Arab and Muslim voters have drifted away from the Democratic Party this year, prompting some community leaders to warn of a continued shift away from a voting bloc that has been reliably Democratic for two decades after leaving the GOP.
While no group has proven that President-elect Donald Trump won by a comfortable margin in Tuesday’s election, the results show another group of colored voters despite his rhetoric about them, he’s leaning toward Trump.
“We could see a multi-generational exodus of Democrats from the party,” said Laila Elabed, co-chair of the national Unaffiliated movement, which emerged during the Democratic primaries to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “If the Democratic Party doesn’t act in a way that’s more in line with its base, there will be real long-term effects.”
Muslim Democratic operatives have changed the narratives of parents, aunts and uncles who voted Republican or third-party for the first time in their lives and now worry they can’t win them back.
Muslim voters supported Republican George W. Bush in 2000, but fled the GOP in response to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 military interventions abroad and counterterrorism policies at home, which they felt unfairly targeted people of the Islamic faith.
In the two decades since then, Muslim Americans have voted nearly 2-to-1 for Democrats, while groups representing the community have become institutionally aligned with Democrats, as have other groups representing voters of color.
The Democratic Party has seemed a particularly natural place for Muslims under Trump, who has barred people from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country after a failed attempt to outright ban devout believers who expressed views deemed Islamophobic.
But on Tuesday Trump won Dearborn, Michigan, the most Arab American city in the country, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who campaigned to end what she calls the genocide in Gaza, won a much bigger share than she did elsewhere.
In Dearborn, where more than half of residents are of Middle Eastern descent, Trump won 42% of the vote — up nearly 15 percentage points from 2020. Harris, meanwhile, garnered just 36% in the city, more than half of Biden’s 2020 vote share. Stein received 18% of the vote, compared to less than 1% nationally.
The result Mayor Bill Bazzi was much the same last month in neighboring Dearborn Heights, home to a large Middle Eastern community that supports Trump.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy groups, which has been sharply critical of Biden’s foreign policy, has nationally post-election survey of Muslim voters. Only 20% of respondents said they supported Harris, while 69% supported Biden. CAIR’s 2020 exit poll.
“Our latest exit poll of American Muslim voters confirms that opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza has played a decisive role, leading to a sharp decline in support for Vice President Harris,” said CAIR National Government Affairs Director Robert S. McCaw. .
Muslim and Arab Democrats say their party has never taken their communities’ anger seriously. Indeed, many Democrats assumed that Arab and Muslim voters would reluctantly or unwillingly return once it became clear that Trump could win and give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a free rein.
“So Dearborn surrendered for Trump? OK, congratulations. You’re going to love the next Muslim ban,” said Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. post-election interview It swirled around group chats of Arab democrats, who said it was symbolic of the indifference they felt toward their concerns.
In addition to the strategic mistake, they say Harris’ campaign failed to implement 101 levels of constituency politics in their communities — showing up at meetings, meeting with leaders and meeting 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 by Vice President Harris. I hope that when the Democrats do their post-mortems on this cycle, they will think about whether they were satisfied with the fact that nearly every statewide race went to the Democrats and learn that we are not their party. Cheneys.”
Trump actually spent more time meeting with local religious and community leaders in the Dearborn area than Harris did. He held roundtables and photo ops with imams, invited supportive Arab politicians to speak on stage at his rallies, and invited Lebanese-born businesswoman Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law to wine and dine community leaders.
“Our community mobilization efforts have shown that Muslim Americans are no longer taken for granted. Trump has acknowledged our role, and we stand ready to work with his administration to advocate for policies that support peace and unity,” said Rabiul Chowdhury, co-founder of Muslims for Trump, which is active in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Unaffiliated movement, which sent 30 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, offered to support Harris in exchange for a speaker to address the plight of the Palestinians, but the request was rejected.
Arab and Muslim Democratic leaders say the rejection of even this symbolic gesture has made it difficult to convince their community that Harris and the Democratic Party care about them. The Harris campaign has acknowledged that it is hoping for increased support from the suburbs to swamp any losses in places like Dearborn.
“We tried to warn people,” said Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American Democrat and non-aligned representative. “I think people thought we were just doing it for attention.”
Still, Democrats aren’t ready to write off the demographics and hope that Tuesday’s result was a product of a particular moment and therefore can be changed in the future.
Dearborn Democratic Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who declined to endorse Harris, said the results show that no party should take his community’s support for granted.
“When political pundits analyze the results, this is what I know,” said X. “Votes are never promised to any party or candidate.”