In early October, former President Donald Trump appeared on “Flagrant,” a popular comedy podcast with almost 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube, hosted by the comedians Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh. Trump touted his affection for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “We have a very good relationship. He’s the nicest human being. But we had a couple of occasions where somebody was threatening India. I said, ‘Let me help, I’m very good with those people. Let me help,’” Trump recounted. “I will do it. I will do it. And I will do anything necessary!” he continued, imitating the Indian prime minister’s anger about threats from India’s adversaries and perhaps alluding to its archrival, Pakistan.

Trump’s imitation added fervor to the much-discussed bromance between the two figures. The duo drew a crowd of about 50,000 at a 2019 gathering at Houston’s NRG Stadium. Before his first presidential term, Trump had held events with parts of the Indian diaspora aligned with Modi, including a well-publicized 2016 rally in New Jersey hosted by the Republican Hindu Coalition, at which he said “I am a big fan of Hindu, and I am a big fan of India — big, big fan.” 

But despite the Republican Party candidate’s pandering to Indian Americans (the largest group within the fastest-growing racial or ethnic demographic in the United States — Asians), an estimated 3 out of 4 Indian Americans voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. All the indications from polling are that a majority will vote for the Democrat at the top of the ticket once again in 2024, though a recent Carnegie Endowment for International Peace survey found that 61% of respondents said they would vote for Kamala Harris, compared to 32% for Trump, a notably greater share for the GOP than in 2020.

A September poll released by AAPI Data and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote found that 66% of Asian-American voters said they would vote for Harris, the nation’s first vice president with Indian roots and the first of Jamaican heritage, while 28% said they would vote for Trump. Both Harris and Usha Vance, the wife of the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, have put a renewed spotlight on Indian Americans in U.S. politics and their growing influence.

As Republican voices in South Asian American communities garner greater attention, questions remain as to whether the blue stronghold within the Indian-American bloc could be beginning to crumble — questions that neither polling data nor voting behavior have yet provided clear answers to. 

Indian-American Republicans have recently gained prominence nationally. Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley (nominated to that position by Trump) was the highest-profile challenger to Trump’s 2024 bid for the GOP nomination and the last one standing after Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out. The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also emerged as a prominent voice in the primaries, often praising Trump as “the best president of the 21st century.” Both have Indian roots, though neither succeeded.

Indian Americans make up only about 1.5% of the U.S. population but their numbers grew by more than 50% between the 2010 and 2020 censuses. There are already more than 300 South Asian Americans — an umbrella term for those with roots in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and other countries in the subcontinent — in elected office across the country. The so-called “samosa caucus” in Congress — currently comprising the Democratic Reps. Ami Bera and Ro Khanna of California, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois and Shri Thanedar of Michigan — could soon expand to seven if candidates in Arizona and Virginia are successful in November.

It is undeniable that Harris, 60, has brought a new momentum to the Democratic ticket that the 81-year-old incumbent Biden just couldn’t muster. After Biden announced he was stepping out of the race in July, many South Asian Americans mobilized to boost Harris’ bid and volunteered for groups pushing to get out the vote.

One of them was Indian American Impact, a political advocacy group that quickly launched DesiPresident.com, a website that promotes Harris’ presidential run with ways to donate and volunteer. Impact’s executive director, Chintan Patel, who has over 15 years of experience in political organizing and campaigns, describes an “incredible explosion of energy and enthusiasm” organically bubbling up from within the community after Harris took over the race. Indian Americans from across the country were reaching out to ask how to volunteer, phone bank and knock on doors, Patel told New Lines.

The Democratic-aligned federal political action committee They See Blue has seen the number of volunteers writing postcards balloon from 130 during Biden’s campaign to more than 1,000 since Harris took control of the ticket. “The engagement level, the energy, the passion is just off the charts,” said one of the PAC’s co-founders, Rajiv Bhateja, a retired tech executive who came up with the group’s name as a play on the term “desi,” a moniker that refers to people from the Indian subcontinent. 

Bhateja estimates that They See Blue volunteers will handwrite about 200,000 postcards to South Asian American voters this year, rivaling the quarter of a million written across the 2018, 2020 and 2022 cycles combined. “She’s a fresher face. She’s somebody we can relate to. She’s a woman of color,” Bhateja said. “It’s not the old sort of old guard kind of trying to be in charge again. I think she has a more forward-looking perspective.”

Several different types of groups from the community — men, women, writers, comedians — have been organizing large videoconference meetings for Harris. In mid-October, South Asian American celebrities gathered on Zoom for a virtual rally, including the actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani, the writer and model Padma Lakshmi, the actor Karan Soni and the comedian Abby Govindan, among others. The evening was full of rallying cries for Harris: “Every time we say ‘Madame President,’ pop a gulab jamun,” co-host Maulik Pancholy told viewers. (Gulab jamun is a popular South Asian sweet comprising fried dough balls dipped in sugar syrup.) 

Performers encouraged fellow desis to “leave no uncle unturned” and send messages encouraging people to vote on WhatsApp, the messaging platform famously popular in South Asian communities, especially among older generations. There were also digs at Trump, including how he has demonized immigrants. One comedian joked that Trump’s tariffs could make products at the largest Indian grocery chain in the U.S., Patel Brothers, more expensive.

The community’s voting power has finally been recognized in recent election cycles, within a skewed electoral college system that puts the fate of presidential elections in the hands of just a few battleground states. Cable news data wonks continue to project razor-thin margins that could give the 270 electoral minimum to either candidate. There are over 400,000 eligible South Asian American voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, a number large enough to be decisive. In 2016, Trump won Michigan by just 10,704 votes. In 2020, Biden won Georgia by just 11,779 votes and Arizona by only 10,457 votes.

In 2024, there is a constant focus on the Rust Belt and Sun Belt swing states, including Georgia, where there are more than 328,000 eligible Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters. They See Blue aims to contact every South Asian American voter in battleground states through phone calls and mailers. Indian American Impact’s Patel said his organization is regularly canvassing with multilingual messaging in battleground states, where South Asian American communities outnumber the closest margins of victory. In Impact’s own polling, focused on the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and released in mid-October, Harris has a 48-percentage-point lead over Trump. Even a quarter of South Asian Americans who identified as Republicans in the survey said they planned to vote for Harris.

And yet, despite the enthusiasm, the Harris-Walz campaign has avoided leaning into the historic nature of Harris’ candidacy. Some suspect the campaign believes it is more effective to motivate independent and swing voters based on issues rather than identity. In an October interview, NBC News’ Hallie Jackson asked Harris about her reluctance to talk about the historic component. “Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris responded. “I don’t need to point that out to anyone. The point that most people really care about is, can you do the job, and do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”

This stands in contrast to Harris’ run for the Democratic nomination in 2019, when she made masala dosas (a popular South Indian meal that includes a crispy rice and lentil crepe with a spiced potato dish) on camera with Hollywood powerhouse Mindy Kaling. During her 2020 vice presidential candidacy, she famously referred to her “chithis” (aunts in the Tamil language) during her convention speech, which was largely seen as a public acknowledgment of her Indian roots and sparked pride for many in the diaspora. “I literally have tears in my eyes,” Padma Lakshmi tweeted that night — the TV host was born in Chennai, which is also the birthplace of Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan.

But this time around, amid Trump’s statements questioning her identity or mispronouncing her name, Harris has often brushed the issues aside and dismissed the dog whistles as coming from “the same old tired playbook.” 

Within the Indian-American community, memes shared on WhatsApp have included “Lotus for POTUS” images. (Kamala translates to “lotus” in Sanskrit.) Ajay Jain Bhutoria, a prominent Harris supporter and major Democratic fundraiser, released a music video riffing off the Oscar-winning song “Naatu Naatu” from the 2022 film “RRR,” which shows her accepting the nomination and features supporters advocating to vote for Harris. Some in the community still refer to Harris as “Kamala Auntie,” a common term for female elders in both South Asian and Black communities. Harris also mentions “auntie” on her social media bios. Some Indian Americans are pleased that Americans are learning how to properly pronounce a Sanskrit first name: COMMA-la as Harris has promoted, or KUM-a-la as many Indians say, rather than Ka-MALA as Trump has deliberately mispronounced it.

On the other hand, groups like Hindus for America First and the Georgia chapter of the American Hindu Coalition have endorsed Trump. Srilekha Palle, a board member of the national-level American Hindu Coalition — which has endorsed neither Trump nor Harris — said she and her peers are mainly leaning toward Trump because of what they believe is his tougher stance on illegal immigration. After Mexico and El Salvador, the largest unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. is from India, according to 2022 data. “Illegal immigrants are illegal immigrants, period,” Palle said. “Anybody that tries to cross the border illegally is somebody that wants to come into your home without your permission.”

Palle also cites economic concerns as high among her priorities, and is not swayed by either Harris’ or Usha’s identities. “It’s nice to have Indian-American representation. It’s nice to have Hindu representation. Those are all emotionally good things,” Palle said. “But you don’t pay your bills through emotions.”

While the recent Carnegie survey suggests that the Indian-American community continues to lean to the left, it found a striking gender gap among Indian Americans under 40: 62% of young women support Harris and 29% support Trump. But among young Indian-American men, 48% prefer Trump while 44% support Harris. This gender and age dynamic is similar to trends found among other races and ethnicities, and is especially notable in this case, considering that the same survey in 2020 found Biden had a 40-point lead with men under 40. Indian Americans who support Trump are more likely to be born in the U.S., compared with Harris supporters, who are more likely to be naturalized citizens.

Some Indian Americans who identify as Hindu have also gravitated toward the right because of what they believe is a “woke” left that overly values religious pluralism, running counter to India’s embrace of Hindu nationalism under Modi. Groups like Human Rights Watch have characterized Modi’s rhetoric about India’s marginalized groups, namely Muslims, as “hate speech,” in line with the Trump administration’s controversial Muslim ban. There is a blurring of lines between what’s happening in the U.S. and back on the subcontinent.

“You can tell that an ethnic group is really flourishing in the United States when they start to produce prominent xenophobes and racists, particularly of the anti-Black variety,” The Nation correspondent Jeet Heer recently wrote in an essay about Indian-American politics. “The trajectory from victim to victimizer is one of the surest markers of upward social mobility.”

Similar beliefs are also present among some Indian Americans on the left, according to Sangay Mishra, an associate professor of political science at Drew University who has studied the political lives of South Asian Americans. Some call them “Modi Democrats,” a group of Indian Americans who lean left at home in the U.S., but prefer Modi’s Hindu nationalist rhetoric on the subcontinent. 

“There is a contradiction there, but I don’t think people see that as a contradiction,” Mishra told New Lines, who believes many people actually aren’t that tuned into Indian politics. He suggested that such views are unlikely to translate into voters from the community moving to the right in U.S. elections “unless the Republican Party changes, and becomes a more sort of regular conservative party, toning down some of its rhetoric around othering, immigration and Christian nationalism.”

The Biden-Harris administration has welcomed Modi with the Indian leader’s famous hugs, while also facing pressure from critics who point to his record of Islamophobia and attacks on the free press. “I don’t know how many people here vote purely based on what’s going on with the U.S.-India relationship. I think people here tend to vote more based on domestic priorities,” Bhateja said. “There are obvious policy issues that matter to the South Asian community — legal immigration, gun safety, health care, women’s rights, some of the issues that people gravitate towards a policy position for.” 

Impact’s battleground state survey found that 59% of Indian Americans trust Harris more than Trump to handle the U.S.-India relationship. But the survey participants indicated that their top issues were the economy, inflation and abortion, which 76% of South Asian American voters in the poll said should be legal all or most of the time. “What we consistently see in our community is they’re voting on bread-and-butter issues that impact their day-to-day lives. They’re voting on the economy,” Patel said. “There’s always this natural pull, of course, to India politics, the U.S.-India relationship, but push comes to shove, what voters are voting on are issues that are impacting them day-to-day at home.”

Nonetheless, anger around the United States’ approach to the war in Gaza and the corresponding Palestinian humanitarian crisis could also be a tipping point that hurts Harris. Mishra sees Gen-Z and younger millennial voters across communities, including many young South Asian Americans, as having a deep sense of disillusionment about the political establishment. “There is a way in which they are moving away from the mainstream political establishment and political parties and thinking very differently,” Mishra said. “Even though Harris is leading among younger people, it’s a very difficult crowd to persuade.”

Democratic political commentator Kaivan Shroff, who represented New York as one of its delegates at the Democratic National Convention this year, said that although younger Indian Americans see climate change and conflicts in the Middle East as key issues, they may be more open to compromise with Harris than they were with Biden. “I really think it’s more of just a psychological reset, where they were so steadfast in their positions on Biden and had years and years to come up with that opposition or feel disappointed … and suddenly there was a reset moment,” Shroff said.

There has also been criticism that both Harris’ mother and Usha’s family hail from privileged castes in the Hindu tradition, which has added to the burgeoning discourse about caste privilege and discrimination in Indian communities in the U.S. Narratives about their Indian lineages often reinforce the “model minority myth” about general Asian-American socioeconomic success — an assertion that often glazes over nuances in immigration stories and pits Asians against other minority groups. Recently, in The Washington Post, columnist Bina Venkataraman highlighted a generational divide among Indian-American voters in Georgia: The first generation were less moved by Harris’ identity and some were supportive of Trump’s harder stance on illegal immigration.

Shroff believes Usha has been an overlooked character in this election cycle for speaking as the daughter of immigrants on a Republican National Convention stage where members of the crowd held signs calling for mass deportations. “[Usha] deserves a lot more scrutiny for what she’s trying to sell people, which I think is a totally dishonest retelling of the immigrant experience,” said Shroff, who had worked on the Clinton-Kaine campaign in 2016. At the RNC, Usha spoke about her immigrant parents as loving, noting how her husband had “adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food from my mother, Indian food” — yet her husband and Trump have continued to spread disinformation and anti-immigrant hatred in their campaign, including targeting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Venezuelans in Aurora, Colorado.

The polls may or may not be accurate as indicators of who voters ultimately support — as seen in the surprise experienced by many at Clinton’s 2016 loss. And whether South Asian voters have fully grappled with anti-Black sentiments within their communities remains to be seen, considering Harris’ multiracial background. Such views are deep-seated and remain strong in the community, according to Mishra. “But when it comes to political candidates, I think different calculations go into deciding.”

Even though many Indian Americans are affluent, a fact that could translate into a preference for lower taxes and smaller government, the community of about 5 million people is still a minority, and “the sense of being the ‘other’ is something that is very much a part of their own identity,” Mishra said.

As long as the Republican Party remains Trump’s MAGA party, with hysteria around immigration and changing demographics, any significant push to the right is likely to be hindered. “There is a way in which the community is acutely aware of their place in American society, and it’s a struggle to be fully accepted. … Religion and everything else plays a role in that,” Mishra added.

Stop AAPI Hate, an advocacy group that emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic-driven spike in anti-Asian hate, found that online hostility — slurs, slogans and phrases — toward South Asian American communities has been rising, including racist accusations of stealing jobs and raping women.

That sour taste could drive desi communities to reject the right’s current rhetoric. Nearly 3 in 4 South Asian Americans in Impact’s battleground state survey are motivated to vote. They See Blue’s Bhateja, a nonpartisan voter himself, became a U.S. citizen in the late 1990s. He volunteered for the 2008 Obama campaign and continued working on political advocacy in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 election cycles. But he is optimistic about Indian-American voters in 2024.

“This year, it has been completely off the charts — the level of engagement, passion and dedication. … It’s just jaw-dropping, frankly.”

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