The US election has finally come to an end with Republican nominee Donald Trump clinching a decisive victory. Trump captured a clear majority of votes in the Electoral College and, for the first time, also won the popular vote. Vice President Kamala Harris, a surprise entrant in the race after President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw, lost a closely contested election, marking the second time in three elections that a female Democratic presidential nominee failed to topple Trump.
Last week on Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy coproduced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sadanand Dhume of the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution joined host Milan Vaishnav to discuss the implications of the election for Indian Americans, for India, and for US-India relations.
One of the most interesting trends this, according to Dhume, was “racial depolarization” — or the idea that ethnic or racial groups in America are no longer polarized in the direction of either the Democrats or the Republicans. Instead, exit poll data suggest that minorities are voting for Republicans in much more significant numbers than in recent years.
Citing recent survey data from the Indian American Attitudes Survey, Dhume remarked that of respondents who expressed enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, only 7% said it was for because of her identity. “So, it either means that Indian Americans have become very enlightened and are no longer paying a lot of attention to identity, or they felt that Kamala Harris maybe really did not play up her Indian identity as much as they would have liked or they did not feel the sense of identification they might have felt with another candidate,” he said. “I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s a really interesting question.”
{{/usCountry}}Citing recent survey data from the Indian American Attitudes Survey, Dhume remarked that of respondents who expressed enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, only 7% said it was for because of her identity. “So, it either means that Indian Americans have become very enlightened and are no longer paying a lot of attention to identity, or they felt that Kamala Harris maybe really did not play up her Indian identity as much as they would have liked or they did not feel the sense of identification they might have felt with another candidate,” he said. “I don’t have the answer, but I think it’s a really interesting question.”
{{/usCountry}}When it comes to policy, Dhume argued that Trump 2.0 will be about completing the unfinished business of the first term. “If you look at his first picks, for example, in terms of things like immigration — Stephen Miller (as deputy chief of staff for policy), Tom Homan (as “border czar”), Kristi Noem (as homeland security secretary) — it is clear that staunching the flow across the southern border is going to be his number one priority,” said Dhume. “I think we’re going to see something that is similar in a policy direction but is stylistically different.”
When it comes to the US-India relationship, Madan posited that India is in a much better position than other countries. For starters, the Indian side has significant experience with Trump. They know they will have to be more flexible and more adaptable. Second, because India is not an ally, it does not have to deal with Trump’s strong feelings toward “freeloading allies”. According to Madan, India will frame its position as a country looking to “burden-share” with the United States. “They will frame asks about technology sharing or defense-industrial collaboration as ‘help us help you’,” she remarked. Finally, though there might be problematic points of friction with Trump — trade and immigration, for instance — India is not a “problem country” from Trump’s point of view, explained Madan.