A new opinion poll has projected that 72% of American Indian respondents will vote for Democrat Joe Biden in the current 2020 presidential election and found that the support of Republican President Donald Trump in the community, at 22%, does not it had grown as significantly as an earlier separate survey suggested.
The 2020 American Indian Attitudes Survey (IAAS) was conducted among 936 Indian American citizens between September 1 and 20, by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins University and Princeton in association with YouGov, a research and analysis firm .
It showed that Indian-Americans ranked the ties between India and the United States as the 11th of the 12 factors that influence their voting decision, only ahead of sexism. This would challenge a narrative sent by Trump supporters and other Republicans that Indian Americans were gravitating toward the president due to his silence on the change in the state of Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act, which has been criticized by Biden.
The poll found that 48% of Indian-Americans approved of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s job performance, while 32% disapproved and 20% had no opinion. Republicans in the community had a more favorable opinion of the prime minister, and most Indians said that Democrats handle US-India relations better than Republicans, 39% to 18% (22% said they found no difference ).
Another significant finding is that the selection of Senator of Indian descent Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate will not change voting preferences, but her selection had mobilized Native Americans to vote.
“The big takeaway from these numbers is that there is little evidence in the poll of the widespread defection of Democratic voters toward Trump,” the report released Wednesday said. “There is little evidence of a significant evolution in partisan loyalties since 2016. The vast majority (91%) of Indian Americans who voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 plan to support Biden in 2020.”
The poll found that 72% of registered Native American voters planned to vote for Biden, compared with 22% for Trump. Biden’s support was seen to have fallen in an earlier poll, the 2020 Asian American Voter Poll (AAVS), to 65% from 77% who said they had voted for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, in 2016. .
Trump’s support in the AAVS, at the same time, had grown from 16% of American Indians who said they had voted for him in 2016 to 28% who said they would vote for him in 2020, prompting talk of a change. significant in the community to the president, sounding the alarm bells in the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party, which had long enjoyed strong support from Americans of Indian descent.
Milan Vaishnav, one of the IAAS report authors who had also moderated the release of the AAVS findings in September, said the changes in support for Biden and Trump could be the result of the difference in timing of the two polls: the previous survey was conducted between July and September the new in September.
“It is possible that people’s opinions changed as the campaign progressed. A lot happened this summer, “he added. But he also went on to point out the difference in the sample size of the two polls – the previous poll was conducted among 260 registered American Indian voters, compared to nearly 1,000 in the new poll, which had an impact on the margin of error. : +/- 6% to 3.2% IAAS.
The IAAS found Indian-Americans “solidly” with the Democratic Party, as did the AAVS, reflecting an unchanging picture. Their findings followed closely: 56% of those surveyed in the new poll self-identified as Democrats, 15% as Republicans, and 22% as independents; the corresponding figures from the previous survey were 54%, 16% and 24%.
Indian Americans, a small but thriving community of 4.16 million people (2.62 million American citizens) are receiving unprecedented attention in the American elections this time around.
Its 1.9 million (1.8 million, according to AAVS) registered voters could play a key role in deciding the outcome in battlefield states that tend to be won or lost by thin margins.
Both campaigns have courted the community. Biden implemented an expansive agenda that promises solutions to immigration problems, such as green card waiting lines and social problems like hate crimes; and better ties between India and the United States under the Biden presidency.
The Trump campaign and Republicans have sought to leverage the president’s relationship with the prime minister and the two public events they jointly addressed in Houston and Ahmedabad to seek support from the American Indian community and the president’s silence on Kashmir and the CAA.
Neeraj Antani, a Republican member of the Ohio state legislature, had said, referring to the AAVS report, that Trump’s support among Indian Americans was growing because of the president’s outreach to the community, his visit to India in February and for “being with the Prime Minister and neutrality on issues such as CA (Citizenship Law) and the repeal of (Article) 370, in opposition to Vice President Biden’s opposition to those issues.”
IAAS found that Americans of Indian origin did not rank US-India relations as an important enough factor to influence their voting decision; They placed it behind the economy, healthcare, racism, taxes, corruption, immigration, the environment, income inequality, terrorism, and education, and just ahead of sexism. India-US relations were cited among the top three topics by just 4% of respondents. The previous poll had found a similar lack of enthusiasm for bilateral relations as an electoral factor.
.
