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Seats with largest Indian-American populations in US mostly went blue
HT’s analysis ranks all 435 House districts by their Asian-Indian population. The top 100 districts are home to more than half of the country’s Indian-American population
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Washington: The Democratic Party won 85 of the 100 congressional districts with the largest Indian-American populations in Tuesday’s midterm elections, up from the 79 it held going into the vote, an HT analysis of election data found. The party held all but one of its own seats in these districts and took seven from Republicans, whose tally fell to 15 from 21.
HT’s analysis ranks all 435 House districts by their Asian-Indian population, using the Census Bureau’s 2020–24 American Community Survey. The top 100 districts are home to more than half of the country’s Indian-American population. They stretch from Silicon Valley, where California’s 17th district alone has about 146,000, to New Jersey and the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle. About 2.6 million Indian-Americans are eligible to vote, according to the Carnegie Endowment’s Indian American Attitudes Survey released in 2024.
Indian-Americans do not form a majority in any of these districts. They account for roughly a fifth of the population of California’s 17th, which has the largest Indian population of any congressional district. Their votes can still matter in tight races.
Deep Dive
The ranking uses the district boundaries in place for the 2024 elections. About nine states, including California and Texas, redrew their maps for this election, so population figures for some seats in those states are approximate. Most of the top 100 seats kept their old lines, but in a handful the new maps helped decide the result.
Democratic dominance was strongest in California, where the party won 19 of the 20 top-100 seats. These included the 17th district, the most heavily Indian American seat in the country, which Congressman Ro Khanna won for a sixth consecutive term. Democrat Ami Bera won the 3rd district, a seat previously held by a Republican, after California redrew its map. Democrats also won every top-100 seat in New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Democratic wave also cost two Republican members of the House India caucus their seats: Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania and Tom Kean Jr in New Jersey.
Republicans held their own in Texas despite their bad night nationally, winning nine of the 13 top-100 seats there. Their winners included Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne, whose district is home to nearly 23,000 Indian residents. Van Duyne has been noted for her proximity to conservative media figures such as Sara Gonzales, who have played up local fears of H-1B visa fraud allegedly involving members of the Indian community.
Republican Trever Nehls won Texas’s 22nd district, which has about 45,000 Indian residents. The district includes Sugar Land, where Texas Republican Senate candidate Alexander Duncan sparked outrage in 2025 by calling a 90-foot Hanuman statue at a local Hindu temple a “false statue of a false Hindu God”. Texas also delivered one of the Republicans’ few pickups. After the party redrew the state’s 32nd district, home to about 16,000 Indian residents on the old boundaries, Republican Jace Yarbrough won the seat, previously held by Democrat Julie Johnson.
The results largely track the community’s political leanings. A Carnegie Endowment–YouGov survey conducted in October found that 62% of Indian-American citizens planned to back Democratic House candidates, against 19% for Republicans. In Senate races, the split was 63% to 21%. In 2024, by comparison, Carnegie found 31% of Indian American registered voters planning to vote for Trump.
Carnegie’s previous survey, conducted between November 2025 and January 2026, shows the mood. Only 29% of Indian-American adults approved of Trump’s job performance, while 71% disapproved. Inflation and prices topped their concerns, followed by jobs and the economy, healthcare and immigration. Nearly half said they often came across racist posts targeting Indians online, and almost a third said they had pulled back from political engagement on social media as a result.
