SIKH AND YE SHALL FIND (A MAJORITY) [via Mike Daley]

Vote for a turban and a beard: The Sikh knocking at the door of the Senate (The Economist, Jul 24th 2003)

WITH Lake Michigan sparkling in the distance and long beards flapping in the evening breeze, they clutched their turbans or ties and vowed to unite behind Chirinjeev Singh Kathuria. An assembly of Sikhs and Hindus and even a token Muslim set aside their differences and turned out on July 22nd on the roof of a posh downtown high-rise to endorse the first American from the Indian subcontinent ever to run for the Senate.

It is not going to be easy for Mr Kathuria, a millionaire Sikh businessman and a Republican. He remembers the insults he faced in airliners and on street corners after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when his Sikh turban and beard got him mistaken for a Muslim. He still carefully keeps an American flag pinned to his lapel.

There is also the fact that he is a Republican. Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax campaigner with influential friends in the White House, claims that “Indian-Americans are natural Republicans and natural conservatives.” They are on the whole well-educated and well-to-do; they respect family values, and like working for themselves. Bobby Jindal, a young Indian-American, is the leading Republican candidate for the governorship of Louisiana. Still, about 70% of them voted Democrat in the 2000 election.

The Indian-American community more than doubled in size in the 1990s, and now totals over 1.6m. That makes it America's third-largest Asian group. Mr Norquist and Karl Rove, George Bush's main strategist, have urged their party to embrace Muslim-Americans and Americans with roots in other parts of Asia. At the moment all seven Asian-Americans in Congress—five in the House and two senators—are Democrats.

If it's hard to figure out why Jews are still voting in lockstep for Democrats, it's impossible to figure out--aside from the parties' respective reputations on race--why Asian-Americans don't vote Republican. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 30, 2003 9:40 AM