to thank America for.

For my parents, that Wednesday evening was just another dinner at Uncle Bình’s house, but for me, that day would lead to a revelation. Right as dessert was being served, Uncle Bình suddenly said, “without the president deporting undesirable immigrants back to their own country, we won’t have a safe home.”

The President he is referring to is Donald Trump, whom he voted for in 2020 and 2024, and this is one of many mismatches I often hear in the Vietnamese community between what Vietnamese people believe in and who they actually vote for. Why don’t Vietnamese vote for what they actually value?

This thought led me on a months-long quest to discover how past experiences, generational differences, and external factors influence Vietnamese voting.

2.

In searching for why Vietnamese vote the way they do, one Vietnamese refugee put it most clearly: “We want someone that stands with us against communism.” This Vietnamese refugee, 77-year-old Hải Vũ, was a high-ranking military officer in South Vietnam, fighting the Northern communists while being injured three times. Born in the North, he escaped its communist regime under Hồ Chí Minh in 1954 and came to the South Vietnamese capital, Sàigòn.

A film he remembers watching vividly mirroring his own experiences, “Chúng Tôi Muốn Sống” (Let Us Live), filmed a year after the war started erupting in 1955, describes the cruelty of communists toward their people and follows the protagonist named Vinh, who makes the dangerous escape by boat to South Vietnam to escape death and search for freedom. Many of these victims, similar to Vinh and Hải, would end up immigrating to the United States.

Upon the fall of Saigon in 1975, while many were able to leave Vietnam successfully, Hải’s attempted escape led to the communists putting him in a “re-education camp,” where he was tortured and forced to do labor. The anti-communist sentiment he grew up in followed him as he finally came to the U.S. in 1992 and settled in Houston, TX, a privilege granted to many high-ranking military officers by Bill Clinton, who normalized diplomatic relations with Vietnam in the 1990s.

If Bill Clinton allowed Hải to attain his freedom in America, wouldn’t Hải support Clinton and the Democrats? “I believe that fighting communism is the most important thing I stand for,” he exclaimed, “and Democrats like control and big government, just like the communists. The way [the communists] controlled us in the North and in prison was inhumane and dictatorial. That’s why I vote Republican. It’s worth sacrificing welfare for the bigger goal.”

In fact, Vietnamese are the only Asian-American group whose majority leans toward Republicans.

There’s another reason why Vietnamese uniquely lean Republican that Hải identified: the Democratic Congress in 1973 denied Nixon’s proposal to support South Vietnam with funds and ammunition, therefore making the Communists’ victory “inevitable.”

One of the opponents to Nixon’s Vietnam-funding plan was Joe Biden, who forty years later would run for President against one of the more popular Presidents of the Vietnamese community, Donald Trump. Trump is, in fact, popular enough that Vietnamese Orange County residents flew a Trump 2020 flag in a drive-by demonstration, and the Hồn Việt Choir in Houston made a video encouraging people to get out to vote for the president in 2020. “Trump definitely doesn’t like socialism or communism. He fights for freedom and democracy. He brings a lot of jobs back to America,” says Bach Hac, a member of the choir.

3.

Tuấn Phạm, an economic refugee who came to the U.S. in 1982 when he was 21 by escaping on a boat in the middle of the night to Malaysia, also agrees with Hải on Democrats acting too much like communism and believes that the Democratic Congress betrayed his country. When the Northern regime took over the South in 1975, Communist officials took the assets Tuấn’s family had and put them into poverty, receiving no more than two bowls of sand-filled rice per day and sharing it among Tuấn’s two elderly parents, one older brother, one older sister, and three younger brothers. Before retiring, he worked on the assembly line in Houston, Texas, where many of his colleagues were also Republicans.

Yet despite supporting Republicans, Tuấn currently relies on Medicare, Medicaid, and other Democrat-supported government programs in California. “I think healthcare is also important,” Tuấn commented, “but I think immigration and anti-communism matter more.” While his wife supports Democrats for their welfare policies, wives typically support, even convert to, their husbands’ political views, including Hải’s wife.

But not all Vietnamese support Republicans. Younger Vietnamese Americans lean Democratic: 88% of Asian Americans aged 18-29 identify as Democrats.

4.

Sophie Nguyễn, raised in Oklahoma City and currently a junior at the University of California at Los Angeles, supports Democrats. “There’s not really a reason anymore to be scared of communists,” she remarked. “That’s a thing of the past.” Instead, she values Democratically-favored policies such as less restrictive abortion and LGBTQ rights and stricter gun control. “My Vietnamese friends and I are all liberal, and I think people at UCLA are as well.”

28-year-old Naomi, also in Los Angeles, further shared, “The younger generation here, at least in Southern California, lean more liberal” and believes “strategies to protect and value humanity, our environment, and the Earth are so necessary.” Influenced by the election of the first man of color to hold the office of President, the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and her local community, Naomi believes Democrats align more with her and her friends’ values. “We need to allow people to be their own individuals and express themselves and who they are. When [Trump] tries to villainize, make people small, and take away rights that we truly deserve as humans, it’s incredibly disheartening.”

As more young Vietnamese-Americans attain voting age, we are starting to see the overall Vietnamese population shift toward Democrats. For the first time, in a mid-2024 poll, more Vietnamese voters lean Democratic than Republican. The poll also indicated a 28% drop in Vietnamese support for Trump compared to 2020.

5.

There’s one more key factor in influencing who the Vietnamese vote for. Huy Đào came to America in 1991, where he had a sponsor in San José. In 2004, like many other Vietnamese, Huy voted for Republican Bush Jr. for President because “[the Democrat] John Kerry was anti-Vietnam War and friendly with the Communist Hà Nội,” and for John McCain in 2008 because “he was a prisoner of war and hero in the Vietnam War.”

Nevertheless, he hadn’t been interested in politics a whole lot, though he had “been watching mainstream news like CNN, ABC, and CBS back then.” Despite voting for Republican Presidential candidates twice and his conservative beliefs, he identified as a Democrat. “The Democrats promised to take care of low-income and newcomers financially,” he said. In 2016, Huy voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton “because I thought Trump was just a businessman. I didn’t know any better.”

Then something changed inside of him. “In 2018, on TV and Facebook, I saw illegal immigrants from Mexico climb the border, and President Trump tried to stop them to protect America. But the Democrats and the Congress wanted to prevent him from doing the right thing. From then on, I became MAGA.”

With his decision to support Trump, Huy began to doubt what he was watching. “Even the mainstream media were saying bad things about Trump,” Huy said, “and so when I started watching Fox News, I stopped watching mainstream media because Fox News is better.” Now, when he gets home from work, Huy goes to his computer and watches conservative-leaning videos on social media. “I like to watch Fox News, Newsmax, and the [Vietnamese] YouTubers the most. They all tell the truth.”

Some researchers argue that the political information many older Vietnamese consume on social media, such as Facebook and YouTube, often contains misleading, opinionated, or even false information from independent reporters with little or no political background.

In contrast, younger Vietnamese are also influenced by social media in making political decisions, but in different ways. Among Naomi’s friends, for example, “Instagram was pretty big. And that was really interesting because it got more young people into politics because we were seeing it on our phones so constantly.”

The difference in social media’s influence between different Vietnamese voters “really depends on its algorithm,” Naomi explains. “If you lean more conservative, the algorithm pushes you more that direction; if you lean more liberal you get pushed more liberal and even more to the extreme. It’s causing this divide in politics where it's feeling like we can't reach a middle ground because we're exposed to both ends of the spectrum in a drastic way.”

6.

As our family was just about to leave for the night, I asked Uncle Bình about how he decides who to vote for. “It’s about their attitude,” he reflected, “Trump’s an outsider, not a corrupt politician or part of the Deep State. He has common sense that aims to truly help us, not just for his own benefit. The Democrats and RINOs [Republicans against Trump] follow the Communists and Socialists and not for America. That’s why they open up the Mexican border so communists can come in in exchange for votes. That’s why Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are very rich.”

When I got in the car, Uncle Bình opened his mouth as if to say something, and, after a few moments of pause, he continued: “I think the way we vote in America has to do with our past experiences, especially experiences with communism, what our local community values, and what media we watch.”

Note: Some of the people I’ve interviewed for this article requested anonymity. Therefore, to protect their identity, I’ve given the following pseudonyms: Hải Vũ, Tuấn Phạm, and Sophie Nguyễn.