Arab and Muslim voters left the Democratic Party this year in a way that led some community leaders to warn of a lasting shift from a voting bloc that has been reliably Democratic for two decades since leaving the Republican Party.
While no single group proved to be the difference-maker in Tuesday’s election, which newly elected President Donald Trump won by a comfortable margin, the outcome shows that another group of voters of color are leaning toward Trump despite his rhetoric about them.
“We could see a mass exodus of multigenerational Democrats from the party,” said Layla Elabed, the co-chair of the national Uncommitted movement, which emerged during the Democratic primaries to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “If the Democratic Party does not act in a way that better suits their base, there will be real long-term consequences.”
Muslim Democratic operatives traded stories about parents or aunts and uncles who voted Republican or a third party for the first time in their lives and now worry they may not get it back.
Muslim voters supported Republican George W. Bush in 2000, but fled the Republican Party in response to the Bush administration’s military interventions abroad after September 11 and counter-terrorism policies at home, which they said unfairly targeted people with disabilities. Islamic faith.
In the two decades since, Muslim Americans have favored Democrats roughly 2-to-1, while groups representing the community institutionally aligned themselves with Democrats, as have other groups representing voters of color.
The Democratic Party seemed a particularly natural place for Muslims in the Trump era, as he banned people from entering the country from predominantly Muslim countries after a failed attempt to ban believers outright and expressed views considered Islamophobic.
But on Tuesday, Trump won the country’s most Arab-American city, Dearborn, Michigan, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who campaigned on ending what she calls a genocide in Gaza, took a much larger share than elsewhere.
Trump won 42% of the vote — an increase of nearly 15 percentage points from 2020 — in Dearborn, where more than half of residents are of Middle Eastern descent. Harris, meanwhile, got just 36% in the city, barely more than half of Biden’s vote share in 2020. Stein got 18% of the vote, compared to less than 1% nationwide.
The result was nearly identical in neighboring Dearborn Heights, also home to a large Middle Eastern community, where Mayor Bill Bazzi endorsed Trump last month.
Nationally, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the largest Muslim advocacy groups in the country, which has been sharply critical of Biden’s foreign policy, conducted its own survey of Muslim voters after the election. Only 20% of respondents said they supported Harris, compared to 69% who said they supported Biden in CAIR’s 2020 exit poll.
“Our latest exit poll of Muslim American voters confirms that opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza played a critical role, leading to a sharp decline in support for Vice President Harris,” said Robert S. McCaw, Director of National Government Affairs of CAIR. .
Muslim and Arab Democrats say their party has never taken their community’s anger seriously. Many Democrats assumed that Arab and Muslim voters would return to the fold, reluctantly or not, once it became clear to them that Trump could win and give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a free hand.
“So Dearborn performed for Trump? Okay, congratulations. You will love the next Muslim ban,” said Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., in a post-election interview that drew attention in group chats from Arab Democrats, who said it was emblematic of the dismissive way they felt their concerns were expressed. treated.
Beyond the strategic blunder, they say the Harris campaign has tactically failed to execute the 101-level politics of constituency management in their community: showing up at rallies, courting leaders and providing face-to-face time with the candidate.
“Day after day, for over a year, we warned President Biden and Vice President Harris,” said Rania Batrice, a Palestinian-American Democratic strategist. “Our pleas, demands and warnings were ignored by President Biden and then Vice President Harris. I hope that as the Democrats do their post-mortem on this cycle, they will reflect on whether they are satisfied with the fact that almost every swing, statewide, went to the Democrats, and that they will learn that we are not the party of the Democrats. Cheneys.”
Trump actually spent more time courting local religious and community leaders in the Dearborn area than Harris. He held a roundtable discussion and photo op with imams, invited Arab politicians who supported him to speak on stage at his rallies, and sent Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, a Lebanese-born businessman, to meet community leaders for dinner and drinks .
“Our community mobilization efforts have shown that Muslim Americans are no longer taken for granted. Trump has recognized our role and we are prepared to work with his administration to advocate for policies that support peace and unity,” said Rabiul Chowdhury, co-founder of Muslims for Trump, which has been active in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Uncommitted movement, which sent 30 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, offered to support Harris in exchange for having a speaker explain the plight of Palestinians, but the request was denied.
Arab and Muslim Democratic leaders say the rejection of even that symbolic gesture made it difficult to convince their community that Harris and the Democratic Party cared about them. The Harris campaign acknowledged that it was counting on a wave of support from the suburbs to offset any losses in places like Dearborn.
“We were trying to warn people,” said Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American Democrat who was a noncommittee delegate. “I feel like people thought we were just making up for attention.”
Still, Democrats are hardly ready to write off the demographics, hoping that Tuesday’s outcome was the product of a specific moment and therefore subject to change in the future.
Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, who declined to endorse Harris, said the results show neither party should take its community’s support for granted.
“While political pundits analyze the outcomes, this is what I know,” he said on X. “No votes are ever promised to any party or candidate.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
