By Sakeena Razick
Indian American voters, who organized as never before on behalf of a presidential candidate who shared their ethnicity, expressed disappointment following the Tuesday defeat of Kamala Harris and the return to office of Donald Trump.
“Most people, at least in my ecosystem, expected a win. To go from that optimism, even midday, to the depths of darkness is pretty heartbreaking to say the least,” said Karthik Selvakumar, an Indian American based in Texas. Selvakumar added that against the intensity of Trump’s victory, many minority groups are uncertain about what’s to come.
Selvakumar worked on the unsuccessful campaign of Democratic U.S. senate candidate Colin Allred in Texas, leading phone-bank sessions and voter registration with an aim to push for a more nuanced understanding of immigration, gun control and women’s health policies.
An estimated 2.6 million Indian American voters were eligible to cast ballots this election, and the minority group expressed its enthusiasm for Harris with larger numbers and more extensive mobilization than in previous campaigns.
But the Indian American electorate, largely Democratic in makeup, appeared to support Harris as much for her party affiliation, political positions, gender and relative youth as it did for her shared ethnic background.
“The moment Kamala Harris announced, the doors just blew up,” said Rajiv Bhateja, co-founder of They See Blue, a nonprofit organization mobilizing South Asian Americans to vote.
According to Bhateja, South Asians expressed an unprecedented rise in enthusiasm for Harris. But They See a Blue — the name is a pun on “desi”, commonly used to describe South Asians and, specifically, Indians — began in 2018 to support progressive Democratic candidates, not necessarily South Asians or Indian Americans running for office.
“Our goal as an organization is to serve voters,” Bhateja said. “The enthusiasm for Kamala Harris is partly because she is South Asian, but also a younger person and a woman.”
A recent survey by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace showed that Harris’s self-identification as both Black and Indian had little sway over Indian American voters, overshadowed by her policy positions on inflation, abortion rights, immigration and the economy. “They vote like Americans because they are,” said Sumitra Badrinathan, an assistant professor at American University who co-authored the report.
Indian Americans can trace their roots to the 17th century, but only became a demographic force starting in the 1920s. The increase of H-1B visas for professional employment in the 1990s under the Clinton administration led to the first large wave of Indian migration to the United States.
“For the most part it’s been a techie sort of world,” said Dinsha Mistree, a lecturer at Stanford University who is currently co-authoring a book on the Indian diaspora. “It hasn’t been rich people coming over. It’s been self-made, really aspirational, happy stories.”
Although the Indian migration to the United States has changed over the years, with more student and working-class arrivals, the group has garnered additional attention for their socio-economic rise. The Indian diaspora is one of the highest-earning groups, with a median household income around double the country’s average.
The group has also historically voted Democrat. Mistree points to partisan labels playing a large role.
“Why do you support a Democratic candidate? If you’re living in the Bay Area, it’s because everyone around you is Democrat. If you’re living in Texas, why do you support a Republican? Similar story,” he said.
For Indian American Sandeep Abraham, a Stanford graduate student who immigrated to California as a child, his family’s choice to identify as Republican connected to their identity as Evangelical Christian.
As a minority among the majority Hindu-Indian population, the Abraham family’s religious identity conflated with ideas of Americanism, patriotism, and being Republican in the 1980s and 90s.
“Growing up, the word ‘assimilate’ came up a lot,” Abraham said.
But, as he grew up, Abraham switched to voting Democrat and has been doing so over his years working in the technology field, in the U.S. Army, and now as a graduate student at Stanford. He points to immigration, the economy and women’s health as some of the policies he focused on as a voter this year.
Similarly, Karthik Selvakumar began voting as a registered Republican. But in 2012 he re-registered as a Democrat.
“Initially, I started with this philosophy of my family [who] immigrated here through this intense process,” Selvakumar said. “I got to see my parents go through this massive struggle.”
He said the Republican narrative critical of illegal immigration often resonates with Indian Americans who legally immigrated to the United States, often with some difficulty.
“And I think the ‘right’ utilizes that a lot,” he added. “‘Look at you, you went through the right way, and this is the wrong way.’”
But as Selvakumar understood the different perspectives of other people, he become what he calls “a raging liberal.”
While Abraham’s and Selvakumar’s shift toward the Democratic Party fits with broader Indian American voter trends, Indian Americans also voted this election season in larger numbers for Republicans, especially younger voters.
According to Carnegie’s survey, around 25% more Indian-American men under 40 who were born in the United States, rather than immigrated here, chose Trump.
“We can only speculate,” said the authors of the Carnegie survey at an online event about the survey results, adding that there is a need to rethink assumptions about minority and immigrant behavior.
The changing attitudes of Indian American voters highlight the diversity within the group, influenced by religion, immigration and integration experiences, and age, among other factors.
Abraham pointed to how the trauma of immigrating experienced by older Indian Americans has created a survivor mindset that cares deeply about the rhetoric around immigration. Meanwhile younger U.S.-born voters without a personal immigration experience “are more focused on how America is treating the world,” Selvakumar said.
Harris’s ethnicity did resonate with some Indian American voters, even if in sometimes minor, personal ways.
“The one area where her [Harris’] background matters to me, [is that] it would mean a lot to me if in the year that my half-Indian daughter was born, we have a half-Indian female president,” Abraham said. “ Just so I can tell her, ‘Hey, the whole world is open to you.’”
