Interview: Did anti-India rhetoric in the US cost Republicans the Indian American vote?
· Scroll
In the 2024 US elections, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party drew the support of nearly a third of Indian Americans – a community that had consistently leaned towards the Democratic Party.
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That, said Sumitra Badrinathan, one of the authors of a new survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the voting patterns of Indian Americans, “was consistent with the broader rightward shift we saw across racial groups that year”.
Since then, however, the pendulum has swung back, according to the survey conducted ahead of the November 3 midterm elections. Only 19% of Indian Americans said that they were going to vote Republican – the lowest share in surveys published going back to 2020. Sixty two per cent said that they were going to support Democratic candidates for Congress.
Indian Americans account for about 1.5% of the population of the United States
In the wake of the Democratic “blue tsunami” in the midterm elections, Scroll asked Badrinathan whether the hostile rhetoric about Indian Americans has cost Republicans dear and what this means for Indian Americans heading into the 2028 US Presidential elections.
Badrinath, an assistant professor of political science at American University in Washington DC, is co-director of the Indian American Attitudes Survey, an ongoing study of the political and social lives of...