Outside of a polling site in Plano on a windy fall afternoon, Bollywood music echoed from a speaker on the sidewalk. North Texans walked towards the entrance of the Davis Public Library on the first week of early voting as the bouncing chorus of “Desi Girl” filled the air.
The Bollywood chart-topper announced the presence of South Asian Voter Empowerment, a progressive organizing group hosting a voter engagement event. Next to the parking lot, SAAVE poll greeters welcomed voters and handed out sheets listing candidates down ballot.
A few feet away, a group of conservative poll greeters handed out their own voting guides to passing people. The two groups, dispersed along the walkway, reflect the partisan divide in Collin County — one of the nation’s bellwether counties, which is expected to represent larger statewide and national election outcomes.
The county’s Indian American population more than doubled from 2010 to 2019. The area reflects the growing number of South Asians — people with heritage from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka or the Maldives — in Dallas-Fort Worth that could make a decisive impact in the 2020 election.
Growing Political Power
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have increased their outreach to the South Asian community in Texas. They know South Asian voters could have a big influence on the election.
President Trump hosted a joint event with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Houston last year, attended by tens of thousands of Texans of South Asian descent. Trump’s campaign has continued to highlight his friendship with Modi in his outreach to the South Asian American community, including in his first ad directed towards Indian Americans.
Chanda Parbhoo, founder of SAAVE, said her organization has been doing everything from passing out literature in North Texas neighborhoods to answering questions about the voting process. She said it’s all been in an effort to get more South Asian Americans out to the polls.
Parbhoo said her organization has the background to answer some more culturally-specific questions like: What do I do with an international ballot? Can I translate for my family members who don’t speak English?
“That's really been helpful for the community, because they didn't have a place to ask some of those very specific questions,” she said. “So you know, that is the power of having an organization that can speak directly to the community and really understand that all of those options are available for people where English might not be their first language.”
South Asian Americans are one of the fastest growing demographic groups in the state, and Dallas-Fort Worth is home to one of the largest populations of South Asian Americans in the Texas. It’s an area where Indian Americans are the largest Asian American group, according to research from AAPI Data.
Mai Nguyen Do is a researcher who worked on AAPI Data’s mapping project. She said Texas cities are unique from other areas in states like California because of the higher proportion of South Asian voters compared to East Asians. There’s also been a growing number of South Asians across the North Texas suburbs in areas like Collin County, not just the metropolitan areas.
“You have a lot of South Asians. Specifically, you have a lot of Indian Americans,” she said. “I think that does kind of challenge what we think about Asian America.”
For South Asian Americans, their growing political power hasn’t just inspired them to get out and vote. They’ve also become more politically engaged by working as election judges, poll workers and greeters. There’s also at least five South Asian American candidates running for office this year across the state — like Sri Kulkarni, who’s aiming to turn the 22nd congressional district around Houston blue.
South Asians across different age groups were helping out at the polls, from 23-year-old Sunand Iyer, who volunteers with the Sharon Hirsch campaign, to “75-years-young” Subir Purkayastha who volunteers with SAAVE.
“A lot of us...old, young, middle aged, we are all making sure that the country we migrated to is preserved, democracy is preserved and people actually have a chance to express themselves,” Purkayastha said.
He’s been politically active for 30 years, but he said he decided to get involved in local politics when President Trump got elected in 2016. During the first week of early voting, he energetically walked up to voters to thank them for coming out and held up a campaign sign as he chatted with other poll greeters.
Umme Samiha “Sami,” 23, lives in Collin County. Her family’s actively involved in the Bangladesh Society of North Texas. She said she’s been pleasantly surprised to see more people in her community become politically active this year.
“It was the first time I saw like uncles and aunties coming out to like mosques and events and they were standing outside and making sure like older uncles and aunties, they were registered to vote like people that honestly probably never voted in their life,” she said.
Samiha said for many older Bangladeshi Americans, English isn’t their first language so having people from their community telling them to vote in their native tongue makes a big difference.
“I think that really became a contributing factor in this election for people to come out and vote,” she said.
The Issues
South Asian Americans have historically leaned strongly left. In 2016, 77% of Indian Americans voted for Hillary Clinton and 16% for Trump.
This election cycle, it appears Indian American voters will remain closely tied to the Democratic Party. A new survey found that 72% of registered Indian American voters plan to vote for Biden and 22% intend to vote for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Still, voters like Jayant Sheth offer a conservative voice within the Democratic majority. He’s the only Republican board member of the Indian American Coalition of Texas, a nonpartisan voter engagement group. Sheth, who lives in Austin, said Indian Americans support the Republican Party because they’ve seen the negative effect of socialism in India before the '90s when the country turned to capitalism.
“They know socialism is a bad thing and that’s why they would vote for Republican instead of Democrats, because Democrats are moving more and more towards socialism,” he said.
Health care and the economy are some of the top issues for Indian-American voters in the U.S., according to the survey. In North Texas, South Asian voters have said the COVID-19 pandemic, health care and the economy are top of mind heading into the election.
Prakash Pai, with the help of his wife Rekha, brought his 91-year-old father and 85-year-old mother to vote curbside at Davis Library. He said they’ve been voting for the last 5 to 10 years, but this year is the first time they aren’t able to walk inside the polling location themselves.
Despite their age and health challenges, Pai said his parents have told him it’s their civic duty to vote. They immigrated to the U.S. in 2000, when they saw the country thriving. They told their son that they want to see the country recover from the pandemic and return back to that same level of prosperity.
“They care about the betterment of this country,” he said. “That’s what they keep saying, that the country should prosper and should have a better leader so that everyone can survive very happily.”
Pai’s parents sat in the back of a minivan as he translated from English to Konkani, a dialect from the southern coastal region of India. An elections judge went back-and-forth from the building, facilitating the curbside voting process.
For Pai, the pandemic is top of mind. He said the situation’s gotten out of hand and he thinks it could’ve been handled differently.
“So many people are hungry because of that,” he said. “So many people’s lives are at stake. They can’t do their daily things just because of the pandemic and because it is not handled right.”
Pai’s wife Rekha said she wants to see new policies for more affordable health care so that people don’t have to worry about the cost of bringing their loved ones to the doctor. She also wants to see tighter gun restrictions.
“I feel like because of open carry and not checking the IDs, the guns get in bad peoples’ hands and that’s why we’re seeing all the mass shootings and everything,” she said. “So I want whoever is giving the guns, they need to make sure it’s landing in responsible citizen’s hands not in those hands who already have mental health issues and stuff like that.”
Sreedhar Bandi is a first-time voter at age 53. He said he finally received citizenship in 2019 after working in the U.S. for 20 years in the IT industry. He’s concerned about a number of issues, but especially the handling of the pandemic.
“One is the economy and health and regular law and order and all those kinds of things,” he said. When it comes to the pandemic, “a lot of other countries did very good, but we could not do much on this. I think this could’ve been better.”
Kamala Harris & Cultural Representation
Kamala Harris is the first Black woman and South Asian to be nominated on a major party ticket. Many South Asians took notice of Harris’ historic nomination.
In her speech accepting the vice presidential nomination, Harris talked about her mother’s South Indian heritage. She also went viral after referring to her ‘chithis’ or aunts in Tamil at the Democratic National Convention, which led to coverage from a number of South Asian media outlets.
Recent survey data shows that Harris has galvanized Indian Americans to vote. But while she’s excited Democratic voters about the party ticket, her nomination appears unlikely to significantly change the minds of voters not loyal to the party.
Some in the South Asian American community have had more mixed reactions to Harris’ nomination — focusing less on her mixed-race identity and more on her politics.
One of those voters is 23-year-old Umme Samiha. She said she focuses solely on a candidate’s policies and qualities — not their gender or race.
“I think it's nice to have that sort of cultural representation, but I don't think it really has a factor in how I'm going to vote,” Samiha said.
She paralleled it to her experience voting in the 2016 presidential election.
“I remember a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, like Hillary Clinton is a girl, you have to vote for her. She's a woman; we'll have a woman president,’” Samiha said. “But personally that was like, if I'm going to vote for her, it's going to be because of her, what she's going to do for the country. Not because of her gender, you know?”
On the other hand, 31-year-old Noma Nabi couldn’t hide her excitement about Harris’ nomination as she headed into the library for early voting.
She showed up to the polls in a red, green and gold sari — a traditional draped garment worn by South Asian women — to honor Harris’ nomination. Nabi said she’s also honoring her Bangladeshi heritage and wants others to show their ethnic pride.
“We’re trying to get some hashtags started and I would love for this to be a nationwide thing and especially it shows the great diversity of voters in this area,” she said.
She said the inspiration for the idea came from the women who wore pantsuits while voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nabi said she came up with the idea while commenting on a friend’s post, but it’s already an idea that’s spreading to areas like New Jersey where a South Asian women’s group planned to launch a social media campaign.
“I think it inspires them to be excited about voting and it also shows how far we’ve come as a country to elect such diverse candidates and candidates that appeal to our issues, many of the candidates that are listed here too,” she said, pointing to the campaign signs around her.
Nabi said she’s hopeful that if Harris were elected, she would implement policies related to Medicare for All, criminal justice reform and a wealth tax.
“It’s not just about feeling welcome but making sure there are policies that fit the wide variety of people of classes and races, and even social status as well throughout the U.S.,” She said. “I think she [Harris] really empowers that and I think she and Joe Biden are a step forward in bringing some of that back.”
With Election Day on the horizon, some predict the growing political power of South Asian Americans will be seen in key areas across the state — which is now a battleground. While election results are yet to be tallied, these voters will continue to head to the polls and rally others in their community to do the same.
Got a tip? Email Elizabeth Myong at Emyong@KERA.org. You can follow Elizabeth on Twitter @Elizabeth_Myong.
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