Once every few years, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace produces a survey that functions less like a poll and more like a mirror held up to one of America's fastest-growing, highest-earning, and most politically consequential immigrant communities. The 2026 edition of the Indian American Attitudes Survey, released amid what its authors describe as an unusually turbulent stretch in US-India relations, delivers a picture that is neither straightforwardly optimistic nor straightforwardly bleak — but genuinely paradoxical, and all the more revealing for it.
The Survey's Scope and Method
The 2026 Indian American Attitudes Survey, conducted by the Carnegie Endowment in partnership with research firm YouGov, surveyed 1,000 Indian American adults between November 25, 2025 and January 6, 2026, carrying a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percent. The study was authored by Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Andy Robaina and Milan Vaishnav, and builds directly on earlier IAAS surveys conducted in 2020 and 2024, allowing the authors to track shifts in attitude over a genuinely consequential six-year window that spans two different Trump administrations, a Biden presidency in between, and now a full year into Trump's second term.
The survey's stated aim was to understand how Indian Americans are navigating electoral politics, sweeping policy change, and ongoing debates over identity and belonging in the United States, at a moment researchers describe as one of unusual political turmoil. As the authors note, a series of unprecedented policy actions — spanning tariffs and sweeping immigration curbs — has pushed the broader US-India relationship into a period of heightened turbulence, placing at risk a quarter-century of steadily deepening ties between the two democracies. That backdrop shapes nearly every finding in the survey, from political approval ratings to reported experiences of discrimination.
Trump Disapproval, But No Democratic Rebound
Perhaps the survey's single most attention-grabbing top-line number is this: 71 percent of Indian American respondents said they disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, with only 29 percent expressing strong or somewhat favourable views. When benchmarked against a nationwide YouGov poll conducted around the same period, the findings show Indian Americans are considerably more critical of Trump than the broader US population — a gap that has widened, not narrowed, since his return to office.
What makes this finding more nuanced than a simple partisan story, however, is what the survey found on the other side of the aisle: even as disapproval of Trump has intensified, Democratic identification among Indian Americans has not correspondingly rebounded. Instead, the survey found that Republican identification has actually increased over the same period — a signal researchers interpret as reflecting rising dissatisfaction with both major American political parties simultaneously, rather than a straightforward flight back toward the Democratic coalition that has traditionally commanded majority Indian American support. Roughly 46 percent of respondents identified as Democrats in the 2026 survey, a meaningful share but one that leaves considerable room for both Republican identification and genuine political independence within the community.
Discrimination: Widespread, Reshaping Behaviour, But Not (Yet) Driving an Exodus
The survey's findings on discrimination are among its most sobering. Roughly one in two respondents reported experiencing discrimination in the past year — a figure broadly consistent with what earlier IAAS surveys in 2020 and 2024 also found, suggesting this is a persistent, structural feature of Indian American life rather than a recent spike tied specifically to the current political moment. The 2026 survey goes further than previous editions in documenting what researchers describe as widespread perceptions of bias, frequent encounters with online racism, and marked levels of personal harassment or discrimination — language considerably starker than the more clinical framing used in the 2020 and 2024 reports.
Crucially, the survey finds that this discrimination is actively reshaping behaviour: many respondents report preemptively changing how they live, speak, or participate in public life specifically to avoid harassment — a finding that speaks to a kind of quiet, everyday vigilance that doesn't necessarily show up in headline statistics about hate crimes or formal discrimination complaints, but that shapes daily decisions about what to say, wear, or where to go. And yet, despite this, the survey is explicit that discrimination is not, for now, prompting widespread exit from the United States. Most respondents do not plan to leave the country, and a majority still recommend the United States for employment — even as many report actively modifying their public behaviour to navigate a less welcoming environment than they may have experienced in prior years.
The survey adds an important comparative dimension here: when asked to weigh the United States against alternatives, respondents slightly favoured the US over the United Kingdom in an educational context, but expressed considerably stronger endorsement of the US in a professional context when the alternative under consideration was remaining in India. Taken together, these findings suggest that perceived professional and economic opportunity in America continues to outweigh concerns about discrimination for many respondents — a genuinely paradoxical finding that captures the tension at the heart of this year's survey: a community reporting rising harassment and bias, while still overwhelmingly choosing to build careers and lives in the country where that harassment occurs.
The Mamdani Effect: Ideology Over Identity
One of the more analytically rich sections of the 2026 survey examines how Indian Americans responded to the November 2025 election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City — a genuinely useful natural experiment for researchers seeking to understand how the community evaluates a prominent American political figure who combines progressive ideology with diasporic South Asian lineage, despite not sharing the Hindu-majority religious identity of most Indian Americans.
The results were striking: roughly 68 percent of respondents reported feeling enthusiastic about Mamdani's election, a substantial majority. But the survey's authors are careful to note that this enthusiasm appears driven primarily by shared ideological alignment rather than by ethnic or religious affinity — an important distinction, given that Mamdani identifies as Muslim rather than Hindu, the religious identity of the large majority of the Indian American community. In other words, Indian Americans appear to be evaluating Mamdani principally as a progressive political figure whose policy positions resonate with a meaningful share of the community, rather than embracing him simply because of shared South Asian heritage.
Interestingly, the survey also captured a more divided undercurrent: while a majority feel Mamdani's win will strengthen the broader standing of the Hindu community in American public life, a substantial minority — roughly 45 percent — believe that electing more officials like Mamdani could actually divide the Indian American diaspora internally, reflecting real disagreement within the community about what forms of political representation genuinely serve collective interests versus what forms might deepen existing intra-community fault lines around religion, caste, region and political ideology.
The Vance Reaction: A Different Kind of Political Flashpoint
Where Mamdani's election produced enthusiasm rooted in ideology, the survey found a very different — and considerably more negative — reaction to public remarks made by Vice President JD Vance concerning religion and marriage, delivered at an October 2025 event on the campus of the University of Mississippi, where Vance was asked about his Christian faith and its relationship to American patriotism. Indian American respondents reacted to Vance's comments with strong negative sentiment, driven specifically by concerns about religious inclusion, representation and belonging in American public life — concerns that cut directly against the pluralistic self-conception many Indian Americans, spanning Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and other religious backgrounds, hold about their place within a religiously diverse America.
Read together, the Mamdani and Vance findings paint a consistent picture: Indian American political reactions in 2026 are being shaped less by identity politics in any simple, essentialist sense, and more by a nuanced weighing of ideology, religious pluralism and perceived inclusion — a level of political sophistication that challenges easier narratives about how ethnic minority communities vote and react to American political figures.
A Community at an Inflection Point
Taken as a whole, the 2026 IAAS paints the portrait of a community confronting what its authors describe as a genuine convergence of electoral, policy and identity-based convulsions, one year into Trump's second term. Indian Americans are, by a wide margin, unhappy with the current administration's performance; they report persistent and, by some measures, worsening experiences of discrimination and harassment; and they are actively adjusting their public behaviour in response. And yet, the same community remains overwhelmingly disinclined to leave, continues to recommend the United States as a destination for professional opportunity, and is engaging with American electoral politics — from Mamdani to Vance — with a level of ideological nuance that resists simple categorisation.
For a community that has, over the past quarter-century, become one of the most economically successful and politically influential immigrant groups in American history, the 2026 survey serves as a genuinely important corrective to any narrative that treats Indian American political and social attitudes as monolithic, static, or purely identity-driven. It is, instead, a portrait of a community actively negotiating — in real time, and with considerable internal disagreement — what belonging in America looks like during one of the more turbulent stretches in recent US-India relations.
Building on Six Years of Longitudinal Data
Part of what gives the 2026 IAAS its analytical weight is that it is not a standalone snapshot but the third instalment in a longitudinal research program that now spans 2020, 2024 and 2026 — six years and two full presidential transitions. This longitudinal design allows the Carnegie researchers to distinguish, with more confidence than a single survey ever could, between attitudes that represent durable, structural features of Indian American life and those that are more clearly reactive to the specific political moment in which each survey was fielded. The finding that roughly half of respondents report experiencing discrimination in the past year, for instance, gains considerably more analytical weight from having appeared consistently across all three survey waves, spanning both a Biden presidency and two separate Trump administrations, than it would as an isolated finding from a single poll conducted at a particularly fraught political moment.
This consistency across survey waves also complicates any simple narrative that would attribute rising discrimination reports purely to the current administration's policy posture. While the 2026 survey's language around bias and harassment is notably starker than in earlier waves, the underlying prevalence — roughly one in two respondents — has remained remarkably stable since 2020, suggesting that whatever is driving these experiences operates at a deeper, more structural level than any single administration's immigration or trade policy, even as specific policy actions may well be intensifying the visibility or the emotional weight of discrimination respondents were already experiencing.
Caste, Religion and the Internal Diversity the Topline Numbers Obscure
One dimension the survey's headline findings on Trump disapproval and discrimination can obscure is the sheer internal diversity of the Indian American community itself — a diversity the Carnegie research team has consistently sought to surface across all three IAAS waves. Earlier editions of the survey found that a meaningful share of respondents, roughly a third, do not identify with any caste category at all, while a plurality identify as General or Upper caste — findings that speak to ongoing debates within the community about how caste identity does or does not translate across the diaspora experience, debates that have taken on additional political salience given recent legislative efforts in several US states to explicitly recognise caste as a protected category under anti-discrimination law.
Religious diversity adds a further layer of complexity that the 2026 survey's findings on both Mamdani and Vance directly engage with. While Hindu Americans constitute the clear majority within the Indian American population, the community also includes meaningful Muslim, Sikh, Christian and other religious minorities — a diversity that makes any simple identity-based political narrative (the kind that might predict uniform enthusiasm for a Hindu political figure, or uniform hostility toward a non-Hindu one) fundamentally inadequate to explain the survey's actual findings. The considerable enthusiasm for Mamdani, a Muslim mayor, alongside the sharp negative reaction to Vance's Christian-nationalist-adjacent remarks, together suggest a community whose political reactions are being filtered through a genuinely pluralistic religious lens, one that values inclusion and representation as cross-cutting values rather than reflecting narrow in-group religious solidarity.
What the Survey Doesn't — and Perhaps Can't — Capture
For all its analytical rigour, the 2026 IAAS, like any survey research, carries inherent limitations worth naming. A sample of 1,000 respondents, however carefully weighted and representative, cannot fully capture the experience of a community as large, geographically dispersed and internally diverse as America's roughly 5.8 million-strong Indian diaspora. Regional variation — between, say, Indian American communities concentrated in Silicon Valley's tech corridor versus those in more politically conservative parts of the American South or Midwest — is difficult to fully disaggregate from a national sample of this size, even with careful methodological weighting.
Nonetheless, the consistency of the survey's core findings across three waves, its explicit engagement with intra-community diversity around caste and religion, and its willingness to surface genuinely paradoxical findings — rising discrimination alongside continued professional optimism, ideological rather than identity-based political reactions — together make the 2026 IAAS one of the more analytically serious attempts to understand a community whose economic and political weight in American life continues to grow, even as, this survey makes clear, its members continue to navigate real and rising tension about what full belonging in America actually requires.
