“They can have that brown face in mind, wading across the Rio Grande River, but guess who else is hearing that?” said Garry South, a veteran Democratic strategist who has done extensive work training Asian American political candidates…

Apart from observing occasions like Diwali, the national party has taken other modest steps, hiring a field director and 10 staffers to work on Asian American outreach and assigning a full-time spokesman to work with media serving the community. The goal, said the spokesman, Jason Chung, is to “learn about these communities [and] communicate our positions and principles to them. But more important is listening to them and seeing what their needs are.”

The positive news for Republicans, and a cautionary note for Democrats, is that Asian Americans tend to be less fixed in their political loyalties than other voters. “This is a group that shifted pretty quickly in the last 20 years,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a UC Riverside political science professor and director of the National Asian American Survey. “There’s nothing to say they won’t shift back again, given the right circumstances.”