After feeling like they were on the precipice of history, many South Asian Americans say they’re heartbroken following Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss in the 2024 presidential race, but are looking back on her ascent in politics with pride for their community.
Harris would have been the first Black woman and South Asian person to hold the nation’s highest office, and with her defeat by President-elect Donald Trump called Wednesday morning, they’re reflecting on the spotlight her unprecedented candidacy put on their community.
“I was speechless,” said Anjali Bhatt, 27, who saw the results online when she woke up Wednesday morning. “The fact that there could have been a South Asian woman in the White House… we’re not there yet, but it would have been very nice. For the South Asian community, there’s that added level of grief.”
Bhatt, a Washington, DC, resident, said Trump is the only Republican presidential candidate she’s ever seen on the ballot. She said she thought Harris might have offered a reprieve — and a sign that America is moving forward.
In Mississippi, Sumati Thomas, 42, said she was hit with similar feelings when she saw the results Wednesday morning. As a Black and Indian woman, she felt particularly connected to Harris’ multiracial identity. Despite the loss, she said Harris’ Democratic nomination earlier this year and ascent to the vice presidency in 2020 put her community on the map.
“Everyone that I’ve talked to is just kind of solemn today,” she said on Wednesday. “But I really hope that, in the history books, this loss doesn’t diminish in any way the achievements that Kamala Harris has had. Just seeing her and having someone that looks like me, being able to look up to that is great.”
Harris’ campaign and the attention paid to her race shone a spotlight on a community of South Asian Americans that makes up less than 2% of the US population.
She reinvigorated a bloc whose excitement was fading under President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race. Sixty-eight percent of Indian Americans lean democraticand in the days after Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, a massive mobilization effort began.
Groups like South Asians for Harris and movements like “Lotus for POTUS” quickly jumped up; many were spearheaded by women who felt an immediate kinship.
“There’s a great deal of disappointment in that sense,” said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the nonprofit South Asian Network. “For Kamala Harris, I think there was a sense of belonging and identity, and that definitely is lost. We don’t have anyone (South Asian) on the horizon who could rise to that level. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Harris’ South Asian touchstones
Though Harris didn’t often touch on her race or gender during her presidential campaign, she did regularly mention her mother, the late scientist and Indian immigrant Shyamala Gopalan.
“My mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, traveling from India to California with an unshakable dream,” Harris said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Gopalan was born and raised in Chennai, a South Indian city, before she moved to the US to attend the University of California, Berkeley. There, she became involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s before she eventually became a leading breast cancer researcher.
She steeped her daughters in all things South Asian, said Harris, who grew up eating South Indian food, like potato curry and masala dosa, and hearing Gopalan speak Tamil.
Harris saw her mother confront racism in the US as a new immigrant.
“My mother was a brilliant 5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” Harris said in her convention speech. “As the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But my mother never lost her cool.”
In her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris recounts her experiences visiting India and the influence her mom’s father, PV Gopalan, had on her early political consciousness. He was involved in the Indian independence movement, she wrote, and often spoke to her about the importance of fighting for civil rights.
Her maternal grandmother, who never finished high school, she wrote, was a community organizer, taking in abused women and helping them rehabilitate their families.
Thomas said Harris’ candidacy and persona awakened people in her circles and got them excited to go to the polls.
“The vibes were not as joyful earlier in the year, and the fact that she was able to re-energize the Democrats in the way that she did is also such a great achievement,” she said.
Where voters feel she fell short
While Thomas feels Harris ran a near-perfect campaign, Bhatt said there are areas where the Democratic agenda missed the mark. Like many young and progressive Asian Americans, she said Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip has been an important issue for her.
“I was really disappointed in how they handled that,” she said. “I would have loved if she had met with the uncommitted movement, with Palestinian leaders in Southeast Michigan, if they’d had a Palestinian speaker at the DNC.”
South Asian Muslims in the US make up the largest percentage of all Muslim Americans, a group that has long expressed solidarity with Palestinians and disappointment with Biden’s handling of the war.
Harris didn’t take the opportunity to distance herself from Biden enough on that issue or introduce different ideas, Syed said.
“These were great openings that she had to distance herself by establishing her own identity as a leader and taking positions, either fully or partly in disagreement with the Biden administration,” he said. “She pissed off young educated, non-Muslim South Asians from India and certainly quite a lot all of Pakistan and Bangladesh.”
Syed said a stronger focus on the economy would also have drawn in more Indian American voters, who are on average the highest earners in the US, with a median household income of $145,000.
“Look at Trump’s agenda: He’s on inflation and immigration primarily,” he said. “And I think she didn’t address those things.”
The next four years
As Harris wanes from the community’s focus, Syed said South Asians are bracing for the next four years. Many are worried about what life might look like back under Trump, he said.
“Working-class folks, they’re largely scared and afraid because of the historical experience of 2016 to 2020 under Trump’s administration,” he said.
But South Asian American influence in politics is far from over, he said, and with Trump headed back to the White House, questions remain about the role future second lady Usha Vance and former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will play in the administration.
“It’s definitely going to raise the profile of the Indian American community,” Syed said.
In the meantime, South Asian voters say they have no choice but to keep pushing. They have been through this before when Trump was elected in 2016, they said, and they’re not entirely losing hope about the work that can be done at the local and state level.
“The only thing you can do is hug your kids and try to reassure them that things will be OK,” Thomas said. “We have lost the presidency, but there’s still city, state, county elections coming up, and we can’t lose focus.”