Case Study
Indian voter turnout swaying votes in swing states
Jul 25, 2025
In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona by just 11,000 votes, Georgia by 12,000 votes, and Michigan by 154,000 votes. Asian-American, and especially Indian-American turnout has the potential to swing the results of even national elections in swing states.
[Georgia, 2020]
Asian voter turnout in Georgia increased by 91% in the 2020 presidential elections, and 30,000 of the Asian-American voters who voted in Georgia in 2020 were voting for the first time. The AAPI vote share, just 3% of the electorate in Georgia, delivered more than 3x the votes of Biden’s margin of victory. This was largely due to the outreach efforts of Indian-American Impact, which invested $10 million into digital and physical outreach programs nationwide, a quarter of which was spent in Georgia alone.
In Georgia, Indian-Americans led a multilingual campaign of voter outreach targeting Punjabi Sikhs, Gujarati Hindus, and Marathi-speaking communities, utilizing temple networks, community associations, and WhatsApp groups to increase Indian-American voter turnout. These outreach campaigns paid off, and more than 40,000 Asian-American voters voted in the Georgia elections for the first time ever.
[Michigan, 2020]
Similar multilingual outreach efforts in Michigan precipitated a higher Asian (and especially Indian) turnout in 2020, increasing by ten percentage points since the last presidential election. Volunteers from temple networks and cultural organizations made personal calls to older, newly naturalized voters, achieving much higher voter contact rates than in 2016.
Volunteers in Detroit and Grand Rapids suburbs with high Indian-American populations conducted door-knocking campaigns to register voters and to educate voters about mail-in voting. Bilingual flyers part of the “Namaste aunty!” campaign, funded and organized by Indian-Americans, were critical in boosting Biden’s vote percentages in Detroit suburbs with a high concentration of Indian-American voters. AAPI turnout in these counties increased by 40% compared to 2016, and improved voter turnout in Michigan’s close-margin counties coincided with Biden winning with less than 10,000 votes in each.