But a vocal and growing segment of the Asian-American population is fed up with the use of race in admissions, which they believe holds Asian-Americans to higher standards than other groups – and some Republicans see an opening to start to woo a new bloc of supporters.

Republican candidates in at least two congressional races this year have railed against affirmative action in explicit bids for Asian-American voters.

Asian-Americans unhappy with the use of race “have an ear, because they occupy a pretty unique place in American politics: They’re non-white voters who are opposing affirmative action,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of Asian-American Studies at the University of Maryland who supports affirmative action.

Does Harvard discriminate against Asians? That depends on who got in

Polling shows the group still overwhelmingly supports Democrats and largely disapproves of President Donald Trump.
But for Democrats, Wong said, it’s “time to sound the alarm”.

“If Asian-Americans move to the GOP – that’s the end of the ‘rainbow coalition' in the US, and that is a problem for the Democrats,” she said.

Led by long-time anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum, the lawsuit against Harvard is seen by many as the next opening to ban race in admissions – and its journey begins just after Trump added a fifth conservative justice to the Supreme Court, where the case is likely to end.

Students for Fair Admissions, Blum’s group, brought the suit against Harvard in 2014 and the Justice Department this summer joined in, accusing Harvard of discrimination in court filings.

The DOJ asserted that “Harvard’s race-based admissions process significantly disadvantages Asian-American applicants compared to applicants of other racial groups – including both white applicants and applicants from other racial minority groups.”

“No American should be denied admission to school because of their race,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement at the time.

It's just one piece of the Trump administration's crackdown on affirmative action. The DOJ has launched separate investigations into admissions policies at Harvard and Yale, the latter of which the Education Department’s civil rights office joined.
And the two agencies this summer scrapped Obama-era guidance that called on school superintendents and colleges to consider race when trying to diversify their campuses.

Civil rights groups see it all as a coordinated drive to end affirmative action.

Harvard bias trial: why is Edward Blum fighting for the rights of Asian-Americans?

“It’s highly unusual for them to be involved in this way,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who led the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration.

“They are seeking at a very early stage to be very engaged and involved – and potentially even in the driver's seat – for a case that could rise to the Supreme Court. This is a much more aggressive posture for the Justice Department to be taking. It’s an unprecedented aggressive posture.”

The Trump administration’s investigations were spurred by complaints from the Asian American Coalition for Education, a relatively new organisation with a goal of ending affirmative action.

The group reports 20,000 individual supporters and lists more than 130 organisations as partners on its website.

AACE says that it is non-political, but Swan Lee, a co-founder and AACE’s board director, said in an interview that Republicans have been quicker to hear its arguments.

The group initially filed its complaints during the Obama administration.

“For a very long time when we complained about discrimination they would say, ‘No problem’, or take no action, like, ‘You should just accept it’,” she said.
“We’re open to support any politician, but interestingly it’s always Republican politicians who seem to care more about racial equality.”

‘We’re now the loud majority’: Asian-Americans rally against Harvard’s admissions policy

The Harvard case is significant because it targets an admissions policy that has been praised by the Supreme Court as a model.
The high court has upheld affirmative action in college admissions multiple times. But with Justice Brett Kavanaugh now on the bench in place of Anthony Kennedy – a key swing vote who wrote the most recent opinion approving the use of race – the court may be less likely to green light the practice again.

The lawsuit marks a new approach for Blum, SFFA’s founder, who has pushed legal challenges to affirmative action in the past, including a lawsuit against the University of Texas at Austin.

That suit, which went to the Supreme Court, was on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a white woman who claimed the university’s rejection of her application in 2008 violated the equal protection clause.

The Supreme Court disagreed, and in 2016 issued a 4-3 ruling in UT’s favour.

The ruling built on years of precedent.

In a landmark 1978 ruling, the court banned racial quotas, but said race could still be considered as one of many factors in admissions.

In two separate rulings in legal challenges to the use of race by the University of Michigan and its law school, the court again approved affirmative action, but continued to narrow the ways it could be used.

In the latest court fight, Students for Fair Admissions will make four arguments: that Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans; that it engages in illegal racial balancing; that Harvard’s use of race falls outside what the Supreme Court has allowed; and that Harvard doesn’t need to consider race at all to shape its freshman class.

Harvard has said SFFA’s lawsuit is based on a “deeply flawed statistical analysis” and presents a “misleading narrative”.

It has called the Justice Department’s brief supporting SFFA “a thinly veiled attack” on Supreme Court precedent that “uncritically adopts SFFA's flawed narrative”.

Civil rights groups argue that affirmative action actually benefits Asian-American applicants, who, if anything, are harmed by Harvard’s benefits for white legacy students, recruited athletes and children of staff and faculty – not by its consideration of race.
They point out that the Asian-American student population has grown sharply over the last several years and Asian Americans now make up more than 20 per cent of Harvard’s student body – compared to roughly 6 per cent of the US population.

“Ed Blum is just trying to use Asian-Americans as a cover for his true agenda of changing policies that will ultimately benefit white students who already have the most advantages in the admissions process and in life,” said Nicole Ochi, supervising lawyer at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Los Angeles, a group helping defend Harvard in the trial.

Blum said such assertions “are weak and intellectually lazy. Hundreds of Asian-American advocacy groups have joined our efforts to end Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies.”

Polling shows Asian-Americans still broadly support affirmative action, however.

A 2018 survey of Asian-American voters by AAPI Data, a programme led by Karthick Ramakrishnan at the University of California, Riverside, found 58 per cent of Asian Americans think affirmative action programmes are a “good thing”.

But that support does not extend to all subgroups of the diverse Asian-American population.

Just 38 per cent of Chinese-Americans believe affirmative action is a good thing, according to the survey.

About as many Chinese-Americans, 36 per cent, are undecided, while more than a quarter have decided it’s a bad thing. Vietnamese-Americans are also sceptical, with just 40 per cent saying affirmative action is a good thing.

But Kham Moua, associate director of policy and advocacy at OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates, says that “the reality is that the majority of Asian-Americans support the programme or are indifferent to it”.

The civil rights group began as an organisation of Chinese-Americans in 1973, but recently re-branded. Moua said despite the group’s long-time support of the use of race in admissions, it now has “small pockets that are vocally opposed to affirmative action”.

Many of these affirmative action opponents are more affluent and recent immigrants from China, said OiYan Poon, an assistant professor of higher education leadership at Colorado State University who has studied the trend.

Why Harvard and other elite universities should avoid a Tinder approach to student admissions

Many attended elite colleges in China and came to the US to pursue advanced degrees, she said.

“This particular segment of the population is a very small minority of folks – they are getting a lot of media attention, they’re creating essentially a public spectacle that’s drawing a lot of attention,” she said.

Democrats have hoped a growing Asian-American population there could help them win the historically red district, and Walters is aiming to peel off some of that support as several polls show Democratic challenger Katie Porter leading the tight race.

He made the pitch at a Vietnamese-American mall in Falls Church, a D.C. suburb where Asian-Americans are the second largest racial group at 10 per cent of the population.

Stewart, who trails Kaine significantly in polls, told Fox News he was approached by Chinese-American residents who told him why they oppose affirmative action: “I always knew that race was a factor in college admissions, but I didn’t realise how bad it was until some citizens brought it up,” he said.