Your survey seems to indicate that the work President George W Bush has done on the nuclear deal, and his personal friendship with Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, has not translated into support for the Republican Party.
Exactly -- and that is because according to the report, foreign policy is not even among the top five issues for Asian Americans. It is important to note that we did not ask the respondents what they thought on this issue or that one -- we asked them instead to list the most important issue, and then number two and number three and so on. And US foreign policy did not rate in the top five. The economy is just so huge a factor that these other considerations are minor. US foreign policy and the nuclear deal matters a lot for the activists, but if you look at the everyday citizen, it doesn't matter as much.
I've noticed that the younger members of the community have been enthusiastic for Obama. Did you in your survey make allowance for such generational bias?
Our survey looked at all age groups, the young and old, first generation and second generation. I must say though that it was more challenging to get younger people because some of them are exclusively cell phone users. So, this is a problem more generally. It's difficult to survey people that only use a cell phone.
How did you compensate for this?
We used a statistical technique called weighting to make sure that what we have is representative of the Indian American population. What this means is that if you have too many older people interviewed, an older person's response will count less than a younger person's. What happens with that is statistically the margin of error increases, but the difference between Obama and McCain is so huge that if you do weighting, even though the margin of error goes up the results are still valid.
Is that surprising, that support for the Republicans is as low as your survey found?
It was surprising, because this is the first data we were able to get that answers this definitively. In the past, you could look at events that people have, and people showing up on convention floors, fund-raisers and that sort of thing, but those are merely circumstantial evidences. That's why this is a very important study -- it is the first where you have a nationally representative sampling of Indian Americans.
Image: (From Left) Democrats Raj Goyle, Jay Goyal, Jay Chaudhuri, Kathy Kulkarni, Rajan Anand, Toby Chaudhari, Rajeev Sharma and Anurag Varma at the Democratic convention in Denver.
Photograph: Paresh Gandhi
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