Washington —
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 backed Joe Biden in 2020 — stunned him. Former President Donald Trump edged out Vice President Kamala Harris, albeit by a narrow margin.
“I was shocked,” Gaonkar, a progressive Democrat who is supporting Harris, said. “Most of them voted for Biden, but now there was a significant shift and that surprised me really.”
One dinner poll does not a trend make, 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 the number of Indian Americans identifying as Democrats dropped to 47% from 56% in 2020. Harris, despite her Indian heritage, commanded just 60% support from a community that gave Biden nearly 70% of its votes four years ago. Trump, meanwhile, improved his support to 31% from 22%.
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 Carnegie Endowment’s South Asia program and one of the co-authors of the study.
“We are seeing some signs of a greater shift or movement or acceptance of at least this Republican Party, led by Trump, and that to us, was a big surprise,” Vaishnav said in an interview with VOA last Friday.
The rightward drift isn’t unique to Indian Americans. In recent years, Republicans have made surprising gains among Hispanic, Black, Arab and Muslim voters – all once deemed reliable Democratic voting blocs.
Polls show a razor-thin race between Harris and Trump, and whether these shifts will propel the former president back to the White House remains uncertain. But the findings shatter a core assumption of American politics: that minority and immigrant communities are safely Democratic, Vaishnav said, during an online presentation Thursday.
“There has been this idea of demography is destiny and that the Democratic Party, which has been the natural home to 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 said. “Clearly, there are many signs that that’s not true. Our survey is one of them.”
More than 5 million strong, Indian Americans defy easy categorization. They’re predominantly Hindus, with smaller numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and others among them. While many first-generation Indians lean conservative, plenty don’t.
Ahead of the Tuesday’s election, their concerns mirror those of other Americans: Inflation, abortion, jobs, and immigration. U.S.-India relations barely register.
“They vote like Americans because they are,” said Sumitra Badrinathan, a professor at the American University and one of three co-authors of the report, during the presentation.
Demolishing long-held assumptions about the community, the Carnegie survey revealed that Harris’ Indian heritage hasn’t helped her top Biden’s 2020 numbers. More surprisingly, it showed that Indian American men under 40 — not their first-generation, supposedly “traditional” elders — are driving the rightward shift.
“The Democrats don’t have a problem with the uncles,” Vaishnav said. “They have a problem with males under 40.”
According to Pew Research, about two-thirds of Indian Americans are immigrants. Many are politically split by era.
“People who came in 1990 or later are clinging to Trump, but people [in] my dad’s generation are solidly Democratic,” said Angana Shah, a Michigan-based social justice lobbyist and lawyer.
The divide between first- and second-generation Indians surfaces in other ways. For many recent arrivals, illegal immigration has emerged as a top concern. Gaonkar said his formerly Biden-supporting friends cite illegal border crossings as the main reason for switching to Trump.
“Indians hate the illegal immigration that skyrocketed under Biden,” Gaonkar said. “We know what hoops we have had to go through to get into the country legally and stay here and to see some others come in like that is not right.”
The sentiment cuts deep among first-generation immigrants. Take Dharmendra Jaiswal, a Maryland tech executive whose path to citizenship stretched nearly 20 years.
He voted for Biden in 2020, his first presidential election, but now backs Trump.
“People are pissed off,” he said. “Illegal immigrants are getting [education and health care] from our taxpayer money.”
Indians make up the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. But Jaiswal said, “illegal immigrant is illegal immigrant.”
Suhag Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, said the backlash against illegal immigration makes sense. Immigration backlogs force many Indian immigrants to wait 10 to 20 years for green cards and citizenship.
“People should not be in limbo for 20 years, but unfortunately that is the state of the immigration program that we are dealing with today and many are speaking out just like many other Americans about the need to have stronger borders,” Shukla said in an interview with VOA this week.
Criticized for being soft on unauthorized immigration, Harris has defended her record, highlighting a drop in illegal border crossings due to recent policy changes implemented by the Biden administration. For his part, Trump has vowed to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
Harris’ campaign, launched in July, electrified many progressive Indian Americans, drawing thousands of eager volunteers.
But the enthusiasm masked a deeper reality: Her Indian heritage proved a weak draw for many voters. The Carnegie survey found that fewer than 1 in 10 Indian American supporters were motivated by her South Asian heritage.
Towson University professor Pallavi Guha, an Indian American, said many members of her community are “looking beyond identity politics.”
“People who are supporting Vice President Harris are supporting Vice President Harris because of the policies,” Guha, who lives in Howard County, Virginia, 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 “poised to make the margin of difference in what will likely be a razor-thin election,” the group said in a statement last month.
But the enthusiasm isn’t uniform. Rupal Shah, an Atlanta-based second-generation Indian American non-profit worker volunteering for IAI, sees a generational divide.
“I’m second generation and I believe that my generation of folks are very, very pro-Kamala, ready to vote for her, excited about her,” Shah said. “And then when you talk to my parents or 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 both the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment but did not receive a response from either group.
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