SAN FRANCISCO—For two months, Menchee Berris, a Filipino-American nurse in Washington D.C., had been citing John McCain’s edge in experience over Democrat Barack Obama as the reason she was inclined to go Republican.

But on Oct. 3, Berris, a first-time voter in America, registered as a Democrat.

Like most young Filipino-Americans, Javier has been taken by Obama’s slogan of change at a critical time in US history.

“Well, if you change your mind, you can always vote for who you want even if you are a registered Democrat or Republican,” she said.

Berris’ remarks appear to support one of the findings of the first-ever National Asian American Survey (NAAS) conducted in August-September. Released two weeks ago, the survey says one in three Filipino-Americans has yet to decide on whom to vote for president.

The survey also shows that despite their numbers, only 67 percent of Filipino-Americans are likely to vote in Tuesday’s US elections, compared with 82 percent among Japanese-Americans, 73 percent among Indian-Americans and 72 percent among Korean-Americans.

Filipino-Americans make up the third biggest Asian-American bloc, accounting for 18 percent of the 14.5 million Asian-Americans in the United States, after the Chinese (24 percent) and Indians (22 percent).

“Some people don’t even like to vote unless they know someone (among the candidates) and if they’re not out shopping on the day of the elections,” said Henry Manayan, chair of the Filipino-American Democratic Caucus (FADC) in California and former Milpitas City mayor.

While many “average Filipinos” in the United States identify themselves as Democrats, Manayan said it was hard to get them to place their convictions on the ballots.

The biggest challenge for Manayan’s group then is to get Filipino-Americans involved in US politics.

Links to the motherland

Despite the high rate of naturalization of Filipinos in America—over 60 percent of nearly 4 million Filipino-Americans are naturalized citizens—less than half register to vote or actually vote during elections, according to Filipino community leaders in the Bay Area and Washington D.C.

“They’re not quite ready to identify themselves as Fil-Ams. The emotional attachment to the Philippines is still stronger. They still think of themselves as Filipinos rather than Americans,” said Jon Melegrito, communication director of the National Federation of Filipino-American Associations (NaFFAA).

“They are more interested in Philippine politics, news and movie stars,” he said. This is what NaFFAA is trying to change.

The NaFFAA, a nonpartisan, nonprofit network of over 500 organizations and institutions, hosted a national empowerment conference in September, to encourage political involvement among Filipinos.

This means getting them out to vote and support Filipinos running for local posts, getting rid of the “immigrant mentality” linking them more closely to the Philippines than to America and “getting them in the mainstream.”

“What we want to happen is get Filipinos involved in the US political process, in commerce, in all aspects of US society, and become Americans,” Melegrito said.

Torn between two loyalties

He said the NaFFAA wanted to address the duality of Filipino-Americans, particularly those who migrated from the 1960s onward who are still torn between being Filipinos loyal to the Philippines and being Americans.

This has proven difficult as these Philippine-born-and-raised immigrants account for 70 percent of the Filipino-American population in America, said Melegrito, who has lived in here for 40 years.

“Even if they have been here for a long time, they still view the Philippines as their country, which is understandable (but) … it’s a bad thing,” he said.

“As Fil-Ams, you are primarily citizens of this country, so you vote for the US president, not the Philippine president. Go out and elect local officials running for state (posts), not the congressmen in the Philippines.”

The NAAS, however, found that being interested in home country politics was “not a deterrent” to being involved in American politics. In fact, it said, Asian-Americans who participate in their home country politics are also more likely to vote in the United States.

“Indeed our results suggest that participation in one context may increase participation in the other,” according to the survey, done by experts from University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Riverside, University of Southern California and Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Unused power

Still, despite their sizeable voting population, there are few Filipino-Americans who have been elected to important positions in government—proof, Melegrito said, of how little Filipino-Americans value political participation.

The highest post a Filipino has been elected to is governor—of Hawaii, where there are more Filipinos than in any other state, except California. That was over a decade ago, when Benjamin Cayetano clinched Hawaii’s top executive post in 1994.

There are Filipino-Americans in the state legislature like Maryland’s Kris Valderrama, in the Senate, like Ohio Sen. Steve Austria, and in the House of Representatives, like Virginia Rep. Robert Scott—but still not enough to be considered political empowerment of Filipino-Americans.

“We have not broken that glass ceiling. We hope to break that, maybe in California, because it has the population. It’s just the timing and the candidate,” said Manayan, a White House commissioner on Asia-Pacific Americans during the time of former President Bill Clinton.

FADC’s priority now is to encourage more Filipino-Americans to run and then get the community to support them.

“But before we get Filipinos to run, we have to get them to vote,” Manayan said.

The NAAS survey of 4,394 adult Asian-Americans also show that 34 percent of Filipino-Americans were still “unsure” of their choice for president, 35 percent said they would vote for Obama and 29 percent for McCain.

The extent of those undecided—34 percent—is substantial enough to provide the swing vote in toss-up states.

(This article is part of a series of stories on Filipino-American issues that the writer, a former reporter at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is doing as a Yuchengco media fellow at the University of San Francisco’s Center for the Pacific Rim.)