Indian Americans in the election fray: How will Shri Thanedar and Sandeep Srivastava fare?

Thus far, this series has sketched a broad overview of the Indian American community in the United States – their role in politics, their behaviour as voting groups, and what influence they have (or don’t have) in lobbying.

Now, over the next few weeks, we will examine the prospects of the various Indian American candidates standing for elections in the upcoming US presidential election. As with any other ethnic group, a diverse range of drivers decide what makes a candidate stand for the US Congress. Unlike in countries where anti-incumbency may lead to parties or states being flipped every few years, the structure of the American party system and the political histories of specific constituencies along the progressive/conservative divide dictate who gets to run, and who gets to win. 

This week, we look at the prospects of two Indian American politicians contesting in two very different locations. The first, Shri Thanedar, is standing for elections from the region around Detroit, Michigan. The second, Sandeep Srivastava, is standing from the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. 

Both men have a few things in common. They are first-generation immigrants and ran successful businesses before turning to politics. Both are internal migrants in the US who lived in other parts of the country before moving to the states that they are now trying to represent. Both have lost high-profile political races in the past. And perhaps most importantly, they are both self-funding their respective campaigns.

First, let us look at a few basic statistics about the Congressional seats in which Indian Americans are standing for elections.

There are very significant differences between the constituencies of Sandeep Srivastava and Shri Thanedar. 

Srivastava is a realtor contesting from Texas’s 3rd constitutional district, a constituency with one of the highest home values in the state of Texas. Thanedar is a multi-millionaire candidate from Michigan’s 13th district, a constituency that includes the single poorest city in the United States. Thanedar’s constituency has high rates of crime, single parent homes, and low levels of college completion while Srivastava’s, on all these counts, is exactly the opposite. 

Importantly, Srivastava has a huge ethnic advantage – his is one of the highest Asian American population constituencies, within which the dominant group is Indian Americans, whereas in Thanedar’s constituency, there is a negligible Indian American presence. However, Thanedar is virtually assured of a landslide win, while Srivastava is almost certainly staring down a significant loss. 

Looking at the individual histories of the candidates, the constituencies, how they got to standing for elections, and what their ethnicity means in the respective races helps make sense of their individual prospects, but also helps examine the possibilities for Indian Americans in US Federal races.

Shri Thanedar

Few candidates are more unusual than Michigan Congressman Shri Thanedar. The maroon-brown wig-sporting entrepreneur is standing from Michigan’s 13th district which includes the overwhelmingly Black city of Detroit and its eastern suburbs and the overwhelmingly White cities of Grosse Pointe and Grosse Pointe Shores. 

The importance of Detroit in Black America cannot be overstated. It was a critical stopping point in the underground railroad helping African Americans escape enslavement in pre-Civil War America, it is practically a cornerstone of African American culture, has witnessed a number of important racially charged political events including the 1967 Detroit Uprising, and was at the forefront of demanding reparations for Black Americans for slavery 

Detroit’s Congressman for over five decades was John Conyers, iconic for his progressive activism. A decorated war veteran, Conyers took part in what was one of the most important political events in Black history – the Selma, Alabama desegregation protests under Martin Luther King Jr. He was on Watergate-fame Richard Nixon’s hit-list, and lobbied for many of the healthcare benefits that were part of Obamacare well before Obama came on the scene. He openly challenged George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq and lobbied for his impeachment. 

Among other things, Conyers was the main author of House Bill 160 in 2005 which condemned Narendra Modi for the Gujarat riots. Ironically, Thanedar escorted Modi into the US Congress in 2023. 

Thanedar’s career in entrepreneurship, mostly around the chemical industry, has seen a share of successes and failures. His New Jersey-based animal-testing lab company went bankrupt in 2010, which led to negative publicity about abandoned dogs and monkeys that had to be rescued by animal shelters. His subsequent venture, a data analytics company, did well and got acquired, but was then sued for fraud, for which he made a settlement days before the trial was scheduled to begin in court. 

He is also known for his sometimes colourful exploits, including talking about his early sexual exploits with his former student and a ‘hippie’ to whom he lost his virginity, mischievous references to marijuana, and sponsoring a play about his own life.

Thanedar burst into the Michigan political scene by running for governor in 2018 in a campaign that people initially thought was a joke, since he had never served in public office and nobody had heard of him. Calling into question his credibility on stance, Thanedar was reportedly unsure of whether he planned to run as a Republican or Democrat when he first started considering the race, though eventually crafted a personality as a progressive ‘Bernie Sanders’ of Michigan.

He lost the race, but spent $10 million on the campaign, effectively buying himself name recognition. Despite losing the 2018 race for governor, he noticed that he did well among Black voters and decided to re-run in 2020, but this time for a small state legislature district in North-east Detroit. Just before that, he moved to the city of Detroit and established domicile.

Despite criticisms that Thanedar was an outsider and appeared to have moved to Detroit just so that he could stand for elections in the city, he had the advantage of being the best funded candidate. The host of Black candidates Thanedar was up against ended up splitting the vote while Thanedar, who ran one of most expensive campaigns in the state’s history for a race of this scale, ended up winning the state election in 2020¹. 

Thanedar then stood for and won the 2022 federal election in Michigan-13. When he won, Detroit had a non-Black representative in the US Congress for the first time in 70 years. At the initial stage of the 2022 campaign when he stood for the Democratic primary, he was up against eight other candidates, all Black, and although he ended up with just 28 percent of the vote, he won with the rest of the candidates eating into each other. With over $6 million of just his personal money, he spent 60 times what his rival for the post-primary election did in the race. 

Shri Thanedar continues to be largely self-funded. Over $5 million of his 2024 campaign funds have come from his own money. By now, he has reportedly spent over $20 million of his own money on his various campaigns over the years. Thanedar also has the smallest share of funding from small individual donors – just about 0.5 percent of his campaign funds for 2024. The small donor funding is generally seen as a very important metric of grassroots support for a candidate, and Thanedar’s poor performance there doesn’t say much about his standing as a leader of the masses. 

In 2024, besides himself, the single largest donor to his campaign is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Thanedar had in the past thrown in his lot with Palestinans over the Israeli occupation. But then in 2023, he went to Israel and backtracked, met with Netanyahu himself, and delivered with a strong pro-Israel statement. In 2022, AIPAC funded his main rival, Adam Hollier, likely in part because Thanedar had taken a pro-Palestinian stance by sponsoring a bill to halt funding for Israel. 

Part of Thanedar’s backtracking is likely connected to redistricting – most of the Arab American population is now in the neighboring district, Michigan-12, where the popular Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is the incumbent (and is consistently targeted by pro-Israel funders). Before his next round of standing for elections, Thanedar was reformed – he had quit the Democratic Socialists Association (though they claim they expelled him for hobnobbing with Modi) and following his u-turn on his Israel, became the AIPAC’s preferred candidate for the district.

Thanedar’s first tenure in Congress has been testy. A Huffpost piece claimed he had become a butt of jokes in Congress for his vanity, and complaints of his office not responding adequately to constituents’ complaints hit the news. Then a scathing account of ineptitude in his office emerged from a communications director who quit his team, and news emerged that a number of Democrats were plotting to unseat him. 

Nonetheless, Thanedar has won the primary in MI-13. Unlike the last time where he won because the Black candidates had failed to unite behind a single person, this time he picked up over 50 percent of the vote. In a month, he will be up against the same candidate he defeated by a massive margin in 2022. 

Candidate prediction: Win

Sandeep Srivastava

Sandeep Srivastava, who made his money as a real estate agent, is running a largely self-funded campaign in the Texas 3rd  (TX-3) Congressional District, which includes the suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth, or DFW. This is a part of northern Texas that is largely Republican. This is also a constituency he contested from and lost in 2022. 

In Texas, the Indian American population has doubled since 2000. They are now the dominant Asian group, numbering over 500,000. While this is less than two percent of the population, it is an economically powerful community which is almost 50 percent wealthier than the average Texan. 

This economic prosperity has accompanied political representation – currently there are 17 Indian Americans elected officials in the state. Just the DFW region has over 230,000 Indian Americans, and a majority of them live in the suburbs of the city. In suburbs like Irving, almost a fifth of the population is Indian American, and in Collin County, where Srivastava’s Congressional district falls, Indian Americans are over 7.5 percent of the total population². 

In the US, Congressional seats are constantly redistricted to reflect changing population patterns, and in many cases, a district includes a range of urban and rural spaces. One part of TX-3, directly north of DFW,  is largely suburban, and also happens to be where the largest decadal increase of population has taken place. However, further east, the county is sparsely populated and largely White. Overall, DFW has attracted Asian Americans due to the growth of the tech industry in the region, but also through the expansion of jobs in engineering and finance roles. DFW hosts several major companies in banking and engineering including American Airlines, AT&T, Lockheed Martin, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Alcatel. 

These have led to racial changes that are important. The largest cities in Srivastava’s district – Plano, Frisco, McKinney, and Allen – have all had significant increases in Asian Americans. Moreover, some of the state’s best performing school districts are in the area, and competitive suburban public schooling is often associated with the growth of Asian Americans. 

In other words, Indian Americans are the aspirational, wealthy newcomers who are carving a very specific space in the region’s politics.

Srivastava started small. He ran for city council elections in his hometown of Plano but lost (incidentally, one of the other candidates who also lost was Bangladesh-born beauty queen Nassat Parveen). He then went straight for the district’s Democratic ticket which he landed in 2022 by winning an easy primary. 

The race in 2022 was unusual in that the incumbent and clear frontrunner for the 2022 Texas-3 seat, Van Taylor, an anti-Trump Republican, was forced to cancel his campaign after a sex scandal that had a connection to ISIS³. This left the field open for what seemed like a potential steal by the Democrats in an otherwise solidly Republican seat. Nonetheless, Srivastava was handily defeated by former county judge Keith Self. 

Interestingly, the primary had another Indian American candidate, Burt Thakur, who withdrew, only to fight from the neighbouring constituency, where he lost⁴. Overall, the main campaign positions of Srivastava are support for universal preschool service access (incidentally his family owns a childcare business), abortion rights, legalisation of marijuana, pathways to citizenship for long-term undocumented DACA recipients, and some commonsense gun control, on which he has not taken a firm position⁵. 

While several of these are standard Democrat positions, selling these will be uphill in a district that has a strong Republican rating, especially since Srivastava is up against the high-flying incumbent Keith Self who has been a lot more effective in outreach. Self is a regular on television and runs a much more aggressive and regular social media campaign, grabbing the news by jumping out of a plane with a parachute to celebrate the Normandy landings, or sending the United Nations a strongly-worded letter for not adequately supporting Israel.

Srivastava, on the other hand, has a poorly updated website, a relatively low-brow social media presence, and online content that do not show the level of on-camera proficiency that Keith Self has. There is also a heavy-duty uncle mode campaign video in which he is surrounded by Indian American seniors asking for votes rather unconvincingly. More tragically, in what may be a bad ‘lost in translation moment’, he ended the campaign video by saying “vote for me, I’ll be your servant” – which may work well when spoken in Hindi in India, but has a very different meaning in the United States. 

While Self has been on a number of major mainstream media venues and podcasts, Srivastava has hardly seen any interviews from big ticket podcasters and the like, and his few appearances have been a bit shaky⁶. 

Candidate prediction: Lose

Conclusion

The contrasts between Thanedar and Srivastava are interesting. On one hand, Thanedar, despite being an outsider to the community that he plans to serve, is almost certain to win since it is a clear Democrat seat. Srivastava, despite being from a relatively wealthy constituency with a significant Asian American population, and one in which he has lived for several years, is almost certain to lose.  

The laws of the respective states play an important part. In Texas, the primary system has a run-off for candidates who do not have a straight majority in the first primary run. Thus while Thanedar’s career in the US Congress was set up by his win in Michigan, despite winning just over a quarter of the votes in the first round, he would almost certainly have lost were he had narrowly won a primary in Srivastava’s district. 

In Texas (and eighth other US states), there is a runoff system, in which the two top candidates must have a one-on-one runoff if nobody in the first round wins over 50 percent of the vote.  Essentially, the advantage of splitting the Black vote would not work. This is not to say that people vote solely based on race, but that the threshold for entry would be much higher for someone who has no ethnic, cultural, or economic ties to a region.

There are several oddities of the two-party, primary-based system in the US that both enable and subvert new entrants. Thanedar’s case highlights how a first-across the line primary system alongside party-line voting during the general elections guarantees just about any candidate a win if they are a Democrat in a Blue district. Likewise, the unlikelihood of a Democrat winning a Red district means anyone who is willing to take a high likelihood of losing an election, but getting to be the representative of a major party, can do so. 

As Sandeep Srivastava has shown, one can be one of the two headline candidates in a major urban centre, despite not having the wherewithal to win even a city council election since few others want to spend a good deal of money to be a losing candidate. But for Srivastava, a real estate agent, losing an election (his constituency is rated +11 Republican by Cook PVI) would still mean getting his name out among hundreds of thousands of voters, getting free advertisements on peoples’ lawns asking for votes. For the person in the right profession, even a losing election can be a solid investment.

Srivastava’s case also showcases a different vagary of the two-party system. A look at Figure 1 shows how complicated the shaping of Congressional districts is in the United States – this is entirely driven by politicians trying to gerrymander as many of their party’s supporters into a district as possible. We see here that the deep blue coloured districts in Figure 1, which is Dallas-Fort Worth and its suburbs, are drawn into almost bizarre shapes, best explained as grouping as many Democrat-leaning voters are clubbed into the same constituencies as possible. 

Likewise, Thanedar need not worry about the wealth of negative press coverage he is getting, or the Detroiters upset at a non-Black candidate with no long-term ties to the city getting to be their most important elected representatives. The fact remains, Detroiters will show up to vote for the general election because even if one doesn’t  care about the local candidate, it is likely one does want to have a voice heard on the Presidential election, and when one is filling out the ballot, one typically just tick marks the “Democrat” line, automatically giving one’s vote to Thanedar.

Both Thanedar and Srivastava can campaign as much or as little as they want, and it will almost certainly have no impact on the outcomes of their respective races. This is both because of the two party system, the oddities of the electoral college system, and the fact that voters may well be going in to elect their president, and in the process, vote for a Congressional representative. As India toys with the idea of a one-nation one-election system, this may be a good moment to pause and think about what this does in terms of aligning votes around one candidate, one party. 

Citations

1. Egan, Paul (2020) Big-spending Thanedar eyes state House: 2018 gubernatorial candidate wins 3rd district primary race. Detroit Free Press; Detroit, 06 Aug 2020: A.8.

2. He was initially slated to run from the 24th Congressional District

3. More on Tania Joya and her escape from her radicalized husband is available here: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/635252666/to-syria-and-back-how-2-women-escaped-their-radicalized-husbands 

4. Thakur, a colourful character himself – a cowboy hat-sporting former soldier and nuclear reactor operator who converted to Christianity, and was also winner on Jeopardy, the hugely popular trivia quiz show. The previous year, Thakur ran for Congress from Imperial county in California, which was incidentally the county from where the DS Saund became the first Indian American to win a Congressional seat in the US

5. https://sandeepforcongress.com/issues.aspx 

6. For instance when he got on the McKinney podcast and got asked whether he preferred burgers or pizza, he fumbled through the response, attempting to give a politically astute answer. This is the kind of question that most politicians will answer with whatever seems the most viable for their constituents, Srivastava, probably vegetarian, could not respond with what are likely the two most popular American foods – cheeseburgers or pepperoni pizza – and instead meandered into pizza with cheese and pineapple, which immediately got a snarky dig from the host.

Table by Prachi Dureja.

This is just the beginning of our coverage of the US presidential election. Sreenivasan Jain will head to America to report on the Trump vs Harris battle and bring you stories snubbed by the mainstream media. Click here to contribute to our new NL Sena project.