For Indian Americans in NY and NJ, a 2024 election cycle unlike any other

Neha Dewan, a Westchester lawyer, has poured much of her personal time since the 2000s into political causes, including grassroots work on behalf of Democratic candidates.

But the enthusiasm unleashed by members of the Indian American community in response to Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy, she said, has surpassed anything she has ever seen.

“It's just been absolutely incredible,” Dewan, co-national director of South Asians for Harris, said. “And I think people are excited.” She adds that “easily hundreds” of Indian Americans from New York and New Jersey alone have traveled to Pennsylvania to bolster canvassing efforts in the key battleground state.

Some of that energy takes center stage this week, in South Asian-themed fundraisers for Harris. Those include a sold-out South Asian Writers Speak Out for Kamala event Monday night in the East Village, followed Tuesday by a virtual comedy event, South Asians Stand-Up for Harris, with actor Kumail Nanjiani and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi at the helm — one of a host of similarly themed online events.

For many in the local Indian American community, including around 400,000 eligible voters in New York and New Jersey, it has been an uncommon election cycle from the very start.

Harris would become the first woman, first Black woman and first South Asian to be U.S. president, her entry into the race coming after President Biden’s July exit. On the Republican side, the election cycle saw Indian representation even early on, with Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley mounting attention-getting challenges to former President Donald Trump.

And Trump selected as his running mate J.D. Vance, whose attorney wife, Usha, is Indian American.

One Indian American voter, Hemant Bhatt of Iselin, New Jersey, said the former president has his support, citing Trump’s tough approach to illegal immigration while generally projecting strength.

“It was such a wonderful time,” Bhatt said.

But many Indian American political observers, both locally and nationally, see most support from that constituency running toward the Harris camp – this after earlier showing relatively lukewarm support for Biden’s candidacy.

“Indian Americans are poised to potentially tip the scales in favor of Harris,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, political scientist, founder and executive director of AAPI Data. Ramakrishnan said that's especially true in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia.

A Sept. 24 report released by AAPI Data and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote found that 69% of Indian American registered voters support Harris, while 25% of voters in the community support Trump. The report showed 3 in 4 Indian American respondents said they had a somewhat or very favorable impression of Harris, far stronger than any other Asian subgroup.

The country's 4.8 million Indian Americans make the second-largest immigrant group in the United States, after Mexican Americans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And as with any group of voters in a tight election, where their support lands could be difference-making.

But the outsize political attention — Indian Americans make up about 1.5% of the U.S. population – has not come without cost. According to the national group Stop AAPI Hate, the high visibility of Indian Americans connected to both tickets has spurred an unwanted consequence: “alarmingly high levels of hate” aimed online at members of the community.

In an Oct. 9 report, the group, which collects data nationwide, noted a spike in violent language in monitored domestic violent extremism spaces, including words and phrases using hate speech and racial epithets in attacks on Indian Americans.

“With the upcoming election giving our communities even greater visibility, it’s critical that we sound the alarm," Manjusha Kulkarni, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, said.

‘People are getting engaged’

Dewan, whose group is not part of the Harris-Walz presidential campaign but works with it, said local volunteers showing up included older members of the community who had never been politically active as well as some as young as 12.

“People are getting engaged,” Dewan said. “And that's getting other people, their friends, their families engaged.”

She attributed this to the many firsts represented by Harris.

“It's not your cookie-cutter, white, male politician,” she said.

Nearly 450,000 South Asians live within the five boroughs, including more than a quarter-million Indian Americans. Community leaders said the religious and socioeconomic diversity within the Indian and South Asian population makes it hard to pin down.

On one hand, Indian Americans have the highest median income of any group in the country, according to the Pew Research Center, but also the third-highest number of undocumented people nationwide.

Three out of four of Indian New Yorkers are either U.S.-born or naturalized, according to the Asian American Federation. Just under a fifth of the population has less than a high school education; close to half have either a bachelor’s degree or higher. The median household income is $90,000, compared to $66,000 for the entire city; however, nearly 29% of the community lives in or near poverty.

Shivana Jorawar, the co-director of Jahajee, a gender justice organization that serves members of New York state’s Indo-Caribbean community, said an Oct. 3 election town hall in Richmond Hill drew 128 South Asian and Indo-Caribbean attendees. According to Jorawar, the topics included housing insecurity and the cost of living as well as abortion rights.

“While there are lots of people excited about the prospect of ‘Kamala Aunty’ making curry in the White House, not all South Asians identify with Kamala, who is also half Black,” said Jorawar, who said the number of Republican voters in the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean neighborhoods in South Queens had grown in recent years.

“There is unfortunately a lot of prejudice in our community against Black people, as in other immigrant communities, and Trump has been able to tap into that hatred,” she said.

Jorawar said “many in our community” are fearful of mass deportation and a Muslim travel ban in the event of a Trump victory. At the same time, she said there is widespread community disenchantment with Harris due to her continued support of Israel, a claim that was reflected in a national petition signed by nearly 1,300 South Asian Americans and by Sadaf Jaffer, a former New Jersey assembly member.

“Unfortunately, many people may simply not vote if they don’t see a change in policy to save lives,” said Jaffer, who also served as the first Muslim mayor in the country, when she was mayor of Montgomery township. “The broader community is in shock, mourning and uncertainty”

Ramakrishnan said the results of AAPI Data’s survey indicated that most Indian American voters would be willing to support a candidate they disagreed with on Israel-Gaza. That isn’t the case with abortion, he said, for which 57% of registered voters surveyed said they couldn’t vote for a candidate with whom they disagreed on the issue.

The split was even more pronounced on the issue of racism and discrimination, with 64% of Indian American voters saying they wouldn’t vote with a candidate who does not share their views.

“No matter how dissatisfied Indian American voters might be about the Biden administration, most of them cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump because of the racist rhetoric,” Ramakrishnan said.

Avinash Gupta, a cardiologist in New Jersey who supports Trump, pushed back against Democratic criticisms of the Trump campaign. He said the alarm over Project 2025, a conservative policy playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation for a second Trump administration, is simply “a scare tactic from Democrats.”

“I think Trump recognizes the talent immigrants bring to the economy and the country. I don’t think he’s going to deport legal people,” said Gupta, who serves as president of the Federation of Indian Associations. “Those who are coming here illegally, they should be deported.”

The political evolution of the community

The prominence of Indian Americans like Harris along with Republicans such as Haley, Ramaswamy and Bobby Jindal is a major shift from previous decades, when the community was smaller and barely represented in state or national politics.

In the early 1990s, Kapil Sharma worked on the Hill as a congressional aide to Rep. Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey. At the time, he said, members of the community were primarily interested in gaining “access” to people in power.

But he recalled how three Indian Americans ran congressional campaigns in 1994, attempting to break a dry spell that had lasted since the 1950s, when Dalip Singh Saund became the first Indian and Asian American to enter Congress.

All three, said Sharma, were “trounced.”

“Indian Americans, at that time, didn't feel like after that loss that we could win an elected office, because we'd be seen as foreigners,” he said.

That changed, he argued, after Jindal won a congressional seat representing Louisiana in 2004. But he said the victory of Jindal, who was born into a Hindu family, caused a rupture within the community, specifically among political activists.

“Him being a born-again Christian really forced political people to say, ‘Do we want Bobby Jindal to be the first face of our community politically?’ And that's when the split happened.”

But he said Jindal’s win served to open doors for other candidates.

Sangay Mishra, an associate professor of political science and international relations at Drew University, said there was a reason why some people from the community had become prominent names in the GOP, rather than the Democratic party.

In large urban areas in particular, Mishra said, “it's very hard to get a spot within the Democratic Party because there's so much contestation within the party,” especially among communities of color, adding, “almost all the spots are taken.”

Mishra said although the community largely voted for Democrats, Indian Americans, with their high education levels and affluence, offered something to the GOP in return: the optics of inclusion. And some politically ambitious members of the community embraced the idea of the model minority, “in terms of being exceptional, in terms of putting a distance between ourselves as a minority group and minorities such as Blacks and Latinos.”

Recalling a rally in Edison

Despite the highly visible names — Jindal became governor of Louisiana in 2008 and Haley became South Carolina governor in 2011 — the GOP didn’t succeed at attracting Indian American voters.

“Indians may agree with Republicans on certain topics like tax policies or even some of their immigration policies, but not identify with the party as a whole, given its hyper-Christian, often evangelical, pro-gun, pro-military stances,” said Pawan Dhingra, associate provost and chair of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies program at Amherst College.

Deepa Iyer, an activist and author of “We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future,” said it was a “hypocritical strategy” for Indian Americans to align with a conservative agenda “that dehumanizes immigrants” and “dismantles racial equity” while “simultaneously telling stories of one's immigrant and cultural heritage.”

"It's hard to stomach the fact that some Indian Americans are positioning themselves so visibly in the GOP which is spewing divisive policies and narratives that harm our own community members,” Iyer said.

Nonetheless, Trump maintains some passionate support in the Indian American community, no matter what the polling shows.

Weeks before the 2016 election, candidate Trump courted Hindu American voters at a Bollywood rally in Edison, New Jersey, telling attendees he was committed to the “fight against radical Islamic terrorism.”

Bhatt, the Iselin, New Jersey-based founder of the Asian American Republican Coalition, likened Trump, with approval, to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“These are the three leaders who can change the world,” Bhatt said.

He said in Trump’s wake, the country had suffered from “illegal immigration” and high inflation, and he lamented the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ movements.

“This is not the same America which I used to see,” Bhatt said.