On a bright Sunday afternoon, two men walked door to door through a neighborhood in Forsyth County, Georgia, on a mission to get votes for the Democrats.
Just 30 years ago, this area, 40 miles north of Atlanta, was part of an almost entirely white, Republican-dominated suburban district that sent Newt Gingrich to Congress. It was the scene of a 1987 civil rights march that drew hundreds of demonstrators, some wearing Ku Klux Klan robes. Now, after an influx of newcomers that has increased diversity, many of the large single-family homes featured traditional Diwali decorations. Hindu temples and Indian restaurants and markets lined the nearby shopping street.
Sure enough, almost everyone who answered the door that day in mid-October was of South Asian descent. The two pollsters switched between English, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil as they asked residents if they planned to vote. Many of the people they spoke to had already voted early. Nearly everyone else said they planned to support Vice President Kamala Harris, which may have been somewhat of a surprise given surveys showing growing support for the Republican Party among Indian Americans.
“These are doors that have never been touched” by Republican and Democratic campaigners, said one of the men, Shekar Narasimhan, the national chairman of the AAPI Victory Fund, a political action committee that backs Democrats. They targeted homes whose records indicated that residents had not voted in the past, and they emphasized to everyone they encountered that only a small number of votes in Georgia had clinched the last presidential election.
In the frantic final days before what is likely to be another incredibly close battle, both sides are making all-out efforts to identify and mobilize potential supporters: black women in Georgia, Latino men in Nevada or white working-class people in Pennsylvania. People of Indian descent, now the largest Asian American group in the US, are an attractive target as this cohort takes on a more prominent role in politics. Harris' mother was from India, as were the parents of Usha Vance, wife of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
Narasimhan points out that in the seven so-called swing states that will decide the presidential election, about 400,000 Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have become new potential voters over the past four years by moving, gaining citizenship or turning 18 year. particularly large concentrations in swing-state metro areas, including Atlanta; Philadelphia; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Detroit, according to AAPI Data, a research institute.
Asian Americans now make up 17% of Forsyth County's population and a quarter of its voters, many of whom are drawn to the area for its good schools, relatively low cost of living and abundant job opportunities. The county hasn't been won by a Democratic presidential candidate since Georgia's Jimmy Carter ran for re-election in 1980.
According to data collected by AAPI Data and APIAVote, Indian Americans are by far the largest Asian ethnic group in Georgia and key to suburbs across the country, which have grown through urban sprawl. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Asian Americans make up 10.5% of voters; they are 10.9% of voters in Oakland County, Michigan.
In Georgia, Narasimhan and other campaigners praised Harris' support for women's reproductive rights, in a state that has a strict ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. They talked about her record on gun safety, especially after the shooting at Apalachee High School, about an hour away. Her multiracial heritage makes her a better choice for an increasingly diverse audience, they argued.
Halfway across the country, Ramesh Kapur, a Democratic fundraiser, spent a recent weekend rallying support from devotees at Hindu temples in the northern suburbs of Detroit, which has one of the largest Arab-American populations in the US. With the conflict raging in the Middle East, Kapur said it was crucial to mobilize Hindus in the swing state of Michigan to help offset the decline in support from Muslim voters angered by the handling of the Gaza crisis by the Biden administration.
“The Hindu vote is all the more important,” said Kapur, who raised money for Harris when she ran for the Senate in 2016 and the presidential ticket in 2020.
But some believers told Kapur they still didn't know enough about Harris. Others said they were not convinced she is strongly connected to her Indian background. Kapur said he told them that Harris, who is Christian, was raised by a Hindu mother and had hosted Diwali celebrations at the White House.
Devesh Kapur, who studies the Indian diaspora as a professor at Johns Hopkins University, says companies desperate for technology workers have been tapping talent from India since the 1990s. Indian Americans make up less than 2% of the U.S. population, but are among the most successful ethnic groups over the past fifty years due to technological ties.
Most immigrants “come to the U.S. and you gradually move up the ladder,” he said. “The Indians came and climbed an escalator.”
But a Bloomberg News analysis of campaign donations from early July to mid-October showed just a dozen Indian-American donors among a list of more than 1,000 people who gave $50,000 or more to key fundraising vehicles of Harris or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
There have been outliers. Billionaires Vinod and Neeru Khosla, who made their fortunes in Silicon Valley, have donated at least $3.8 million to Democratic candidates and committees since the start of 2023, according to federal election data. Sumir Chadha, who runs investment firm WestBridge Capital, has donated at least half a million dollars, mostly to Democratic candidates and charities. Oil executive Harry Singh gave at least a quarter of a million dollars to a pro-Trump PAC this year.
A Politico investigation found that the number of small Democratic donors with common South Asian names increased fivefold after Harris became the nominee. Harris' mother, who came to the U.S. to study at the University of California, Berkeley, was from the city now known as Chennai.
Currently, there are five Indian Americans in Congress, all Democrats, affectionately called the 'Samosa Caucus'.
Republicans have encroached on Democrats' support from Indian Americans since Trump's 2016 victory. About 27% of Indian Americans said they would vote for Trump this year, up from 17% in 2016, according to a survey published in late September by AAPI Data. About 47% of Indian Americans identify as Democrats, up from 56% in 2020, according to an October report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Conservatives have long tried to argue that Indian Americans are a natural fit for the Republican Party: Older members of the group, in particular, tend to be religiously and socially conservative; they are richer than average; and Trump and the Republicans have worked with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has led India for more than a decade. In 2016, Trump appeared at a Bollywood-themed benefit in New Jersey weeks before the election.
Shalabh Kumar, a Midwestern businessman who heads the Republican Hindu Coalition, said he and his family have donated about $500,000 to Trump's election efforts over the past year. But in a recent interview, he lamented the lack of interest the campaign has shown in events he had wanted to organize for Indian Americans.
“The Trump campaign has just been completely silent,” Kumar said, adding that Democrats had done more to mobilize voters. A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not return messages seeking comment.
Still, Trump showed some support for Hindus on Thursday when he said in a post on X that Harris and President Joe Biden “have ignored Hindus around the world and in America.”
Narasimhan of the AAPI Victory Fund points out that of the roughly five million people of Indian descent in the U.S., only about half are eligible to vote. To encourage them to go to the polls, he planned to travel to Nevada and Michigan in the coming days, while the allies would go to Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
He tells people he meets that the Asian American vote tilted the 2022 Senate race for Democrat Raphael Warnock, when an exit poll showed support at 78%.
“The next generation understands one simple thing: they were born here, they live here and they will stay here,” Narasimhan said. “This community has so much potential, growth and opportunity.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
