Kamala Harris’s history-making potential as the first president of Asian or South Asian origin could be a decisive factor in propelling a record number of Asian Americans to the ballot box. New survey findings, however, point to an even bigger factor—the promise of gender representation is turbo-charging voter interest among Asian Americans, and particularly so among Asian American women.

The outsized role of gender representation versus ethnic representation for Asian American voters may seem surprising at first. Kamala Harris’s racial identity has gotten a lot more airtime than her gender identity. Donald Trump drew outsized attention to her Indian heritage in July when he claimed at the National Association of Black Journalists that Harris “was Indian all the way, and all of a sudden…became a Black person.” Social media uproar and news coverage soon followed, with dozens of stories covering her upbringing, the neighbourhoods in which she lived, her childhood visits to India, and her time at Howard University.

Recent data (see figure below) released by AAPI Data and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote) indicates that gender representation plays a stronger role than racial representation in shaping voter support for her candidacy.

Well over a third of Asian American voters (38%) said that Harris’ identity as a woman was ‘extremely important’ or ‘very important’ to them, with significantly smaller proportions indicating the same about her racial identities as Indian/South Asian (25%) and as an African American (24%) or about her age (25%). The findings were not statistically different among Indian American voters, who arguably share even closer ethnic affinity to Harris.

Notably, the ‘gender boost’ in identity representation was driven entirely by the opinions of Asian American women. About a half (49%) of Asian American women said that Harris’s gender was important to them, nearly double the proportion among Asian American men (25%). This gender gap was also noticeable in questions about the importance of having more elected representatives who are women (56% of Asian American women said that this was extremely important or very important to them, when compared to 36% of Asian American men), and about their intention to vote for Harris (72% among Asian American women and 59% among Asian American men).

Importantly, the Harris candidacy has introduced a gender gap among Asian American voters for the first time in recorded polling history, including when compared to the Spring 2024 Asian American voter survey, where we found that 47% of Asian American women and 46% of Asian American men said they intended to vote for Biden. Thus, even as Harris improved the Democratic Party’s performance among Asian Americans overall, the gain was disproportionately large among Asian American women. So while Trump is making gains among male voters, Harris is making disproportionate gains among female voters. We have not seen a similar gender gap in support for Harris among Black voters or a consistent gender gap among Latino voters.

Ramakrishnan is founder AAPI Data and Sadhwani is senior researcher.