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Pro-Palestinian protesters rally for a cease-fire in Gaza during the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Dearborn, Michigan, on May 19, 2024.
Bloc by Bloc: The Arab-American vote in the shadow of Oct. 7
This GZERO 2024 election series looks at America’s changing voting patterns, bloc by bloc.
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In 2019, Mohamed S, an Egyptian-born investment consultant who had lived in New York for more than 20 years, finally decided to apply for US citizenship, for one reason:
“I wanted to vote against Donald Trump.”
But the pandemic delayed his naturalization until after the election. Next month will be the 47-year-old’s first chance to vote in a US presidential race. But this time, Mohamed says, he’s not going to cast a ballot at all.
Mohamed, who asked that we not use his last name over concerns his views might affect his business, said that while he still opposes Trump, the Biden administration’s Gaza policy has made it impossible for him to support a Democrat this fall.
“Why would I vote for a person who has provided weapons and funding that have been used to kill children who look exactly like my son, speak the same language as my son?” Mohamed asks. “That’s an outrageous thing to expect me to do.”
Mohamed’s views echo wider shifts in the Arab American community in the year since Hamas’ murderous rampage through southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, provoked an Israeli response that has killed at least 40,000 people in Gaza and displaced nearly 2 million, according to local authorities. Israel has faced charges of genocide in international courts.
A small community with big electoral power
About 4 million people in the United States identify as Arab Americans. They are a community of diverse faiths, national origins, and viewpoints. Roughly two-thirds are Christian, and one-third are Muslim. They have a large presence in key swing states like Michigan, comprising about 5% of the electorate there, and Pennsylvania, where they make up about 2%.
The war in Gaza looms large for them. More than 80% in a recent poll by the Arab American Institute, an advocacy group, said it’s their top election issue.
That marks the first time that any conflict in the Middle East has topped the list of concerns among Arab Americans, says AAI chairman James Zogby.
“It’s a genocide. And the administration’s response has been abysmal,” says Zogby, “not just in its full-throated support for Israel, but in its failure to put any restraint on Israel.”
Democrats are now paying the price
For decades, Arab Americans were a reliably blue voting bloc. Only about a third of the community ever voted Republican. In 2020, Biden got 59% of the Arab American vote against Trump’s 30%.
But the AAI poll, taken in early October, showed Trump edging out Harris 42% to 41% among Arab American voters — a 12-point swing in Trump’s favor. Expected turnout, meanwhile, has fallen from a historical average of 80% to around 60%.
Given that Biden won Michigan by less than three points in 2020, and Pennsylvania by just over one point, Arab American voters’ choices – not only about whom to vote for but whether to vote at all — could shape the outcome in November. At the moment, Harris leads Trump by roughly one point in both states.
Feeling ignored at a fraught moment
Zogby says weak outreach from the Democrat camp has hurt Harris. The Democrats’ rejection of calls for a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention stung, and the failure to hold high-level meetings with Arab American leaders — as opposed to lumping them in as part of a broader outreach to Muslim Americans — has made the community feel marginalized at a painful time.
“I’d love for her to call for a cease-fire, of course, but if she just got up and gave a speech in Michigan and said, ‘I want your support, I know we have differences, but I know we can talk them through, it would make a difference,” says Zogby.
Some Arab American voters are going further than simply staying home on Election Day.
“Six months ago, I was a Democrat,” says Bishara Bahbah, a Jerusalem-born, Harvard-trained academic and journalist. Now he is the founder of Arab Americans for Trump.
“I came to the conclusion that not only do I not want to vote for Biden or Harris, I want to actually punish them,” says Bahbah, a Palestinian Christian who grew up in East Jerusalem and now lives in Arizona.
Financed by Bahbah himself, Arab Americans for Trump has been coordinating events with Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-born businessman and father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, as well as former Ambassador Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s acting director of national intelligence. Bahbah has met with Trump directly at least once, he says.
The Trump campaign has sought to expand its small base of Arab American support with pledges to cut taxes, crack down on undocumented immigration, and defend traditional views on gender, which plays well in many socially conservative Arab households.
A recent endorsement by Amer Ghalib, the Yemen-born mayor of Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb and the only US city with an all-Muslim local government, has helped the Trump effort.
Bahbah dismisses concerns about Trump’s history of strongly pro-Israel policies and his recent pledge to bring the US “closer [to Israel] than it’s ever been.”
“The difference is the Democratic camp has blood on their hands,” says Bahbah, who says he lost three relatives in an Israeli airstrike on an ancient church in Gaza last October. “President Trump does not.”
Bahbah is confident that Trump, without reelection to worry about, would make a push for a two-state solution after all.
“I think he is interested in leaving a legacy of a peacemaker.”
Not everyone who has soured on the Democrats shares that optimism about Trump.
“I’m not naive enough to believe that Trump would be better,” says Mohamed, the New York-based consultant. “I just don’t see a scenario in which Kamala Harris wins and things change in Gaza.”
But Zogby still sees more opportunity with a Democrat in the White House than not.
“There’s a coalition that exists in the Senate around Palestinian rights,” he says. “I would rather be fighting alongside them with a Democratic president than with a Republican president or a Republican Congress that wouldn’t give a shit at all.”
“People tell me it can’t be worse,” he says, “but it can always be worse.”
A Trump Vance campaign sign sits at the Cobb County Republican Party's booth at the Pigs and Peaches Country Festival in Kennesaw, Georgia, on Aug. 17, 2024.
Trump’s ground-game gamble
Both sides know they must motivate as many supporters, and potential supporters, as possible to cast a ballot. Harris is taking a more conventional approach to the “ground game” by relying on the resources of the Democratic National Committee and onhundreds of thousands of volunteers to knock on doors in key states and to register more voters likely to support her.
Trump has a different strategy. Rather than relying on the Republican National Committee and volunteers as past GOP presidential candidates have done, the Trump campaign is reportedly outsourcing these operations to outside groups, including one backed by Elon Musk, to target mainly undecided voters. These groups pay workers to do the groundwork once done mainly by volunteers.
If this strategy works, it may change future campaigns for both parties. If it doesn’t, Trump’s gamble will likely be remembered as a bad idea that helped cost him the election.
What Florida's abortion rulings mean for the 2024 US election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
This is what we are watching in US Politics this week: Abortion.
Abortion is the big story in US politics this week with the Florida state Supreme Court ruling that a ballot initiative that would protect access to abortion up until fetal viability will be on the ballot in abortion in Florida this year. Democrats are excited about this ruling because it was starting to look like Florida was increasingly out of reach for them.
Republicans now out register Democratic voters in the state by over 800,000 registered voters, which is a flip from a decade ago when Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about 500,000 registered voters. Florida is looking like more and more of a red state with a massive 20 point victory for Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2022 midterm elections. That's what was making Democrats feel like it wouldn't be a very competitive state in this presidential cycle.
However, with abortion on the ballot, they now see an opportunity for outside groups to come in and spend a bunch of money who otherwise wouldn't have sent money there, forcing Republicans to respond by potentially wasting money there. The state is probably a little bit too red for it to truly be competitive for President Biden in this election cycle.
But this abortion referendum story is going to play out across the country. Democratic activists have the opportunity to get abortion on the ballot in two critical swing states of Nevada and Arizona. But it's unlikely they would show up in the other swing states of Wisconsin or Michigan, because Wisconsin had a recent state Supreme Court decision about it. And Michigan had an abortion referendum in 2022. That doesn't mean they can't find other ways to make this election about access to abortion, which has been a very positive issue for Democrats.
There have been seven state referendums since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And in each of those, the electorate shifted significantly to the left from what they did in the 2020 results, even in deep red states like Kansas and Kentucky. So this is going to be an important issue to keep watching throughout the election. And could be one of the wild cards that helps Joe Biden overcome the bad polls that he's been experiencing in recent weeks.
Trump will use election fraud claims to stay relevant through 2021
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
The Electoral College has voted. Why is Trump still refusing to acknowledge defeat?
Well, the President has a long history of criticizing people who lose elections as losers, who quote, "choke like a dog." And I don't think the President wants to admit to himself that he is a loser who choked like a dog. In addition, he's building a pretty impressive political operation based off claims that the election was stolen from him. He's raised over $200 million in the month since the election, and that political operation is going to keep him relevant in the media and in Republican politics for at least the rest of 2021. I think that the claims of election fraud are really central to that operation. So, don't expect Trump to concede anytime soon, even after Republicans start broadly acknowledging his loss.
Why is Attorney General William Barr resigning?
Barr had been one of the President's biggest loyalists. He'd used the Department of Justice in order to advance many Trump causes. And after the election, it looked like he was moving in a different direction. Ostensibly, he's doing it to spend time with his family around Christmas, which is what President Trump said. But in recent weeks, it's come out that Barr didn't acknowledge the DOJ was investigating Hunter Biden before the election; and also, he's been disputing the President's claims of voter fraud. So, I think that relationship just wasn't tenable anymore. Barr's on his way out in the closing days of the administration.
How will the US respond to recent Russian cyber attacks?
Well first, the US has to be sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that the perpetrators of these attacks were Russian. It's possible that there's a false attribution, although it looks very likely these things were carried out by the Russian government. Second, the US is likely to respond with sanctions targeted at the people who did the deed, unless it turns out that this was more than just an intelligence gathering operation and, in fact, targeted US critical infrastructure or was an attempt to damage some US companies or the government. In that case, you may see something much, much broader than sanctions, up into and including cyber attacks back on the Russians to make sure that they pay a price for having done this. Third, a lot of this may not happen until the Biden administration. With the transition of government happening now and going til January 20th, the Biden people may want to reset their approach to Russia altogether, and you may see a much more aggressive response to Russia that goes beyond targeted sanctions starting in the new year.
Malaysian opposition backs bid to lower voting age to 18
Malaysia's Pakatan Harapan (PH) administration will be able to pass a proposed amendment to the Constitution to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, after the opposition yesterday agreed to support it.
Malaysia's opposition backs government's bid to lower voting age to 18
KUALA LUMPUR - The Pakatan Harapan (PH) administration will be able to pass a proposed amendment to the constitution to lower the voting age from 21 to 18,, after the opposition agreed to support it.
Malaysia seeks to lower voting age from 21 to 18
Malaysia will today table a proposal in Parliament to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, a move that will add 1.5 million voters to the electoral roll.
Tight security as Indians vote in final phase of mammoth election
KOLKATA (REUTERS) - Indians lined up to vote amid unprecedented security in the eastern state of West Bengal on Sunday (May 19) as the final phase of a massive, staggered election got underway to decide whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns for a second term.