The sharpest suburban shift toward Trump was in these heavily South Asian precincts in Delaware County

The week before the election, Shelly Rahman visited the Sikh temple in Millbourne, a small borough in southeast Delaware County with a large population of South Asian immigrants.

The congregation welcomed Rahman, a Democratic organizer who tried to pitch Vice President Kamala Harris, but many of the temple members were backing President-elect Donald Trump largely because of concerns about illegal immigration. Rahman sought to appeal to them, insisting they should be empathetic because many at some point may have had issues with their own legal status. The argument didn’t land.

“I found out that there’s no way I can convince them,” said Rahman, a Bangladeshi immigrant and longtime Democratic organizer in the area.

She moved on to the Masjid Al Madinah mosque in nearby Upper Darby. The reception from the Muslim worshipers was similar but for a different reason, as voters there told her they couldn’t support Harris because of President Joe Biden’s administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas, which has resulted in heavy Palestinian casualties.

Election results in Millbourne and parts of Upper Darby on Nov. 5 demonstrated that Rahman’s experience wasn’t an outlier, but a tangible political shift in the community and a representation of how Trump won Pennsylvania in part by doing better in reliably Democratic pockets.

Harris’ 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 held up as an attribute that would make her relatable to a wide range of communities. But in Millbourne and parts of Upper Darby, some of the most diverse precincts in the Philadelphia suburbs, her message seemed to fall flat. The area had some of the most dramatic rightward swings in the collar counties, and many South Asian voters stayed home or voted for Trump.

Harris won the national Asian American and Pacific Islander vote, according to exit polls, but Trump boosted his support with the voting group by 5 percentage points compared to 2020.

Harris still won Millbourne, but Trump’s vote share in the tiny precinct improved by 13 points compared to 2020. He gained more ground there than he did in any other suburban Philadelphia precinct.

And of the 11 precincts in the collar counties where he saw the most improvement, five were in eastern Upper Darby. While Republicans improved their performance in the area, Democratic turnout also plummeted.

Twelve precincts in Millbourne and Upper Darby that together saw a 7.5-point swing for Trump make up some of the most diverse areas in the Philadelphia suburbs. According to census data, Asian Americans and Black Americans make up the two largest segments of residents, each accounting for 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 president of the mosque, described Upper Darby as “the world in one place.”

Economically, the pockets of southeast Delaware County are home to working-class voters who cited immigration, the war in Gaza, and inflation as key drivers of the shift. The Harris campaign, many said, failed to respond to early warning signs that they’d lost support within the community. And Republicans capitalized on the opening to talk to voters they hadn’t before.

Raj Singh, 48, immigrated from India to the U.S. in the late 1990s and settled in Upper Darby around 2000. But the father of two grown children, who owns an insurance company and an auto repair shop, said his politics have shifted in recent years and 2024 was the first race where he got actively involved trying to turn his community out for Trump.

“I put myself 100% into it " Singh said. “Things were getting bad here in terms of crime and the economy and the border — the people pouring in here.”

Singh saw his Sikh community attracted to Trump’s promise of curbing illegal immigration. He worries about criminals coming into the country illegally and an asylum system he sees as susceptible to abuse in a country with limited resources.

“That could be devastating to the people born here — and their children, who would compete … for the jobs,” he said.

Terry Tracy, the GOP chair in Upper Darby, said Democrats did his party a favor by prioritizing social issues like abortion rights that didn’t resonate as broadly with a conservative religious culture.

“It’s not that someone 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 Democratic messaging, which blamed corporations for high prices through “greedflation,” didn’t sway voters who owned small businesses and were frustrated by rising taxes and fees.

For 33-year-old Maruf Noor, an immigrant from Bangladesh, his vote came down to one question: “Who can give the opportunity?” he said outside his mosque in Upper Darby last week. After four years under Biden, his answer was Trump.

Muhammed Sabir, a 70-year-old who attends the same mosque and has voted for Republicans since Ronald Reagan, agreed as he predicted Trump could bring the costs of goods down.

Rabiul Chowdhury, who cochaired the national pro-Palestinian Abandon Biden movement and then formed Muslims for Trump, said Muslim voters in the working class community were motivated to vote for Trump based upon his “America first” platform and hopes he’d end foreign wars.

Muslim voters, he noted, had largely voted for Democrats after former President George W. Bush’s administration targeted Muslims in security efforts following the Sept. 11 attacks and the community more broadly faced discrimination. But Chowdhury said things have changed.

“Democrats abandoned us,” he said, citing numerous incidents of pro-Palestinian protesters being removed from Harris rallies. “As a Muslim, many of us are, most of us are America first. We care about our country.”

Nina Ahmad, a Democratic Philadelphia City Council member who chairs the state party’s AAPI caucus and emigrated from Bangladesh, said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonated deeply with the South Asian immigrant communities.

“Because we come from a country that also went through a really violent upheaval, they saw again, the U.S. siding with people who had power against people who didn’t,” Ahmad said of Bangladeshis.

Democrats saw a steep drop-off in turnout in Millbourne and the Upper Darby precincts — driven at least in part by voters who said they couldn’t support either ticket.

For instance, Iman Chowdhury, a 60-year-old Democrat, said outside his mosque last week that he voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein to protest against the Republican and the Democratic parties because each had chosen to support Israel.

And for the first time in decades, Saif Mohammed, a Pakistani immigrant, said he didn’t vote at all. To vote for Harris or Trump, he said, would be to support their ideas and a system that allowed for the killing of innocent people and a refusal to put an end to the war in Gaza.

Harris, he said, inherited a shattered ticket and didn’t have enough time to regain trust that Biden had lost.

“The system has to be changed,” he said outside of the mosque after prayer on Friday.

As Ahmad looks back on what happened in Delaware County, she describes it as “death by 1,000 cuts.”

Siddique, the president of the Upper Darby mosque and a former Democratic council member in the city, felt similarly. The Muslim faith, he noted, is culturally conservative and opposed to LGBTQ lifestyles and he said some members of the community believed Harris had gone too far in her support for LGBTQ rights and may have been uncomfortable with a woman in the White House.

Despite this, he said the most prevalent issues were foreign policy and the economy.

“I think many people did not like the ticket, the Harris-Walz ticket, they didn’t like it,” he said.

Siddique and Ahmad said the Harris campaign didn’t do enough to respond to the loss of support in South Asian communities on a tight deadline.

Ahmad visited Upper Darby in September, and was struck by local residents showing up to all sorts of community events to stump for Trump.

“Those people were there constantly,” Ahmad said. “I didn’t see a counter to that. We knew they were there and I think this is where the campaign just didn’t understand how important it was to do this personal touch on this local level. They just didn’t do that.”

The Harris campaign hired a Pennsylvania AAPI director in September and she was in the state by the end of that month, Ahmad said. She called that effort “too little, too late.”

The idea that Harris might appeal because of her background as the daughter of an Indian immigrant also may have fallen short with Muslim Bangladeshis, Ahmad said. Harris’ mother was Hindu, and Harris is a practicing Christian. While Ahmad didn’t sense any antagonism toward Harris in the community, Harris’ heritage wasn’t something that Muslim Bangladeshis would automatically connect with.

Still, Ahmad gave Harris credit for what she was able to accomplish in a short period of time, saying “107 days was not enough to … combat all that she was up against.” She added, “I feel deeply sad that she was the sacrificial lamb for this.”

Already looking ahead to the midterms in 2026, Chowdhury, the founder of Muslims for Trump, said the next election will be a “litmus test” for the movement within Muslim communities toward Republicans.

The change, he believes, is here to stay.

But others in Delaware County are convinced Trump capitalized on a unique moment that won’t return — if Democrats do a better job of connecting with the community.

“I really think it’s a one off,” Rahman said.