A week before the election, Shelly Rahman visited a Sikh temple in Millbourne, a tiny community in southeastern Delaware County that is home to a huge South Asian immigrant population.
The congregation welcomed Rahman, a Democratic Party organizer who tried to woo Vice President Kamala Harris, but many temple members supported the initiative. President-elect Donald Trump mainly due to concerns about illegal immigration. Rahman tried to appeal to them, urging them to show empathy because many people may have had problems with their legal status at some point. The argument failed.
“I found I couldn’t convince them,” said Rahman, a Bangladeshi immigrant and longtime Democratic Party organizer in the region.
She moved to the Masjid Al Madinah mosque in nearby Upper Darby. The reception from Muslim believers was similar, but for a different reason, as voters there told her they could not support Harris because of President Joe Biden’s administration’s support for Israel in its war with Hamas, which has caused weighty casualties in Palestine.
Election results in Millbourne and parts of Upper Darby on November 5 showed that Rahman’s experience was not an isolated one, but a material political change in the community and a reflection of how Trump won in Pennsylvania, in part because he performed better in reliable Democratic pockets.
Harris’s candidacy was historic as the first black and Asian woman to run for president. She was the child of immigrants from India and Jamaica, and her biography was often presented as a feature that made her relatable to a wide range of communities. But in Millbourne and parts of Upper Darby, some of Philadelphia’s most diverse suburbs, her message seemed to have no application. The region saw the most dramatic shifts to the right in collar counties, with many South Asian voters staying home or voting for Trump.
Harris won the national Asian and Pacific Islander vote, according to exit pollsbut Trump increased his support among voters by 5 percentage points compared to 2020.
Harris still won Millbourne, but Trump’s vote share in the small district was up 13 points from 2020. He gained more votes there than in any other suburban Philadelphia district.
Of the 11 collar counties where he saw the greatest improvement, five were in eastern Upper Darby. While Republicans improved their performance in this area, Democratic turnout also dropped sharply.
The twelve precincts in Millbourne and Upper Darby, where Trump gained a combined 7.5 points, are some of the most diverse areas in the Philadelphia suburbs. According to census data, Asian Americans and Black people make up the two largest groups of residents, each making up 36.4% of the population. Hispanic Americans make up another 13.4% of the population, while less than 10% of the population is white.
Sheikh Siddique, the mosque’s president, described Upper Darby as “the world in one place.”
Economically, areas of southeastern Delaware County are home to working-class voters, who cited immigration, the war in Gaza and inflation as the main drivers of the shift. Many argued that Harris’ campaign failed to respond to early warning signs of a loss of support in the community. Republicans used the opportunity to talk to voters they hadn’t talked to before.
“Who can give a chance?”
Raj Singh, 48, emigrated from India to the United States in the slow 1990s and settled in Upper Darby around 2000. But the father of two adult children, who owns an insurance company and a car repair shop, said his politics have changed in recent years. change and 2024 was the first race in which he actively engaged in trying to convert his community to Trump.
“I put 100% into it,” Singh said. “Things were getting worse here in terms of crime, the economy and the border – people were pouring in here.”
Singh noted that Trump’s promise to curb illegal immigration had piqued the interest of his Sikh community. He worries about criminals entering the country illegally and an asylum system that he sees as vulnerable to abuse in a country with restricted resources.
“It could be devastating for people born here and their children who will be competing… for jobs,” he said.
Terry Tracy, chairman of the Upper Darby Republican Party, said Democrats did his party a favor by prioritizing social issues such as abortion rights that have not resonated as widely in a conservative religious culture.
“It’s not that anyone in the Sikh community doesn’t care about abortion, but it doesn’t resonate because it’s very, very rare because of their religious orientation,” he said. He argued that Democrats’ messaging that blames corporations for high prices through “greedflation” hasn’t swayed voters who own tiny businesses and are frustrated with rising taxes and fees.
For 33-year-old Maruf Noor, an immigrant from Bangladesh, his voice came down to one question: “Who can give a chance?” he said last week outside his mosque in Upper Darby. After four years under Biden, his answer was Trump.
Muhammed Sabir, a 70-year-old who has attended the same mosque and voted Republican since Ronald Reagan, agreed, predicting that Trump could lower commodity prices.
“The Democrats have abandoned us”
Rabiul Chowdhury, who co-chaired the national pro-Palestinian “Drop Biden” movement and then formed Muslims for Trump, said Muslim voters in the working-class community were motivated to vote for Trump based on his “America First” agenda and hopes he will end he foreign wars.
He noted that Muslim voters largely voted for Democrats after former President George W. Bush’s administration focused on Muslims in security efforts after the 9/11 attacks, and the community more broadly experienced discrimination. But Chowdhury said everything has changed.
“The Democrats have abandoned us,” he said, citing numerous cases of pro-Palestinian protesters being removed from Harris rallies. “Many of us are Muslim, most of us are American first. We care about our country.”
Nina Ahmad, a Philadelphia Democratic City Council member who chairs the party’s AAPI caucus and immigrated from Bangladesh, said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has resonated deeply with the South Asian immigrant community.
“Because we come from a country that also went through a really violent upheaval, they again saw the United States siding with people who have power against people who don’t have power,” Ahmad said of Bangladesh.
Democrats saw turnout plummet in Millbourne and Upper Darby ridings – at least partly driven by voters saying they couldn’t support either seat.
For example, Iman Chowdhury, a 60-year-old Democrat, said outside his mosque last week that he voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein to protest the Republican and Democratic parties because each has chosen to support Israel.
And for the first time in decades, Saif Mohammed, an immigrant from Pakistan, announced that he did not vote at all. Voting for Harris or Trump, he said, would mean supporting their ideas and a system that would allow the killing of innocent people and refusing to end the war in Gaza.
He said Harris inherited a broken ticket and hasn’t had enough time to regain Biden’s lost confidence.
“The system must be changed,” he said outside the mosque after prayers on Friday.
“Too Little, Too Late”
When Ahmad recalls the events in Delaware County, he describes them as “death by a thousand cuts.”
Siddique, president of the Upper Darby Mosque and former city Democratic council member, had similar sentiments. He noted that the Muslim faith is culturally conservative and opposed to the LGBTQ lifestyle, and said some community members believe Harris has gone too far in her support for LGBTQ rights and may have felt uncomfortable with a woman in the White House.
Still, he said the most common issues are foreign policy and the economy.
“I think a lot of people didn’t like this ticket, the Harris-Walz ticket, they didn’t like it,” he said.
Siddique and Ahmad said Harris’ campaign did not do enough to address the loss of support from South Asian communities in the low term.
Ahmad visited Upper Darby in September and was impressed by local residents showing up at all kinds of community events to fight for Trump.
“These people were there constantly,” Ahmad said. “I didn’t see any contraindications. We knew they were there and I think that’s where the campaign just didn’t understand how important it was to make a personal touch at a local level. They just didn’t do it.”
Ahmad said Harris’ campaign hired a Pennsylvania AAPI director in September, who worked in the state until the end of that month. She called the effort “too little, too late.”
Ahmad said the idea that Harris might be attractive because of her background as the daughter of an Indian immigrant also might not have gone down well with Bangladesh’s Muslim citizens. Harris’ mother was Hindu and Harris is a practicing Christian. Although Ahmad did not sense any antagonism towards Harris in the community, Harris’ legacy was not something with which Bangladeshi Muslims could automatically identify.
Still, Ahmad praised Harris for what she was able to accomplish in a low period of time, saying, “107 days was not enough to… overcome everything she faced.” She added: “I am deeply saddened that she was the sacrificial lamb for this.”
Already looking ahead to the 2026 midterms, Chowdhury, founder of Muslims for Trump, said the next election would be a “litmus test” for the movement in Muslim communities toward Republicans.
In his opinion, the change will be enduring.
But others in Delaware County believe Trump has seized on a unique moment that won’t come back – if Democrats do a better job of engaging with the community.
“I really think this is a one-off,” Rahman said.
