Elections for the President and Vice President are underway in the US, with November 5 as the last date. It is a very tight race between Donald Trump who is the Republican nominee and Kamala Harris, the sitting Vice President and the Democratic nominee.
This piece is not about the prediction of who will win, or who is a better candidate, or the impact on India-US relations of Trump or Harris’s presidency
This is about the growing importance of the Indian vote in the US, why it matters and the preferences of the Indian voter.
The Indians, though a very small minority, have become increasingly visible and vocal and are showing very active participation in the electoral process.
The numbers
The total number of residents who identify as Indian Americans has gone up to over 5.2 Million. This is approximately 1.5 per cent of the total population of 348 Mn.
Over 2.6 Million of these 5.2 million will be eligible to vote this year which is just 1 per cent of the total eligible voting population of 244 Mn.
Rise of Indian
Indian Americans are now the most successful ethnic minority in America, a totally different scenario from a century earlier, when they were a small irrelevant group, at the lowest rung of the ladder. They are the second largest community by country of Origin, first being Mexicans.
The average household income for Indian Americans is roughly $153,000, more than twice the figure for the overall population of US.
Indian Americans have made their names in countless fields, from corporate America (CEOs of Novartis, Starbucks,Vertex), Technology (CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe, Google, IBM) to Nobel Prize winners in Science (Hargobind Khorana, Subramanian Chandrasekhar), and Economics (Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee) to recognition in Literature (Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Seth) Journalism (Ali Velshi, Fareed Zakaria), Music (Norah Jones, Zubin Mehta) and comedy (Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Hasan Minhaj).
Indian Americans have led more than a dozen business schools in the US (Nitin Nohria at Harvard, Dipak Jain at Northwestern, Rangarajan Sundaram at NYU and Paul Almedia at Georgetown). Indian business and management gurus like C.K. Prahalad, Anil K.Gupta, Sumatra Ghosal and Ram Charan have guided the best of US corporates in terms of business and management strategy.
Interestingly Indians own almost 50 per cent of all the motels and 20 per cent of all the trucks.
While Indian Americans only constitute 0.6 per cent of the adult citizen population in the U.S., about 4.4% of senior positions in government are filled by Indian Americans. (www.indiaspora.org)
One could go on and on but this has been documented countless times before and is well known enough to need additional repetition.
Indians in Politics
Indian American vote is getting a fair amount of attention in media both in India and US in spite of its very small percentage of the overall voting populace (1 %) thanks to the high profile nominations for presidential and vice presidential tickets from both sides.
Kamala Harris, the presidential nominee,was born to a hindu mother(Shyamala Gopalan). Two of the republicans who threw their hat in the ring for nomination as president were of Indian origin, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley are both 2nd generation Indian Americans. J D Vance, the nominee for Vice President is married to Usha Chilukuri Vance who is a practicing Hindu and a second generation American Indian.
No other ethnicity has had such a high profile share in the race to the highest offices in the recent past.
The ambition to high offices comes on back of a decent representation in Senate and Congress, compared to the small minority of Indians overall.
Five members of Congress are Indian American: Ami Bera, Pramila Jayapal,Ro Khanna,Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Shri Thanedar.
More than 50 per cent of Indians are concentrated in the states which consistently vote for democrats like California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York.
However almost one-third live in closely contested swing states such as Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
The indian community has had the highest voting turnout at 71 per cent compared to all other ethnicities. (https://aapidata.com/blog/2020-record-turnout/)
96 per cent of Indian American voters are planning to vote this November, according to the 2024 AAPI Voter Survey released in September.
These have the potential to sway the outcome of 2024 elections as the Indian population could influence the margin of victory in the closest elections in these states.
What does a Swing state mean?
Swing states, also known as battleground states, are states that could “swing” to either Democratic or Republican candidates depending on the election. Because of their potential to go either democratic (blue) or republican (red), parties spend a disproportionate focus on these states.
A typical swing state is one where elections are won or lost by thin vote margins , say 3 percentage points. Tight margins in races also indicate that a state could have been won by either party. In 2020, seven states were won by a margin of three percentage points or less. These states were Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Nevada.
Whom do Indians vote for?
Over half of Indian American voters (55 per cent) identify as Democrat or lean towards Democrats (2024 Asian American Voter Surveys) while just over 1 in 4 Indian American voters (26 per cent) identify as Republican or lean towards Republicans (2024 Asian American Voter Surveys). 25 per cent of Indian American voters identify as an independent.
If the election were being held today, nearly 7 in 10 Indian American voters (69 per cent) indicated they would vote for Kamala Harris, according to the 2024 AAPI Voter Survey released in September. 1 in 4 Indian American voters (25 per cent) indicated they would vote for Trump.
Why do Indians vote the way they do?
In the latest survey by on Indian Attitudes by Carnegie Endowments, labelled as IAAS 2024 https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/indian-american-voters-election-survey-us?lang=en ) the responders were asked why they DO NOT support the Democrats or Republicans.
The responses are revealing
The top 5 reasons cited for why Indians don’t support the Republicans are because of their views on abortion, perception of intolerance of minorities, allegiance to christian evangelism, economic policies, and policy on gun control.
The top 5 reasons cited for why Indians don’t support Democrats are due to their support for illegal immigration, influence of extreme left, economic policies, identity politics, and being seen as too soft on crime.
While all surveys and findings are unanimous that Indians largely vote in favor of Democrats, a shift towards the Republicans is unmistakable.
Wooing the Indian voter
It is therefore not surprising to see the Indian voter population wooed by both democrats and republicans.
In 2023, NY governor Kathy Hochul signed a legislation to declare Diwali as a public holiday for all NY City schools. State Sen. Jeremy Cooney unveiled a new bill recently that would establish Diwali as an official school holiday across the state.
Governor Josh Shapiro, a democrat, officially signed a legislation this year to declare Diwali as an official state holiday for Pennsylvania state.
Trump proposed “automatic” green cards to foreign students upon graduation from a U.S. college. This resonates greatly with Indian population. He has been very vocal in his praise of India, Prime Minister Modi, and Hindus. He has also endorsed the idea of building a Hindu holocaust memorial in Washington, DC.
What is certain?
The current race is tight and it is very difficult to predict who will win in the end. Irrespective of who wins, Indian voter’s influence on the overall American political landscape is certainly increasing and it would be hard for either party to ignore the Indian voter in the coming years.
