Muslim Americans moving to anti-Israel Jill Stein in potential blow to Kamala Harris
Green Party candidate, who is Jewish, leads among Muslim voters in swing states of Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin amid anger at Democrats for support of Israel in war against Hamas
Arab-American and Muslim voters angry at US support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza are shunning Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race to back third-party candidate Jill Stein in numbers that could deny Harris victories in battleground states that will decide the November 5 election.
A Council on American-Islamic Relations poll released this month showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed the Green Party’s Stein. Republican candidate Donald Trump got 18% with Harris, who is US President Joe Biden’s vice president, trailing at 12%.
Stein, a Jewish anti-Israel activist, also leads Harris among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states with sizable Muslim populations where Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by slim margins.
Harris was the leading pick of Muslim voters in Georgia and Pennsylvania, while Trump prevailed in Nevada with 27%, just ahead of Harris’s 26%, according to the CAIR poll of 1,155 Muslim voters nationwide. All are battleground states that have swung on narrow margins in recent elections.
Biden won the 2020 Muslim vote, credited in some exit polls with more than 80% of their support, but Muslim backing of Democrats has fallen sharply since Israel’s nearly year-long war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip that began with the Palestinian terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel.
About 3.5 million Americans reported being of Middle Eastern descent in the 2020 US Census, the first year such data was recorded. Although they make up about 1% of the total US population of 335 million, their voters may prove crucial in a race that opinion polls show to be close.
On Tuesday, Harris called for an end to the Israel-Gaza war and the return of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza who were abducted from Israel by terrorists on October 7. She also said Israel must not reoccupy the Palestinian enclave and backed a two-state solution.
But at closed-door meetings in Michigan and elsewhere, Harris campaign officials have rebuffed appeals to halt or limit US arms shipments to Israel, community leaders say.
“Decades of community organizing and civic engagement and mobilizing have not manifested into any benefit,” said Faye Nemer, founder of the Michigan-based MENA American Chamber of Commerce to promote US trade with the Middle East.
“We’re part of the fabric of this country, but our concerns are not taken into consideration,” she said.
Stein is aggressively campaigning on Gaza, while Trump representatives are meeting with Muslim groups and promising a swifter peace than Harris can deliver.
The Harris campaign declined to comment on the shifting dynamics; officials tasked with Muslim outreach were not available for interviews.
Stein’s 2016 run ended with just over 1% of the popular vote, but some Democrats blamed her and the Green Party for taking votes away from Democrat Hillary Clinton. Pollsters give Stein no chance of winning in 2024.
But her support for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, for an immediate US arms embargo on Israel, and for student movements to force universities to divest from weapons investments have made her a star in pro-Palestinian circles. Her running mate, Butch Ware, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is Muslim.
This month Stein spoke at ArabCon in Dearborn, Michigan, an annual gathering of Arab Americans, and was featured on the cover of The Arab American News under the headline “The Choice 2024.” Last week in an interview with The Breakfast Club, a New York radio program, she said, “Every vote cast for our campaign is a vote against genocide,” a charge that Israel denies.
The war broke out with Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel on October 7, in which terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, of whom 97 are still held in Gaza. Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at toppling the terror group, which rules Gaza, and securing the release of the hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 41,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 17,000 combatants in battle and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 348.
‘Uncommitted’ protest group won’t back Harris
Leaders of a Democratic protest vote movement against the Israel-Hamas war also said that they would not endorse Harris’s bid but strongly urged their supporters to vote against Donald Trump in November.
The “Uncommitted” movement drew hundreds of thousands of votes in Democratic primaries earlier this year in protest of US President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. The group’s leaders urged the administration to change its policy on the conflict, warning that some Democratic voters might otherwise abstain from voting in November, particularly in swing state Michigan.
Despite months of discussions with top Democratic officials, discontent within the protest-vote ranks only grew after the Democratic National Convention when they were denied a speaker on stage and other demands weren’t met.
Harris’s “unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” movement leaders said in a statement Thursday.
Group leaders also made clear in their statement that they strongly opposed supporters voting for Trump or a third-party candidate who “could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency.” Instead, they urged voters to register “anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot.”
“In our assessment, our movement’s best hope for change lies in growing our anti-war organizing power, and that power would be severely undermined by a Trump administration,” the leaders said.
After the DNC failed to include a Palestinian American speaker as requested, the group asked Harris’s campaign to respond by September 15 to its request for the vice president to meet with Palestinian American families in Michigan and to discuss their demands for halting arms sales to Israel and securing a permanent ceasefire. The group claimed these demands were not met.
The movement began in Michigan when over 100,000 voters marked “Uncommitted,” in the state’s Democratic primary. The state is home to the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, making them an important electoral group as each presidential candidate attempts to win the crucial battleground state.
Both nominees have been actively trying to win over leaders in metro Detroit’s large Arab American community. Last month, Harris met with the mayor of Dearborn, the nation’s largest Arab American community, while on Tuesday, Trump sat down with the mayor of Hamtramck, a majority-Muslim city in metro Detroit, seeking his endorsement.
Trump team campaigns for Arab American votes
The Trump team has also hosted dozens of in-person and virtual events with Arab Americans and Muslims in Michigan and Arizona, said Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of National Intelligence.
“Arab American leaders in Detroit know this is their moment to send a powerful message to the Democrat party that they shouldn’t be taken for granted,” Grenell said. Trump has said he would secure more Arab-Israeli peace deals.
The Trump outreach and Stein’s appeal could translate into numbers that might threaten Harris. The Green Party is on most state ballots, including all battleground states that could decide the election, except for Georgia and Nevada, where the party is suing to be included.
Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by just thousands of votes in some states, thanks in part to the support of Arab and Muslim voters in states where they are concentrated, including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020, but Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton there by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016. The state is home to overlapping groups of more than 200,000 registered voters who are Muslim and 300,000 who report ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa.
In Philadelphia, which has a large Black Muslim population, activists have joined a national “Abandon Harris” campaign. They helped organize protests during her debate with Trump last week.
Philadelphia CAIR co-chair Rabiul Chowdhury said, “We have options. If Trump pledges to end the war and bring home all hostages, it’s game over for Harris.” Trump has said the war would never have erupted if he were president. It’s unclear how he would end it. Trump is a firm supporter of Israel.
In Georgia, where Biden won in 2020 by 11,779 votes, activists are rallying 12,000 voters to commit to withholding votes from Harris unless the Biden administration acts by October 10 to halt all arms shipments to Israel, demands a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank, and pledges to uphold a US law that imposes an arms embargo on nations engaged in war crimes.
Thousands have already signed similar pledges in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
US Representative Dan Kildee, a Michigan Democrat, said he worries about the impact the Gaza war will have in November. He said not only Arab Americans and Muslims, but a much broader group of younger voters and others are also upset.
“You can’t unring a bell,” he said, adding Harris still had “the space and grace” to shift gears, but time was running out.
