Indian Americans and future of India-US ties

The five million-strong diaspora is in a flux, with a shift visible towards the Republican Party. Importantly, the diaspora's outlook towards India and India-America ties has become sunnier

- Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Milan Vaishnav

One of the most popular narratives emerging from the 2024 US election is the significant shift of non-White voters away from their traditional support for the Democratic Party and their newfound embrace of Republican candidate Donald Trump. That account gained further traction earlier this month with the release of detailed new data from Democratic pollster David Shor and his colleagues who found that, between 2016 and 2024, Hispanic, Black, and Asian voters—especially those who identify as "moderate" or "conservative"—swung toward the Republican Party in large numbers. In fact, the only group which exhibited no discernible partisan shift over this period was White voters.

In conjunction with polling and analytics firm YouGov, we collected granular survey data on Indian Americans ahead of the 2024 elections—the Indian American Attitudes Survey, a rare source of representative data on Indians in the US. Our data demonstrate that the political shift among Indian Americans was in line with this overarching trend. In 2024, 47% of Indian Americans identified as Democrats, down from 56% in 2020. In the 2020 presidential election, Indian Americans favored Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump by a 70:20 margin; just four years later, when Biden's vice-president Kamala Harris challenged Trump, that advantage dipped to 60:30.

This shift has fueled a second narrative—that Indian Americans turned against the Democrats, at least in part, because they felt that the Biden-Harris administration would be worse for US-India relations than Trump. However, our data finds little evidence to support this claim.