Does identity matter in presidential elections?

Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing racial groups in Georgia’s electorate, voting in numbers that exceed Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in the state. Nationally, Asian Americans appear to prefer Harris over Donald Trump, and among young progressives of Indian descent in urban centers, enthusiasm is palpable for her candidacy and the possibilities it represents for others who share her cultural background.

But that’s not the whole story. In conversations I struck up with dozens of Indian Americans while staking out Indian shopping malls, beauty salons, cultural centers and grocery stores in the affluent communities that surround Atlanta, I found a divide between enthusiastic descendants of immigrants and those who had grown up abroad — with the latter group being more or less indifferent to Harris’s heritage.

“Her Indianness doesn’t matter to me,” said Piyush Patel, 60, a physician born in India who will likely vote for Harris because of his disdain for Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.

Patel hopes her policies become more centrist and told me that many of his Indian American friends who are small-business owners are supporting Trump. (He said they believe the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program boosted businesses that didn’t need help — even though it was launched in 2020, when Trump was in office.)

The generational divide I found among these Georgia voters was not a matter of whether someone was a baby boomer or Gen Z, but whether they were first- or second-generation immigrants.

Shobha Umapathy, a 47-year-old scientist who grew up in India, said she dislikes both candidates but plans to vote for Harris because she dislikes Trump more.

“I don’t care at all about Harris’s identity. I just want my questions answered, and I’m kind of worried,” she told me, explaining that she’s uncertain about Harris’s policy positions.

Democrats often assume that immigrants will be turned off by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, but those with legal status aren’t necessarily empathetic to the plight of the undocumented. Rather, several first-generation immigrants I spoke to in Georgia ardently support Trump’s hard-line stance on illegal immigration.

Robbie Patel, 40, who came to the United States from India when he was 16, is one of them. “He wants to stop people coming through the borders, including people who look like me but are maybe not good for us,” he said of Trump. And of Harris? “I don’t look at people as Indian or any other color,” he said, and then — in response to my raised eyebrow — added: “I look at them as people.”

There was a slightly uncomfortable subtext lurking behind these exchanges. That Harris was raised in the United States and is of mixed heritage — her mother emigrated from southern India, her father from Jamaica — seemed to affect how immigrants who grew up in India and became naturalized U.S. citizens viewed her. Never mind that Harris has made dosas with Mindy Kaling, Hollywood’s desi darling, or that a campaign booster recently made a Bollywood-inspired music video about her, riffing on a song from the popular Indian film “RRR.”

“People born here are very different,” one retiree who emigrated from India decades ago insisted. As the child of Indian immigrants who settled in small-town Ohio, and with no trace of an accent from the motherland, I felt self-conscious in moments like this. I spoke with people outside mosques, Hindu temples and stores who looked as though they could be members of my own family. But a name and a face as Indian as mine didn’t feel like a guarantee that these aunties and uncles would think I was all that Indian, either.

A few Muslim Americans of South Asian origin — including the imam of a local mosque, who did not want to be named for fear of online harassment — told me they will not vote for either Harris or Trump because both support Israeli military actions in Gaza that are killing Palestinian civilians.

When I embarked on my reporting for this column, I suspected — wrongly — that support for Trump among Indian Americans in suburban Georgia would map onto Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, given the authoritarian impulses of both men and their notorious bromance. But when I asked people about this, they earnestly distinguished their sentiments about the two figures, regardless of whether they were voting red or blue.

What did matter was how recently the voters had become part of the American project of assimilation. Counterintuitive as it may seem, a generation removed from the experience of immigrating was more keen to mix ethnicity with politics.

I found a stark contrast between first-generation immigrants and urbanites who were born in the United States to parents from India. After Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, Natasha Rishi-Bohra, a 36-year-old health-care strategist in Atlanta, volunteered to become the co-leader of the Georgia chapter of a national women’s political advocacy group called Post March Salon.

She was especially moved when her 5-year-old daughter recognized Harris’s middle name, Devi, which means goddess in Sanskrit. (She also strongly favors Harris’s stances on reproductive rights and gun reform.) It’s almost as if second-generation immigrants feel freer to embrace their cultural identity as part of their political identity, while people who grew up in India see it as more important to make political choices that are separate from their own heritage. Perhaps the luxury and curse of being born American is being able to dream not just of joining the country as it is, but also of the country becoming more as you are.

And so, with just a month left until the election, Harris’s chances of winning Georgia are likely going to hinge more on getting second-generation progressives such as Rishi-Bohra to the polls than on underwhelmed first-generation immigrants in the suburbs and exurbs.

The lesson for electoral politics is not that representation doesn’t matter; it does, to mothers such as Rishi-Bohra, who want to inspire their brown-skinned daughters to break glass ceilings, and to many other people around the country who think our leaders should reflect the richness and beauty of our multicultural population.

Still, the diversity of the Indian American vote in Georgia offers a cautionary tale about counting on the politics of identity. People’s voting decisions are shaped by ideology, personal character, partisanship and matters of policy — and sometimes misconceptions and misogyny — just as often as they are shaped by sharing a cultural background with a candidate. To assume otherwise is to risk being wrong and to reduce voters to only one dimension of themselves.