How South Asian Voters May Pick The Next President

Asian Americans are actually the fastest growing demographic in America, but the demographic in remains an afterthought, even during the 2016 US Elections with issues like immigration have been the hot topic during the campaigns.  It’s not that the parties have ignored Asian-American voters , much has been made of the “rising American electorate” and the impact that minority voters are poised to have on the 2016 elections. The problem is that too often, both sides of the aisle have treated Asian-Americans as if we were a monolithic block of color, culture and creed. And with Asian-Americans projected to overtake Hispanics as the largest minority group in the United States by 2065, that wrongheaded approach will inevitably cost our would-be elected leaders elections in the future.

While Asian Americans are poised to become a powerful force, both in national and local elections, political engagement remains a critical obstacle in unlocking this potential. Despite Asian American voters’ ability to swing elections, political campaigns have been slow to reach out, while the community is also less likely than other racial groups to make it to the polls.

“It’s a missed opportunity,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, professor of public policy and political science at UC Riverside and director of the nonpartisan National Asian American Survey. “Especially among the higher-income, more-educated parts of the population, you’d expect to see higher levels of political engagement, so there’s a lot of power that’s going to waste.”

Meanwhile, the rise of South Asian American politicians running for public office is also a prominent driver for South Asian American engagement in political campaigns. Some of the most influential politicians include Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and Nikki Haley, governor of South Carolina, Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney General for the Southern District of New York, and Neel Kashkari, former Treasury Department official and current GOP candidate for California governor. This year, Ravi Patel, president of Hawkeye Hotels, announced his running for Congress in Iowa’s 1st congressional District, and ignited more support from South Asian American communities to engage in political campaigns. Another factor that influences South Asian American’s political participation is the strong tradition of civic engagement in South Asian countries like India, especially nowadays when over three-quarters of the South Asian American population in the U.S. is foreign-born.

Since most Asian Americans don’t live in battleground states, California alone is home to one-third of all Asian Americans and it’s state and local elections where they can make the biggest impact. “What we found in the past is that one-third of Asian American voters are undecided about ballot propositions even a month before Election Day,” Ramakrishnan said. “If you do the numbers, that’s 12% of the electorate. If one-third of them are undecided, that’s 4% on ballot propositions that could swing either way, but those campaigns are not engaging with them.”

Despite Asian Americans’ importance in potentially determining electoral outcomes, the gap between their share of the population and of total votes cast has long persisted. Nationally, Asian Americans are about 5% of the resident population but only 3% of the voting population, and in California, they’re about 15% of residents but only 12% of voters, Ramakrishnan said.  There are three layers to this, he explained. The first is citizenship. Since Asians are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to be foreign-born, many aren’t eligible for citizenship or haven’t yet taken the steps to naturalize.

The growing population of South Asian Americans could hold the key to who will become president in November as they represent a growing part of voters in the United States.  “South Asians are critical to the U.S. presidential election,” said Lakshmi Sridaran, Director of National Policy and Advocacy at South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), a national non-profit South Asian organization.  However, South Asian Americans could be more aware of the importance of voicing their opinions and exercising their vote, according to another South Asian American platform.  In swing states like Florida and Virginia, where Indian Americans number around one percent of the vote, the South Asian vote could make a difference between winning or losing the presidency in those two states in November.

Today, 65 percent of the nearly three million Indian Americans in the United States identify themselves as Democrats. Eighty-five percent of this group also voted for President Barack Obama during the past election, according to the Pew Research Center. But in the past, South Asian Americans tended to vote Republican and several of high-ranking South Asian politicians in the South like former Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina are Republicans.

However, the South Asian community in the South may also be changing. The South Asians, who in a growing number travel to Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas and Detroit in search of jobs, to unite with family or for lower living costs, constitute a very diverse group of different nationalities, different social status and a growing number is also illegal immigrants.  “Their [South Asians] party identity is not cast in stone,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, an Indian American professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Riverside to India News on Jan.16, 2016. “There’s still potential for persuasion there.”

Both the 2012 and 2014 surveys also underscored a crucial finding. The 2014 survey noted: “Asian American voters are ‘up for grabs’ in terms of party identification. The largest group is ‘independent’ or ‘don’t know,’ while among partisans, Democrats have 2-to-1 advantage.”  For Democrats, the primary danger is that political candidates take the unique nature of Asian-American voters for granted.   While Asian-Americans have not figured into the leading Republican presidential contenders’ operations in a particularly visible way in 2016, the Republican Party itself has historically considered these communities important.