At a recent Diwali gathering in Denver, software architect Salil Gaonkar asked his Indian American friends to raise their hands: Would they vote for Trump or Harris in the presidential race?
The response — from about 45 tech professionals and business owners who had overwhelmingly supported Joe Biden in 2020 — stunned him. Former President Donald Trump edged out Vice President Kamala Harris, albeit narrowly.
“I was shocked,” said Gaonkar, a progressive Democrat who supports Harris. “Most of them voted for Biden, but now there is a significant change and that really surprised me.”
A single poll can’t tell a trend, but Gaonkar’s experience appears to reflect a broader national pattern. Indian Americans, long a reliable Democratic voting bloc, are showing signs of shifting allegiance.
A Carnegie Endowment survey released this week showed that the number of Indian-Americans identifying as Democrats fell to 47% from 56% in 2020. Harris, despite her Indian heritage, received only 60% support from a community that gave Biden nearly 70% of its vote. four years ago. Trump, meanwhile, improved his support, from 22% to 31%.
The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7%. And while other polls show stronger South Asian support for Harris, the shift in loyalties is significant, said Milan Vaishnav, director of the Carnegie Endowment’s South Asia Program and one of the co-authors of the study.
“We are seeing signs of greater change, movement or acceptance of at least this Republican Party, led by Trump, and that for us has been a big surprise,” Vaishnav said in an interview with VOA last Friday.
The rightward drift is not unique to American Indians. In recent years, Republicans have made surprising gains among Hispanic, black, Arab and Muslim voters — all once considered reliable Democratic voting blocs.
Polls show a razor-thin race between Harris and Trump, and it remains unclear whether these changes will propel the former president to the White House. But the findings shatter a fundamental assumption of American politics: that minority and immigrant communities are safely Democratic, Vaishnav said during an online presentation Thursday.
“There has been this idea that demographics are destiny and that the Democratic Party, which has been the natural home of ethnic and racial minorities and many, if not most, immigrant communities… will have a perpetual electoral advantage as the size of these groups increases,” he says. “Clearly, there are many signs that this is not true. Our investigation is one of them.”
With more than 5 million Indian-Americans, they defy easy categorization. They are predominantly Hindu, with smaller numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and others among them. While many first-generation Indians are quite conservative, many are not.
On the eve of Tuesday’s election, their concerns mirror those of other Americans: inflation, abortion, jobs and immigration. US-India relations are barely recorded.
“They vote like Americans because they are Americans,” Sumitra Badrinathan, a professor at American University and one of three co-authors of the report, said during the presentation.
Demolishing long-held assumptions about the community, the Carnegie investigation found that Harris’ Indian heritage did not help her surpass Biden’s numbers in 2020. Even more surprising, the study showed that these are Native American men under 40 – not their first-generation, so-called “traditional” elders – who are driving the shift to the right.
“Democrats don’t have a problem with uncles,” Vaishnav said. “They have a problem with men under 40.”
According to Pew Research, about two-thirds of American Indians are immigrants. Many are politically divided over time.
“People who came in 1990 or later cling to Trump, but people from my father’s generation are solidly Democrats,” said Angana Shah, a Michigan-based social justice lobbyist and advocate.
The gap between first- and second-generation Indians shows up in other ways. For many recent arrivals, illegal immigration has become a major concern. Gaonkar said his former Biden supporter friends cite illegal border crossings as the main reason for their switch to Trump.
“Indians hate the illegal immigration that has exploded under Biden,” Gaonkar said. “We know what hoops we had to go through to legally enter the country and stay there, and to see other people arriving like this is not right.”
This feeling runs deep among first-generation immigrants. Take Dharmendra Jaiswal, a Maryland tech executive whose path to citizenship took nearly 20 years.
He voted for Biden in 2020, his first presidential election, but now supports Trump.
“People are upset,” he said. “Illegal immigrants receive (education and health care) money from our taxpayers.”
Indians make up the third largest group of undocumented immigrants in the United States. But Jaiswal said, “an illegal immigrant is an illegal immigrant.”
Suhag Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, said the backlash against illegal immigration makes sense. Immigration delays force many Indian immigrants to wait 10 to 20 years to obtain a green card and citizenship.
“People should not be left in limbo for 20 years, but unfortunately this is the state of the immigration program we face today and many are speaking out, as are many other Americans, about the need for stronger borders,” Shukla said in a statement. interview with VOA this week.
Criticized for being lax on illegal immigration, Harris defended her record, pointing to a decline in illegal border crossings due to recent policy changes implemented by the Biden administration. For his part, Trump pledged to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Harris’ campaign, launched in July, electrified many progressive Indian-Americans, attracting thousands of enthusiastic volunteers.
But that enthusiasm masked a deeper reality: His Indian heritage proved to have little appeal for many voters. The Carnegie survey found that fewer than one in ten Native American supporters were motivated by their South Asian heritage.
Towson University professor Pallavi Guha, an Indian-American, said many in her community are “looking beyond identity politics.”
“People who support Vice President Harris support Vice President Harris because of the policies,” Guha, who lives in Howard County, Maryland, said in an interview with VOA on Thursday.
A survey of South Asian voters by the Indian American Impact Fund, a political group, found Harris leading Trump, 68% to 20%, in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia , Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
With more than 400,000 eligible South Asian voters in these states, the community is “ready to make a difference in what will likely be a razor-thin election,” the group said in a statement last month.
But the enthusiasm is not uniform. Rupal Shah, a second-generation Native American nonprofit worker based in Atlanta and IAI volunteer, sees a generation gap.
“I’m second generation and I believe my generation is very, very pro-Kamala, ready to vote for her, excited about her,” Shah said. “And then when you talk to my parents or my parents in general, you get a sense of excitement and a sense of nervousness.”
“Their fiscal concerns always kind of rise to the top, but there’s also a lot of excitement about Kamala and who she represents and how she represents our community,” Shah said.
VOA reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment but did not receive a response from either group.
