Muslim voters once abandoned the GOP. Now they may leave the Democrats.

0
246

Arab and Muslim voters moved away from the Democratic Party this year in ways that led some community leaders to warn of a lasting shift from a voting bloc that has been reliably Democratic for two decades since it abandoned the GOP.

While no single group proved to be the difference maker in Tuesday’s election that President-elect Donald Trump won by a comfortable margin, the outcome shows another group of voters of color trending toward Trump despite his rhetoric about them.

“We may see a mass exodus of multigenerational Democrats from the party,” said Layla Elabed, the co-chair of the national Uncommitted movement, which sprang up during the Democratic primaries to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “If the Democratic Party does not move in a way that is more aligned with their base, there’s going to be real long-term repercussions.”

Muslim Democratic operatives swapped stories of parents or aunts and uncles voting Republican or third party for the first time in their lives and now worry they may not get them back.

Muslim voters backed Republican George W. Bush in 2000, but fled the GOP in response to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 military interventions abroad and anti-terror policies at home, which they felt unfairly targeted people of Islamic faith.

In the two decades since then, Muslim Americans have broken roughly 2-to-1 for Democrats, while groups representing the community institutionally aligned themselves with Democrats, much like other groups representing voters of color.

The Democratic Party seemed like an especially natural place for Muslims in the Trump era, as he banned people entering the country from predominately Muslim nations after a failed attempt to ban believers of the faith outright and he expressed views considered Islamophobic.

But on Tuesday, Trump won the most Arab American city in the country, Dearborn, Michigan, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who campaigned on ending what she has called a genocide in Gaza, took a far larger share than she won elsewhere.

Trump won 42% of the vote — a nearly 15 percentage-point gain from 2020 — in Dearborn, where more than half of residents are of Middle Eastern descent. Harris, meanwhile, received just 36% in the city, barely more than half of Biden’s 2020 vote share. Stein received 18% of the vote, compared to less than 1% nationwide.

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

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 postelection survey of Muslim voters. Just 20% of respondents said they backed Harris, compared to 69% who said they backed Biden in CAIR’s 2020 exit poll.

“Our final exit poll of American Muslim voters confirms that opposition to the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza played a crucial role, leading to a sharp drop in support for Vice President Harris,” said CAIR National Government Affairs Director Robert S. McCaw.

Muslim and Arab Democrats say their party never took seriously the anger felt by their community. Indeed, many Democrats assumed Arab and Muslim voters would come back into the fold, reluctantly or not, once it became clear to them that Trump might win and give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu free rein.

“So, Dearborn delivered for Trump? OK, congratulations. You’re going to love the next Muslim ban,” Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., said in a postelection interview that rocketed around group chats of Arab Democrats, who said it was emblematic of the dismissive way they felt their concerns were treated.

Beyond the strategic blunder, they say Harris’ campaign failed tactically to do the 101-level politics of constituency management in their community — showing up at meetings, courting leaders and providing face time with the candidate.

“Day after day, for well 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. My hope is that as Democrats do their post-mortem on this cycle, they reflect on whether they’re content with the fact that almost every swing, statewide race went to Democrats, and they’ll learn that we are not the party of the Cheneys.”

Trump actually spent more time courting local religious and community leaders in the Dearborn area than Harris. He held a roundtable and photo-op with imams, invited Arab politicians who endorsed him to speak onstage at his rallies, and dispatched Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, a Lebanese-born businessman, to wine and dine community leaders.

“Our efforts in mobilizing the community demonstrated that Muslim Americans are no longer taken for granted. Trump has acknowledged our role, and we are ready to work alongside his administration to advocate for policies that support peace and unity,” said Rabiul Chowdhury, a co-founder of Muslims for Trump, which was active in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The Uncommitted movement, which sent 30 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, offered to endorse Harris in exchange for having a speaker to address the plight of Palestinians, but that request was rebuffed.

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 surge in 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 who was an Uncommitted delegate. “I feel like people thought we were just making it up for attention.”

Still, Democrats are hardly ready to write off the demographic and are hoping Tuesday’s result was the product of a specific moment and can therefore be changed in the future.

Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, who refused to endorse Harris, said the results show neither party should take his community’s support for granted.

“While political pundits analyze the outcomes, here is what I know,” he said on X. “Votes are never promised to any party or candidate.”

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

‘The movement is not over’: leaders of Uncommitted look ahead at organizing during Trump term

<span>A volunteer holds a "Vote Uncommitted" sign near a polling station in Dearborn, Michigan, on 27 February 2024.</span><span>Photograph: Nic Antaya/Bloomberg via Getty Images</span>

Following Donald Trump’s decisive victory in this week’s presidential election, leaders of the anti-war group Uncommitted National Movement expressed their disappointment over the results, highlighting the Democratic party’s failure to listen to its base and prioritize progressive policies. Since the movement formed last winter, its leaders have urged the Democratic party to heed their demands of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and to adopt an arms embargo on Israel, or risk losing their votes.

While a full picture of how Arab and Muslim Americans voted in the presidential election is still being captured, this election showed a shift among communities that had long formed the Democratic base. A majority of Muslim Americans voted for the Green party candidate Jill Stein at 53%, according to a nationwide exit poll of more than 1,500 Muslim Americans by the civil rights group Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), followed by 21% for Trump and 20% for vice-president Kamala Harris.

In Michigan, which has one of the nation’s highest Arab American and Muslim populations, 59% of Muslim Americans voted for Stein, according to the CAIR poll, while 22% cast ballots for Trump and 14% supported Harris. While exit poll data on Arab American voters is not yet available, a September poll for the non-profit group Arab American Institute found that they were evenly split between their support of Trump and Harris at 42% and 41% respectively.

Now, Uncommitted’s founders and supporters say that the election results reveal that the Democratic party has lost touch with its working class and anti-war voters. Their message for the Biden-Harris administration and Trump is clear, said Uncommitted leader and Palestinian American activist Lexis Zeidan: the movement is not over. While organizing for Palestinian rights under a Trump presidency will be an uphill battle, leaders said, they plan to continue mobilizing activists to apply pressure on the US government until it ends its support of Israel’s war on Gaza, where more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since last October.

“The results of the election are really unfortunate because, with Trump taking office, there’s a reality that domestically, policies are going to get worse, and people’s rights are at stake. And we know also for Palestine and the Middle East, it’s not going to get any better. It definitely didn’t have to be this way,” said Zeidan. “Dems could have been much smarter, much more strategic and they chose to stick with the status quo rather than listening to their base of voters.”

The Uncommitted National Movement spread to more than two dozen states in the spring, when more than 700,000 citizens marked their ballots “uncommitted”, or its equivalent, in state primaries to send a message to Joe Biden that he would lose their support if he didn’t push for a permanent ceasefire. It followed a campaign called Listen to Michigan, which encouraged more than 100,000 voters to vote “uncommitted” during the state’s Democratic primary in February. Thirty uncommitted delegates were sent to the Democratic national convention (DNC) over the summer.

Discontent over the US’s handling of the war on Gaza was behind the Arab American community’s historic shift from being reliably Democrat to voting Republican and third party in this election, said Tariq Habash, a former policy advisor for the Biden administration who resigned due to the US’s policy regarding Gaza. Habash, who’s Palestinian American, recently co-founded the lobbying organization A New Policy to help reform US strategy on Middle East relations.

“When you are recognized as the party that historically has fought for civil rights and fought for justice, and you allow what has happened in Gaza to happen on your watch and have failed to actually reel in the Israeli government,” said Habash, “you create a situation where you communicate to your base that is often comprised of vulnerable populations, that you are not necessarily going to fight in the interests of vulnerable populations. And I think that resonated with voters in a way that Democrats were not able to turn out the people who they normally would rely on to help them win elections.”

While the Democratic party did not meet Uncommitted’s demands, including to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the DNC, Habash sees the movement as successful for its grassroots mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people and for shining a light on the Democratic party’s shortcomings.

The movement’s leaders were split on their voting plan for the top of the ticket. In September, the Uncommitted declined to endorse Harris after her campaign failed to meet with Palestinian families or Uncommitted representatives ahead of the group’s deadline. The movement also abstained from endorsing a third party candidate, saying that casting a ballot for one was tantamount to a vote for Trump. Zeidan abstained from voting for a presidential candidate and otherwise voted along Democratic party lines down the ballot, while the co-founder and uncommitted Michigan delegate Abbas Alawieh backed Harris.

Several days before the election, some members of the movement formed an offshoot group called Uncommitted Grassroots to encourage voters to support a third party candidate.

Dems could have been much smarter, much more strategic and they chose to stick with the status quo rather than listening to their base ...

Lexis Zeidan

“Over the last few months, a small group of individuals have made decisions on behalf of our nationwide movement. These individuals, without consulting our broader coalition and without being democratically chosen, changed the way that the movement operated from one that challenged the Democratic party to one that completely catered to the party’s needs at the DNC,” Uncommitted Grassroots wrote in a statement. “This was a betrayal of the true voice and core values of the countless uncommitted voters who believe that compromising on the values of peace and justice is non-negotiable.”

In response, the Uncommitted leaders said that they had always been clear that the movement was for Democratic voters seeking to prevent a Trump presidency. “If our strategy had been to abandon organizing within the Democratic Party,” they wrote on X, “we would have taken that path from the start rather than investing in the Democratic Party.”

Zeidan said that she understands the anger and frustration of Arab and Muslim American voters who cast ballots for Trump after their pleas to Biden for a ceasefire were ignored. “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why the Democratic leadership didn’t listen to them.” For Alawieh, the US’s violent and harmful Gaza policy crosses party lines. “For those of us who are experiencing this policy violence and trying to make sense of how to respond politically, I think it is totally understandable for us to arrive at different conclusions about what the politically savvy thing might be to do,” Alawieh said. “Indeed, both parties are diametrically opposed to a pro-peace and pro-justice approach to the issue of Israel and Palestine.”

Zeidan did not provide specific details on the group’s next steps, but she said that the movement plans to continue organizing around Palestinian liberation and applying pressure on the Biden-Harris administration ahead of Trump’s presidency. “My hope is that this election is the clear demarcation for the Democratic party,” Zeidan said, “to begin to realign on what their party stands for.”

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Democrats' working-class exodus sets off reckoning within party

 Demoralized Democrats are soul-searching and blaming each other after President-elect Donald Trump's resounding election victory exposed erosion among working-class support for Democrats that poses a potential long-term crisis for the party.

Democrats − who have long prided themselves as the party for the little guy − instead strengthened their emerging base of financially secure college graduates this election while a growing number of blue-collar voters embraced Trump and Republicans.

Especially alarming for Democrats this election: The exodus of working-class voters from the Democratic Party included not just white voters, but helped Trump make gains with Latino and Black men.

Reflecting a widening educational divide, voters with college degrees backed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris 55%-42% in this week's election while Trump won non-college-educated voters − who made up more than half the electorate − 56-42%, according to exit polls. Four years ago, Trump won 50% of voters without college degrees to President Joe Biden's 48%.

What's more, Trump won 50%-46% among voters whose income is less than $100,000, a staggering turnaround from Biden's 56%-43% advantage with this group in 2020. Meanwhile, Harris won voters who earn $100,000 or more 51%-46% over Trump, who in 2020 topped this more affluent group of voters 54%-42% over Biden.

Vice President Kamala Harris concedes the election during a speech at Howard University on November 06, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Vice President Kamala Harris concedes the election during a speech at Howard University on November 06, 2024 in Washington, DC.

The realignment crystalized a political reality that's tough for Democrats to swallow: With blue-collar voters flocking away from their party over multiple election cycles, Democrats' refashioned base is becoming more upper-class, urban/suburban and coastal. It's a narrowed coalition that does not bode well for future elections.

"It should be the top and only concern of every Democrat in Congress and around the country for the next two years and beyond," U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told USA TODAY. "It showed that the campaign was a failure. We have to prioritize the economic needs and hardships of most working-class families. We failed to make them seem heard and seen in their frustrations with the economic and political system."

The shift of many working-class voters away from Democrats helped produce Republicans' first popular vote victory in 20 years. Trump gained ground from his 2020 performance in 49 states, while a New York Times analysis found Trump improved on his 2020 margin in at least 2,367 counties and decreased in only 240 counties.

"We should spend six months just listening to communities," said Khanna, who grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which narrowly flipped to Trump in this week's election. "Just sit there and respect the voters. Listen and understand what they're saying."

US Vice President Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at Howard University in Washington, DC, on November 6, 2024. Donald Trump won a sweeping victory on November 6, 2024 in the US presidential election, defeating Kamala Harris to complete an astonishing political comeback that sent shock waves around the world.

For the past three-plus years, the Biden administration tailored economic policy to blue-collar union workers including making historic investments in green-energy and microchip manufacturing and supporting tax relief for families with young children. Biden walked the picket-line with striking autoworkers. And Biden and Harris pushed tax hikes on the super rich and corporations and savings for the middle-class through measures to lower prescription drug costs.

But the Biden-Harris sweeping economic agenda − which includes projects that are a decade out − failed to connect with working-class Americans' immediate concerns about inflation and high consumer costs.

"Democrats have a fundamental problem on their economic brand, and I don't think it can be dealt with by just offering a couple popular proposals or even the best message or ad test," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. "I think we have to step back and really develop an economic narrative that communicates that we're in touch with people's lives and that offers real help for working class people."

Lake said about 60% of voters don't believe Democrats have an economic plan, while those who do recognize a plan believe it favors college-goers. She pointed to Biden's efforts to forgive college student loan debt as an example. She said Americans have more clarity with Trump's brand of conservative populism: tax breaks, "America first" policies like higher tariffs, and less federal regulation.

"Trump beat us with populist economics," Lake said, adding that Democrats' struggles with the working class are years in the making. "It's not just one loss. This has been building, and I think this is a call to action to get an economic brand that includes working people."

Harris spent much of her campaign warning about the dangers of a second Trump presidency. She called him increasingly "unstable and unhinged" and out for revenge and power. Echoing Biden before he departed from the race in July, Harris attacked Trump as a threat to American democracy, convinced that the memories of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol would weigh on voters.

Yet such rhetoric resonated most with college-educated voters and "never Trump" Republicans who already backed the Democratic nominee. And restoring abortion rights, another focus of Harris, took a backseat to many voters behind the high costs of their groceries.

David Axelrod, former longtime adviser for President Barack Obama, likened Democrats to "missionaries" in their approach to non-college-educated voters − a message of "we're here to help you become more like us."

"There's a message of unspoken and unintended, I think, disdain that was felt," Axelrod said in an interview on CNN. "If you're talking about democracy over the kitchen table − and I care deeply about that issue − you probably don't have to worry about the food on your table, about the cost of it."

It's not as if Harris ignored blue-collar voters on policy − far from it. On the campaign trail, Harris championed proposals to make housing more affordable for first-time buyers, capital available for Americans starting small businesses and extending the child tax credits. She called it an "opportunity economy" for all Americans, regardless of income.

But while she labeled reducing consumer costs her top priority, Harris remained tethered to the unpopularity of Biden, who voters blamed overwhelmingly for high inflation, even as it dropped considerably from a year ago, and migration at the southern border.

Rather than regularly railing on the billionaire class, Harris campaigned on a "pragmatic" approach to the economy. "I'm a capitalist," she told Americans in an appeal to independent and moderate Republicans.

Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris embrace as she concedes the presidential election on Nov. 6, 2024, in Washington, D.C.
Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris embrace as she concedes the presidential election on Nov. 6, 2024, in Washington, D.C.

The Atlantic, citing an unnamed Biden aide, said Harris backed away from a more aggressive economic populist message at the urging of her brother-in-law Tony West, chief legal officer of Uber, who held an influential role in Harris' inner circle. West pushed the shift as a way for Harris to win support within the business community, The Atlantic reported. By the end of the campaign, one of Harris' top surrogates was billionaire businessman Mark Cuban.

"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said in a statement. "First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right."

Many progressive Democrats celebrated Sanders' blistering assessment, but some in the party's establishment pushed back, arguing Harris and Biden got behind many of the very policies Sanders has championed.

"This is straight up BS," Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison said in a post on X, calling Biden "the most-pro worker president of my lifetime" who saved union pensions, created millions of jobs and "even marched in a picket line."

He said Harris' various economic proposals would have "fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country."

"There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one," Harrison said in his rebuke to Sanders' critique.

Donald Trump holds hands with wife Melania at his Election Night Watch Party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center after being elected the 47th President of the United States.
Donald Trump holds hands with wife Melania at his Election Night Watch Party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center after being elected the 47th President of the United States.

For all the Democratic infighting over economic messaging, others blame the party's left wing for exposure on divisive cultural issues such as support of transgender rights and the chaos on college campuses from Gaza war protests. Harris didn't campaign on these areas − but Republicans attacked her over them anyway.

"Republicans are masterful at weaponizing the words of the far left against the Democratic Party, and the losses among voters of color, particularly Latinos, is nothing short of a catastrophe for the party," U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., said in an interview on MSNBC.

Arguably the Trump campaign's most powerful ad of the 2024 race − which it targeted to male voters watching football games − was an overt anti-trans spot featuring Black radio host Charlamagne tha God sounding off on Harris' support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries in prison. "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you," the ad claimed.

Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, in a Substack column she penned on her party's "messaging crisis," said the rampant number of anti-transgender ads this election cycle was a "a gross exploitation of a vulnerable community." But she said the average person in Saginaw, Michigan doesn't think it's fair that their daughter has to compete in athletics with someone biologically stronger than her.

Roginsky also emphasized the lack of outrage from Democrats over pro-Palestinian protests this year that effectively shut down some colleges and universities.

"Democrats are no longer perceived as the party of common sense. In our quest not to offend anyone, we come across as totally out of line with how regular people think," Roginsky said.

Torres pointed to the results in heavily Latino Starr County, Texas, a southern border community that Trump won with 58% of the vote − ending 132 years Democratic vote support. Trump came within 6 percentage points of winning Democratic-stronghold New Jersey, he noted, and lost New York by only 12 points, slicing in half his 24-point 2020 defeat in New York.

"If that is not a wake-up call then I'm not sure what would be. And we ignore those wake-up calls at our own peril," Torres said. "We have to seriously reckon with the results of the election."

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Спонсоры
Поиск
Категории
Больше
Health
Cultural Perspectives on Scalp Micro Pigmentation Services
How Different Cultures View and Adopt Scalp Micro Pigmentation Services Scalp Micro Pigmentation...
От waltonhood 4 месяца назад 0 514
News
Water-based Coatings Market, Solutions, Services, Opportunities and Challenges Till 2032
Water-based Coatings Market Overview Water-based coatings Market Size was valued at USD 71.2...
От davidblogs30 3 месяца назад 0 324
Другое
Acid Lipase Deficiency Market share Analysis, & Forecast 2029
Acid lipase deficiency market is expected to gain market growth in the forecast period of...
От sophiyagrew год назад 0 3Кб
Другое
Strategic Storytelling: Public Relations Services That Shape Brand Narratives
Are you looking to elevate your brand's narrative and leave a lasting impact on your target...
От RaynoShannon 7 месяцев назад 0 905
Другое
Live Stats Dream Catcher: Analisi Completa di Tutte le Estrazioni
Introduzione: Dream Catcher, un popolare gioco di casinò live di Evolution Gaming,...
От Oliverte 3 месяца назад 0 384