Indian-American candidates have delivered one of the strongest showings in the community's political history in the 2026 United States midterm elections, with a series of victories and re-elections that have protected and even strengthened the informal group of Indian-American lawmakers in Congress known as the "Samosa Caucus".
The results, declared after voting on Tuesday, 3 November, underline how a community that makes up barely one and a half per cent of the American population has become a durable force in the country's politics.
The headline result came from Florida, where Democrat Pia Dandiya won a closely contested congressional race in the state's 22nd Congressional District, defeating Republican Casey Askar with around 52 per cent of the vote to Askar's 48 per cent.
Dandiya, a former schoolteacher and high school principal whose parents immigrated to the United States from India, becomes the first Indian-American elected to the US House of Representatives from Florida, and the tenth Indian-American ever elected to the United States Congress. Born and raised in Palm Beach County, she built her campaign around her experience in public education, and her victory was projected by CBS News and Decision Desk HQ.
Dandiya's win mattered beyond her own district because of the arithmetic of the Samosa Caucus. The informal group of Indian-American members of the House had been facing the prospect of shrinking from six members to four after the midterms, with two of its members not returning. Her victory changes that calculation.
The group could return to its full strength of six if Indian-American physician and former state lawmaker Amish Shah maintains his lead in Arizona's 1st Congressional District, a race that remained undecided as results continued to be counted. The caucus had reached its highest strength of six members in January 2025, when Suhas Subramanyam was sworn in after winning Virginia's 10th Congressional District.
Subramanyam himself was among the night's winners, securing re-election from Virginia's 10th Congressional District with 63.16 per cent of the vote, defeating Republican challenger Dave Beckwith. Born in the United States to Indian parents, Subramanyam previously served as a policy aide on Capitol Hill, working on healthcare access, immigration reform and legislation concerning employment opportunities and funding for veterans, senior citizens and working families.
Elsewhere in the House, the established Indian-American incumbents all held their seats. Ami Bera of California, Ro Khanna of California and Pramila Jayapal of Washington were all re-elected, continuing a presence in Congress that has now lasted more than a decade for Bera, who first entered the House in 2012.
The re-elections mean the core of the caucus remains intact even as new faces join it, giving Indian-American representation in the House a continuity it lacked in earlier decades.
The community's gains extended beyond Congress. In Maryland, Indian-origin Democrat Aruna Miller secured another term as the state's Lieutenant Governor on the ticket led by Governor Wes Moore, after NBC News projected victory for the Democratic ticket. Miller made history in 2022 by becoming the first South Asian woman elected lieutenant governor anywhere in the United States.
Born in Andhra Pradesh, she immigrated to the United States with her family when she was seven years old, and her re-election confirms her place as one of the most prominent Indian-American office-holders in the country.
Not every Indian-American candidate on the ballot was successful. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Cincinnati-born son of Indian immigrants, lost his race for governor of Ohio despite having the endorsement of President Donald Trump. His defeat was a reminder that the community's candidates, like any others, face the ordinary risks of competitive elections, and that Indian-American voters themselves are far from a single bloc.
The midterm elections were held midway through President Donald Trump's second term and decided all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 Senate seats, 36 governorships and a host of state and local offices. According to reports, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, a result that will shape the balance of power in Washington for the remaining two years of Trump's presidency.
The Indian-American results sit within that larger national picture, but they also tell a story of their own about a community's long climb into American public life.
That climb was slow for decades. Before 2012, only two Indian-Americans had ever served in Congress. Democrat Dalip Singh Saund represented California from 1957 to 1963, and Republican Bobby Jindal represented Louisiana from 2005 to 2008.
Ami Bera's election in 2012 marked the beginning of a larger Indian-American presence in Congress, and the numbers grew in 2017, when Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal and Raja Krishnamoorthi entered the House. Shri Thanedar joined in 2023, followed by Subramanyam in 2025, taking the group to its peak of six.
The footprint now reaches well beyond Congress and well beyond the familiar terrain of immigration and foreign policy. In New York, Saritha Komatireddy, a 41-year-old Republican born in Brooklyn to parents who emigrated from India in the 1980s, challenged one of the state's most powerful Democrats for the office of attorney general.
A Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before his elevation to the Supreme Court, worked as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn and served as chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration under President Joe Biden, her candidacy illustrated how Indian-American professionals are competing for offices that extend deep into state government.
In Colorado, Hetal Doshi, a first-generation Indian-American and former federal prosecutor, entered the Democratic race for attorney general.
The scale of the community behind these candidacies is modest in raw numbers but large in influence. Indian-Americans number around 5.5 million people, roughly 1.6 per cent of the United States population. Yet their economic footprint is considerably larger than their population share.
The US-India Strategic Partnership Forum estimated in January this year that Indian-Americans contribute around 6 per cent of total US income tax revenues despite accounting for approximately 1.5 per cent of the population, and that they support 11 to 12 million American jobs, directly and indirectly. Their presence is particularly visible in technology, healthcare, business and education.
Immigration and education figures underline the same pattern. According to the Migration Policy Institute's 2026 analysis, Indian immigrants numbered around 3.2 million in 2024, making them the second-largest foreign-born group in the country. More than 363,000 Indian students were enrolled in US higher education institutions in the 2024-25 academic year, making India the largest source of international students.
Indian nationals also received 71 per cent of all H-1B visas issued to highly skilled workers in fiscal year 2024.
As voters, Indian-Americans lean Democratic but not overwhelmingly so. The 2026 Asian American and Pacific Islander Voter Survey, released by AAPI Data and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote in August 2026, found that 66 per cent of Indian-American respondents preferred a Democratic candidate for the Senate, compared with 22 per cent who preferred a Republican, and 66 per cent favoured Democratic candidates for the House against 18 per cent for Republicans.
A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace survey conducted with YouGov between 7 and 27 October 2026 found that 62 per cent of Indian-American citizens intended to vote for the Democratic candidate in their congressional district, against 19 per cent for the Republican candidate, with 46 per cent identifying as Democrats, 19 per cent as Republicans and 26 per cent as independents.
That political diversity was visible in the campaigns themselves. While most Indian-American candidates who won were Democrats, Republicans of Indian origin also contested prominent races, and the community's candidates faced very different political environments.
Some hard-line activists in the MAGA movement made clear during the campaign that conservative credentials do not necessarily outweigh questions of race, ancestry or religion, and Ramaswamy faced attacks from within the right, including a primary rival who derided him as an "Indian boy" pretending to be American. The episode showed that visibility in politics can bring scrutiny as well as opportunity.
For the Samosa Caucus itself, the midterms have delivered something its members will value: survival, and possibly renewal. A group that feared losing a third of its strength has instead added a new member from a state where no Indian-American had won a House seat before, kept its incumbents, and may yet return to full strength if the Arizona result goes its way.
For a community that waited more than half a century between its first and third members of Congress, the sight of Indian-American names on ballots from Florida to Virginia to Maryland to Arizona, and on both sides of the partisan divide, marks a change that is now hard to reverse.
(Reporting based on News18, The Times of India, The Economic Times and Rediff.)