A handful of wealthy Indian American donors are backing Republicans three to one. The rest of Indian American voters are leaning the other way—and Indian American women hold more influence over that majority than any donor.
This piece is part of an ongoing series, “Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care.” The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility. Have a story to share or want to be interviewed? Reach the series author Jaime Patel at redefiningpower@msmagazine.com.
Big-money Indian American donors are giving Republicans about $3 for every dollar they give Democrats. Indian American voters are leaning roughly three to one the other way. The first number made headlines last week, and the second will shape what the country believes about us after Nov. 3.
Seven in 10 Indian Americans disapprove of the job President Donald Trump is doing, according to the Carnegie Endowment’s 2026 Indian American Attitudes Survey—a sharper rebuke than he gets from the American public as a whole.
The donor figure comes from an IANS review of federal campaign finance records for 11 donors, which found $10.8 million going to Republican committees and groups this cycle, and $3.3 million to Democrats. Three contributions to MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC, made up $7.1 million of that Republican total, and some of the donors’ money has reached the challengers of two Indian American Democrats: Amish Shah in Arizona and Pia Dandiya in Florida.
Yes, you read that right: Indian American money is helping fund campaigns against Indian American candidates.
That ratio describes a few checkbooks, and it tells us very little about the rest of the community. In this year’s Asian American Voter Survey, Indian American voters favored Democratic candidates for Senate 66 percent to 22 percent. The Indian American sample was small, but Carnegie’s research points the same way. The pattern is clear, and Indian American women are driving it.
In Carnegie’s 2024 survey, 67 percent of Indian American women planned to vote for Kamala Harris, compared with 53 percent of men. By early 2026, just 16 percent of Indian American women ages 18 to 39 said they would back Trump in a rerun of that race.
Where the Votes Are Moving
The drift is happening closer to home. Carnegie found Indian Americans over 50 moving away from Democrats since 2024, and Harris’ support fell among older men and women alike. Those are our parents and the aunties and uncles who helped raise us.
Opal Vadhan knows this conversation well. She spent a decade working for the only two women nominated for president by a major party, and her own family is split.
Do your taxes even matter if they don’t want you in this country?
Opal Vadhan
“I have people in my own family too, my extended family, like aunts and uncles, who vote for Trump … and they think so much of it as a financial decision,” she told me.
In a September issue of her newsletter, The Opal Office, she wrote that a relative had credited the administration with a tax break on a new property. She asked, “Do your taxes even matter if they don’t want you in this country?”
The question stings because of where her family started. Her mother was a doctor in India and pregnant with Opal when she boarded a plane to New York, planning to give birth in America and raise her daughter in India.
“She always said that as soon as she got off the plane at JFK, she knew she had to stay in this country to give me better opportunities,” Vadhan told me.
Her mother never practiced medicine here. Her father worked at a pizzeria and at Toys R Us until the family saved enough to open Dimple, an Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, where Vadhan worked her first job as the cashier.
Decades later, she walked through the White House gates as a personal aide and later senior advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, after years as executive assistant and trip director to Secretary Hillary Clinton.
I have these conversations too. Years ago, when the country was arguing about building a wall, an uncle told me he supported the border crackdown. I asked him directly how he could close the door behind him when the laws of his era let him come here and build an extraordinary life. He said it came down to timing. He had arrived when America needed people like him, and now, in his view, the country needed more control over who got in. We went back and forth, and I shared research that contradicted what he believed.
I left disappointed and still curious about how a man who walked through an open door had decided it should close.
The daughter who learned to hold her tongue at the dinner table is now the person her father is most likely to hear.
Jaime Patel
Why the Messenger Matters
The 2026 AAPI Voter Survey also shows where persuasion happens.
- AAPI voters named family and friends as their most trusted messengers, narrowly ahead of academic experts.
- Forty percent of Indian American voters said Democrats had not contacted them at all over the past year.
- Three-quarters had already talked politics with family or friends, and a quarter had done it in group chats like WhatsApp.
Campaign ads and donor money cannot reach our parents the way we can.
Vadhan is blunt about the gap. “I do think our community is not as engaged as other communities,” she said.
She tells young South Asians that staying out has a cost. “If you are not doing politics, politics is just happening to you.”
That gives Indian American women real power before Nov. 3. As I told Vadhan, many of us were raised on composure and learned to speak up in our twenties, if at all. I have written about the cost of that silence before: 76 percent of Indian American adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, yet few of us say so publicly.
The daughter who learned to hold her tongue at the dinner table is now the person her father is most likely to hear.
What Is on the Ballot for Us
Those talks work best when they are specific, and the stakes for women are concrete.
This month, the administration finalized a rule that stops H-4 visa holders, the spouses of H-1B workers, from working while a permit renewal is pending, so a renewal stuck in a government backlog can force them off the job.
DHS has also added a proposal to its regulatory agenda that would end H-4 work permits altogether. Federal data show the vast majority of those permits have gone to Indian women, so the second paycheck in many of our families is on the line.
For the relative who votes on taxes, Carnegie found 68 percent of Indian Americans disapprove of the president’s domestic economic policy, and two-thirds oppose the administration’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, which courts have temporarily blocked. Indian American households earning more than $100,000 have moved toward identifying as Democrats since 2024. “Groceries are too expensive. Gas is too expensive,” Vadhan said. “People can’t afford to live.”
For the relative worried about safety, this fall has supplied the evidence. On Sept. 9, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of a Sikh man telling “Mr. Singh” to get off American roads, then deleted it after public backlash.
Days later, a nominee for Texas railroad commissioner shared a photo of South Asian students cheering at a University of Texas football game and called it evidence of a “problem.”
This month, police in Illinois arrested a 19-year-old who prosecutors say planned a mass shooting at a Hindu temple in Aurora.
The fear predates this fall: One in four Indian Americans told Carnegie they had been called a slur since the start of 2025, and nearly one in five had avoided wearing Indian clothes in public.
What to Do Before Nov. 3
Vadhan is already doing it. In the days before the election, she has been posting in her family’s group chat. “Reminder, midterms are happening, eight days away. Make sure you’re voting,” she said she told them.
Call the relative you have been avoiding, and ask what worries them before you say what you think. Bring the H-4 numbers to the uncle who tracks the family finances, and the temple plot to the auntie who worries about safety. Then vote early and drive them to the polls.
“Your vote is your voice, and your voice is your power,” Vadhan said.
Her mother made her choice at JFK. Ours comes on (or before) Nov. 3, and for many of us the vote that matters most may be the one we help get out at home.
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Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
