Why Do Indian-Americans Flock To The Democratic Party?

Indian-Americans vote Democratic at rates that would seem puzzling on the surface. Here is a community that is, by most measures, economically successful — among the highest-earning ethnic groups in the United States, with high rates of small business ownership and a cultural emphasis on educational achievement and family stability. The conventional wisdom would predict such voters drifting toward the Republican Party of lower taxes and individual achievement.

The 2012 numbers tell the real story. A September 2012 national survey of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders found Indian-Americans the strongest Obama supporters in the AAPI group, backing him 68 percent to 5 percent over Mitt Romney. In the actual voting, the AALDEF multilingual exit poll found 84 percent of Indian-American voters chose Obama — up from 2008, when the community backed him by similar landslides.

So what explains the alignment?

Immigration policy is the single most powerful factor, and the same 2012 survey shows it plainly: 60 percent of Indian-Americans preferred the Democratic Party's position on immigration. The overwhelming majority of Indian-Americans are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants, and much of the community's prosperity arrived through employment-based visas — exactly the channels that Republican immigration restrictionism puts at risk. For many Indian-Americans, a threat to the H-1B system is not an abstraction; it is a threat to how their own family got here.

Beyond immigration, researchers point to the community's diversity. Indian-Americans are not monolithic — Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and atheists; every state, every income bracket, views across the political spectrum. What unifies them politically is less ideology than a shared reading of which party's cultural tone feels more welcoming. The Republican Party's Tea Party-era rhetoric on immigrants and minorities, and the post-9/11 suspicion that still attached to brown-skinned Americans regardless of religion, registered as unwelcoming across the community.

As the community grows in size and political influence, both parties are beginning to pay closer attention to its concerns. But in 2012, at least, the verdict was not close.