According to recent surveys, almost 2 million Indian Americans are eligible to vote of whom about 500,000 live in the ‘battleground states’. The widely dispersed Indian community could have the greatest impact in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.
The 2020 US presidential election proves that the Indian-American community of some 4 million (almost half of them eligible to vote) has come of age.
I have been in New York for six weeks, observing that magnificent quadrennial “circus” also known as the Presidential elections.
Congress and the Supreme Court may go in and out of session, but the President is the Energizer Bunny of American politics—always on and ever present. In the last 11 elections with incumbent candidates, incumbents prevailed eight times.
As one editorial said: The White House represents “the single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world.” In the age of 24-hour news, a President commands extraordinary and immediate visibility. Americans expect their Presidents to lead, comfort, enthuse and guide through trauma and crisis.
Having been posted in Washington DC from 1982-1985, I have been mesmerised by this amazing country, always protesting, always screaming, and always winning.
More than 26 million Americans had voted at the time of writing, according to the US Elections Project, more than six times the number of votes cast by the same point in 2016. This is an all-time record, suggesting much great voter interest in the 2020 election.
My morning walk group in Washington Square Park, just behind our apartment block, includes immigrants of different ethnicities and races. All came here chasing the American dream.
The history of immigration in America is fascinating. In the 1920s, the US passed quota laws that restricted immigrants based on nationality. By the 1930s, the number of immigrants arriving in the US had fallen dramatically. As European Jews increasingly sought refuge outside Nazi-occupied countries, the US was building up its walls.
Following the Immigration and Naturalization Act 1965 that ended immigration based on national origins and prioritized highly skilled workers, thousands of Indians flocked to America, not fleeing a repressive political system, but in search of economic betterment. They were not refugees, but financial migrants, a disproportionate segment of them being middle class professionals—doctors, educators, researchers and managers.
Their children, first generation Americans, have come of age but retain interest in the home countries of their parents and grandparents.
Unlike those from authoritarian systems who were seduced by the Statue of Liberty’s call to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, Indians have come to this magical land, the richest and most powerful country in the world, drawn by the promise of Ms Liberty: “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
And they hit gold. The Indian-Americans have been spectacularly successful, with a median annual income of US$100,000, more than any other expatriate community.
Except for a brief period in the 1980s when some members of the Sikh community alleged persecution in India and were able to find sanctuary in the United States, the overwhelming majority of Indian immigrants came to climb upward in the democratic whirl and dust, and as acknowledged by every American leader in the last half century, they, too, made today’s America.
At 4 million, Indian Americans constitute a mere 1.5% of the population but their impact on American politics can be disproportionate. Indian Americans are among the wealthiest and most educated of all immigrant groups in the US.
They are one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in the US and the second largest immigrant group after Mexicans. They are in professions that involve daily contact with people—doctors, teachers, cab drivers. And they are respected for their conformity to American laws and systems (with a couple of prominent exceptions).
Being a high-earning and educated immigrant group makes Indian Americans a very attractive pool of potential donors for political campaigns. In the current election season, they have emerged as significant donors.
According to recent surveys, almost 2 million Indian Americans are eligible to vote of whom about 500,000 live in the “battleground states”.
The American Presidential electoral system is idiosyncratic. Although Americans vote directly for their President, he is formally elected by an electoral college of 538 electors, representing the total members of Congress (Senate and House of Representatives). However, the system is heavily skewed in favour of the more populous states. The 50 states, depending on their population, have wide disparity in the number of electors they send for the decisive vote.
However, once a candidate wins the popular vote in a state even by a margin of 50.1 to 49.9, the winner takes all the electors! In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton led in the polls and won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, but she still lost.
Most states nearly always vote the same way and are considered Blue (Democrat) or Red (Republican), there are just a handful of states where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground or swing states and have a frightening importance.
With razor-thin margins in these regions, the widely dispersed Indian community could have the greatest impact in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.
And so, both candidates are spending millions on advertisements that target the Indian community, more than in any previous election.
President Donald Trump highlights his closeness to India and its Prime Minister, Joe Biden flaunts his Indian-Jamaican-American running mate Kamala Harris (she of the perpetual sneer).
The Chinese virus (and China itself) is a big issue in the elections. It has cost people their homes, their health, their jobs, their relationships, their lives.
Following 9/11, Islamic terrorism was Public Enemy No. 1 in America. Many Muslim visitors (including a prominent Indian actor) were intensively interrogated. After the annihilation of the previous version of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and the Islamic State, that dubious honour now belongs to China.
The public anger is palpable, aggravated by the statement by the Word Health Organization in early October that 10% of world’s population has been infected (780 mn) and counting. Recent studies have been prominently reported, suggesting that the virus attacks every human organ, and causes cardiovascular, neurological, renal, biliary, hepatologic complications even after recovery, with former patients developing encephalopathy (altered brain function) ranging from short-term memory loss and difficulty with multitasking to confusion, stupor and coma.
With well over 200,000 dead and several million affected, America is angry with China, seeing the pandemic as an attack on the American homeland.
New York has just set up a special unit to deal with hate crimes against Chinese (or Chinese looking people), although political correctness demands that it be called the “Asian Hate Crime Task Force”. It is the first ever task force to exclusively investigate crimes against a single race. Three of its prominent officers, whose picture was published by the Wall Street Journal, are Stewart Loo, Martin Chen, and Jacky Wong.
The commanding officer of the task force said the origins of the virus in China have led some people to blame the Chinese, while Stewart Loo is quoted as acknowledging that “with Covid-19 and the whole anti-Asian sentiment, it’s a very uncomfortable feeling being out in the public”. Probably this is why I see fewer Chinese-looking law enforcement officers on patrol that I did on earlier visits to New York.
The anti-China sentiment (Sinophobia) is widespread. US agencies are investigating Chinese researchers who joined American universities by concealing their active-duty status as members of the People’s Liberation Army.
And the greatest self-goal scorer of all time, the Chinese Chairman of Everything, Xi Jinping, has threatened to retaliate by arresting US nationals living in China!
Joe Biden is focusing on Donald Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll, just 1/3 of all Americans approve of how the President has handled the crisis, while ¾ of Republicans do.
Donald Trump squarely blames China for lying to and deceiving America and the world, and claims to have stood up to Chinese belligerence and aggression.
His core constituency, white, non-college educated Americans, believes him. They want their country back from the “Latino immigrants and the Muslims and the Chinese”, as a police officer put it to me as gently as he could. The call to make America great again resonates with them.
An interesting sidelight of this election is the battle of the juniors! Speaking a day ago to rich Indian Americans in Long Island, New York, not far from where I live, Donald Trump Jr, referred to his recent book, Liberal Privilege, that lists allegations of corruption against Hunter Biden (Joe Biden Jr). His punchline: “(do) you think the Chinese gave Hunter Biden USD 1.5bn…because he was a great businessman or because they knew the Bidens could be bought…(Biden) is bad for India.”
Trump Jr pressed all the right buttons. Describing the Indian community as family oriented, hard-working and education oriented, Trump Jr recalled the President’s rally with the Indian Prime Minister in Ahmedabad earlier this year as “the biggest Trump rally probably ever”. The audience stood up to applaud.
One Indian professor (who emigrated to America 40 years ago) in my morning group told me: “We have never felt so wanted”!
Deepak Vohra is former Indian Ambassador to Armenia, Georgia, Sudan, South Sudan, Poland and Lithuania.