There are two Indian American politicians presently standing for elections in two very different locations.
Pramila Jayapal is contesting from the state of Washington’s 7th Congressional district, which is part of the Pacific Northwestern city of Seattle. And Raja Krishnamoorthi is standing from Illinois’s 8th Congressional district, which is a suburban part of the Midwestern Chicago metropolitan region.
There are ways in which the two candidates are similar. Both were born in India, are members of the Democratic party, and holders of graduate degrees. Both are upper caste by birth – Jayapal is a Nair Malayali1 while Krishnamoorthi is Tamil Brahmin2, and both swore on the Bhagavad Gita during their swearing-in ceremonies in the US Congress. Both have been part of the political ecology of their respective states for much of two decades; Jayapal has been an activist and organiser in the state of Washington, while Krishnamoorthi has been active in Illinois politics since Barack Obama’s senatorial run.
Their constituencies have some things in common too. Both are part of the solid liberal-leaning metropolitan areas, both are relatively affluent compared to the rest of their respective states, and both have proportionately higher Asian American populations than the United States average.
But there are also some important differences between the two.
Jayapal’s constituency is a slam-dunk liberal seat. It is the seventh most Democrat-leaning seat in the US, where Republicans have scored below 20 percent of the vote in the last three elections. Krishnamoorthi’s seat is a suburb outside the traditional liberal core of central Chicago city, but is still likely to go Democrat despite a likely tighter race. Indian Americans do not form a numerically important vote bank in Seattle, whereas they are much more sizable and politically relevant in the Chicago suburbs.
Krishnamoorthi straddles the more moderate space within the Democrat party, whereas Jayapal is considered a solid progressive, having chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Last, Krishnamoorthi is considered a strong supporter of causes specific to Hindus, while Jayapal is one of the legislators who supported Seattle’s anti-caste legislation, and targeted for her activism on caste as well as on Kashmir issues by groups associated with pro-Hindu positions.
Now, let us look at a few basic statistics3 about the Congressional seats in which Indian Americans are standing for elections.
We can see here that there are very significant differences between the constituencies on a few key issues.
Jayapal’s constituency in Seattle is the second wealthiest in the state of Washington, and among the top five percent in household income in the entire country. In comparison, Krishnamoorthi’s constituency has a higher poverty rate, but also a lower rate of income inequality.
While Jayapal’s constituency has an extremely high degree of population with graduate degrees at almost three times of the US average, Krishnamoorthi’s constituency has a graduate degree holding rate that runs slightly above the US average. Yet over a third of his constituents have a high school education or lower.
The last major Republican presidential candidate to carry Krishnamoorthi’s constituency was George W Bush. No Republican Congressional candidate has won this seat since 2012. The record for Jayapal’s seat is even worse for Republicans. The last time a Republican president carried it was 44 years ago; the last Republican Congressman from the state won there in 1979. Even Walter Mondale, who had the worst Presidential defeat in the last 100 years, won more votes than the massively popular Republican Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Pramila Jayapal
Pramila Jayapal is an influential representative as well as the first (and only) Indian American woman to win a Congressional seat in the United States. She has won successive elections in the Seattle city area during both primary and general elections with a significant vote share.
Jayapal has never lost a major election – winning a state senate seat in 2014 and then going on to win every single primary and general election since. She won her first federal Congressional election by about 45,000 votes in 2016 at a sizable 12 percent margin, which in fact would be the smallest vote share by which she has won a Congressional seat. Her popularity is underlined by the fact that she has, since 2016, won every Congressional primary by a whopping tally of 80 percent of the vote or more, then winning each general election with almost 250,000 or more votes.
As the first Indian American woman to serve in the US House of Representatives, Jayapal’s popularity with her voters is underlined by the fact that about a fourth of all her campaign funding comes from small donors, which places her in the top quintile among representatives on this metric. Two of her top funders consistently are staff at the University of Washington and employees at Microsoft corp. She gets a good chunk of campaign funding from Amazon employees even though she takes several positions that are against Big Tech.
Jayapal moved to the US for her undergraduate degree at Georgetown University. She is the younger sister of Susheela Jayapal, a politician and activist from the neighbouring Pacific Northwestern state of Oregon. After completing her degree, she worked in finance for a couple of years and then got an MBA. But, for the most part, she’s been outside of the corporate world, working in a range of activist positions. She worked at PATH, the global health NGO, on a range of logistical and operational issues around vaccine cold chain and service delivery. It shaped her views on access to healthcare, which remained a consistent theme through her political career.
Besides healthcare, she tends to stand behind causes around equity and greater representation of people from marginalised communities. For instance, Jayapal has openly spoken about an abortion she had prior to her formal political career. She has been a vocal supporter of gender rights, openly discussing her own relationship to the issue as a parent of a trans person.
As a representative from one of the most progressive leaning cities, she has taken positions on a number of causes through sponsored bills in Congress that have not found widespread support among her colleagues in the House. These include providing bankruptcy relief to student borrowers and free meals to children at schools. She has also been on the progressive end of the spectrum on immigration – she discusses her identity as an immigrant and what that has meant living in the United States. She has spoken publicly about fears about wearing Indian clothing or being a brown woman in the US during periods of anger aimed at immigrants, and about her ambivalence about getting her citizenship, which took her 17 years from the time she first landed in the States.
Jayapal has also been known to take contrarian positions from the mainstream Democrat party. She has been critical of Biden on a range of issues, including his dealing with the war in Gaza. She has been openly critical of Israel and also accused AIPAC, the powerful Israel lobby, of derailing her sister’s bid for a Congressional seat in Oregon. She was one of the co-signatories of a letter from lawmakers to Biden condemning India’s human rights record on the eve of Narendra Modi’s 2023 visit to the US, and urged India to end its blocking of internet services in Kashmir.
While a lot of the Indian American candidates benefit from the high share of suburban Asian Americans in their voter base, these voters tend to be more centre-left. Jayapal’s main draw is her progressive politics which in the city of Seattle – with its strong liberal and young voter base – has consistently elected representatives on the left end of US political spectrum. It’s worth noting that Seattle famously elected the first politician from the Socialist Alternative who was also an Indian American, Kshama Sawant.
Candidate prediction: Win
Raja Krishnamoorthi
Raja Krishnamoorthi, born in Delhi, is the son of immigrants who moved to the United States following the 1965 opening up of borders to high-skilled professionals. His father was a college professor and Krishnamoorthi himself was educated at some of the top universities in the US. He got his undergraduate degree at Princeton and a law degree at Harvard, also the alma mater of Barack Obama.
It was through his association with Obama’s first senatorial campaign in Illinois in 2004 that Krishnamoorthi started his political career. He later stood for two elections that he lost – for comptroller of Illinois in 2010 and for the House of Representatives in 2012 against another Asian American candidate, Tammy Duckworth. The constituency, Illinois-8, had potential as a Republican seat at the time but Duckworth’s two successful campaigns, before she moved on to a senate position alongside a steady growth in the Asian American population, made it a stronger Democrat seat.
Unlike Jayapal, Krishnamoorthi’s appeal is more aligned with centrist Democratic politics. His constituency includes Chicago’s western suburbs. And while the city of Chicago is staunchly on the progressive end of the Democrat party, the suburbs have a fair share of conservatives. This urban-suburban distinction in political positions is consistent through most of the United States.
Krishnamoorthi is rarely a sponsor of some of the more progressive bills in the US Congress. Nonetheless he has been referred to as a progressive, including as “Radical Raja” by his 2024 Republican opponent4, entrepreneur Mark Rice. This is more of a reflection of polarisation in the United States and the dog-whistling on migration from his opponent4 than a reflection of any of his core values. In 2022, he was challenged in the primary by a progressive Indian American Democrat, Junaid Ahmed, who in fact worked on Krishnamoorthi’s team on the first Congressional campaign he won. While Krishnamoorthi beat Ahmed handily, the process of back and forth between the two men from the same party revealed schisms among Democrats in the district.
Unlike Jayapal, Krishnamoorthi has more emphatically embraced the Hindu vote bank. He’s shown up at events run by Hindutva-leaning groups and benefitted from campaign funds from several key Hindu donors including the Bhutadas and Bharat Barai, who are important in the Indian-American funding ecology discussed in my previous piece on Indian Americans in political lobbying.
Krishnamoorthi won in 2022 with 56.9 percent of the vote, which is the lowest margin by which he has won. He has a reputation as a master fundraiser; his campaign sits on a massive $17 million in cash, with $8 million raised in this cycle.
Figure 25 gives us an example of gerrymandering in Illinois in which minority-dominated districts are often oddly shaped (note the district that encompasses Chicago). Krishnamoorthi himself lives in Schaumburg, which is heavily Asian and relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the Congressional district which includes Hispanic-majority cities like Carpentersville and Addison which are much poorer. This is indicative of the faultlines at the intersection of race and economics in the state, and in the US in general.
Candidate prediction: Win
So, Jayapal represents the left-leaning faction of the Democrats, both openly embracing her own progressive values in public life and advocating for transformative positions on healthcare and social justice. It may be notable that Jayapal is so certain to win that I have not even bothered to mention her Republican opponent in this piece. Krishnamoorthi is more of a pragmatic politician who takes relatively incremental positions, careful not to ruffle his suburban vote bank by going too far down the progressive end.
Yet both are hot favourites to win because of the way their constituencies fall on the political spectrum. Alongside Shri Thanedar of Michigan, the three are almost certain to be a trio of Indian-born representatives in US Congress for the next two years.
Citations
1. https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-densho-1000/ddr-densho-1000-156-transcript-674cc0ae63.htm
3. Washington District 7 data: https://www.census.gov/mycd/?st=53&cd=07
Illinois District 8 data: https://www.census.gov/mycd/?st=17&cd=08
4. Rice, who uses an anti-immigrant position, notes on his responses to the standard set of Congressional questions, “We met a guy in Roselle, Illinois train station named Chris who was evicted from his apartment with his mom after living there for 22 years paying rent with three different landlords. Then he was late on his rent and in 60 days he was evicted and was replaced by a migrant family that was moved in and subsidised by the federal government. He couldn't believe that as a military veteran who served his country, that his own country he served would treat him so badly. He paid taxes for decades and feels that he had nowhere to go, while migrants were being catered to and supported.”
5. https://scorecard.prosperitynow.org/data-by-location#cd
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