Voters in the biggest U.S. city with an Arab-majority population shifted decisively toward Donald Trump on Tuesday, in a stinging rebuke of the Biden administration’s policies in the Middle East.
Trump claimed 43 percent of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan, to Kamala Harris’s 36 percent. Jill Stein claimed 15 percent of the vote in the city, where the Green Party had notched less than 1 percent in 2020.
Trump’s margin of victory in Dearborn represents a massive reversal from the 2020 election, when Joe Biden’s won 69 percent to Trump’s 30.
The huge shift toward Trump will not be decisive in a race where he cruised to a Electoral College victory without the help of Michigan, the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans. The state had yet to be called Wednesday morning. Still, it was a telling sign of how completely the administration has lost Arab Americans over the war.
Down-ballot results suggest that the move was motivated in large part by anger toward the Biden administration rather than dissatisfaction with Democratic policies overall.
“She bucked her Party’s leadership, because she refused to ignore the needs of her constituents — which in this case meant opposing a genocide.”
Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a progressive Palestinian American, won 62 percent of the vote in Dearborn compared to Republican candidate James Hooper’s 30 percent. She was easily reelected to a fourth term.
For observers, the contrast between Tlaib’s strong performance and Harris’s weakness is striking.
“Working class voters across this country no longer see the Democratic Party as a Party that fights for their interests,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats, “and they saw Rashida Tlaib as someone who does for the very reason that she bucked her Party’s leadership, because she refused to ignore the needs of her constituents — which in this case meant opposing a genocide.”
“That’s what putting democracy back at the center of the Democratic Party looks like,” Andrabi said. “Anything else is a betrayal to everyday people and they feel it.”
Why the Turn?
Some Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan had gone over to Trump because of their conservative values and culture-war alignment. A nationwide ad campaign attacked Harris for her support of trans people, often using misinformation, and the tack had been successful. The issue had helped Trump peel Arab and Muslim voters away from Democrats.
Tlaib, though, took progressive stands on the issue, vocally supporting trans rights.
“Even though social issues were there, a huge focus was on the Middle East and the war.”
So what made Harris perform so poorly in comparison to Tlaib? One lightning rod stands out: Tlaib, a Palestinian American, has been one of the most vocal critics in Congress of Israel’s war on Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon.
One prominent Lebanese American civic leader in Dearborn, Abed Hammoud, said he saw no contradiction in Trump and Tlaib — a social progressive — both winning the city because the election was a clear referendum on Israel’s assault against Gaza.
“Even though social issues were there, a huge focus was on the Middle East and the war,” he said.
The unofficial results for Dearborn track with The Intercept’s reporting on Arab and Muslim residents of Michigan during early voting. Many said they were lifelong Democrats who were turning to Trump out of a sense of dismay over the war in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon.
Trump has promised to let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza and supported inflammatory pro-Israel policies such as recognizing Jerusalem as its capital. Still, some voters said they wanted to give him a chance after more than a year of devastating war in Gaza — and in light of Harris’s refusal to break with Biden on the issue.
In a statement, Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the huge shift of votes to Trump could be attributed to Harris’s failure to take a stronger position on Gaza.
“Rather than listening to the clear majority of American who support both a ceasefire and a suspension of weapons to Israel, Vice President Harris only struck a slightly more sympathetic tone toward Palestinians while sticking with the substance of President Biden’s disastrous stance,” said Awad. “This led to an unprecedented shift of support from Muslim, Arab, and other communities who traditionally vote for Democratic presidents.”
“Very Hard Thing to Do”
Trump campaigned aggressively for the Arab and Muslim vote in Michigan, paying several visits in the race’s final weeks to Hamtramck, which has an all-Muslim city council, and Dearborn. Trump cast himself as the peace candidate, and Awad called on him to follow through.
“The president-elect should fulfill his campaign pledge to pursue peace abroad, including by ending the war on Gaza. However, this must be a real peace based on justice, freedom, and a state for the Palestinian people,” Awad said.
Dearborn was a center of the national “Uncommitted” movement, which sought to push the administration to shift its policies toward Israel. Harris rejected Uncommitted’s campaign to have a Palestinian American speaker address the Democratic National Convention in August.
David Dulio, a professor at Oakland University in Michigan, said that given such activism in the area, Trump’s overperformance was not entirely surprising.
“We have known this has been a possibility for months going all the way back to the presidential primary when Uncommitted gets 100,00 votes statewide,” Dulio said. “We knew that this was a point of contention in these three Arab American communities. We knew that many people in those communities were not and are not happy with the current administration’s policy with respect to Israel and the war in Gaza.”
Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Uncommitted movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh said the people voting for Trump included his own family members.
“Folks who voted for Trump are my cousins, my friends, people who were tasked with a very difficult task of carrying a lot of grief, and trying to do a politically savvy thing at the same time,” Alawieh said. “It’s a very hard thing to do.”
Alawieh said he hoped the “gamble” of voting for Trump in an attempt to end the war will pay off, but he expected members of his movement to be organizing in the streets to pressure politicians of both major parties.
“It’s going to be a tough road,” he said. “And for a lot of us, our activism, our organizing, might even be criminalized. And that’s a very grim prospect, but we’ve got to get going.”
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