Arab-American enthusiasm for voting dampens as Harris, Trump appear neck-and-neck: Poll
New polling suggests US Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are in a dead heat among Arab Americans for the race to the White House, though this has traditionally been a community that easily favoured Democrats - at least for the last thirty years.
The shift in attitudes is largely attributed to the year-long Israeli assault on Gaza, which has been carried out with the full support of the Biden administration, with no end in sight.
Figures published by the Arab American Institute (AAIUSA) on Wednesday show that the two leading presidential candidates are virtually tied among voters: Trump has a lead of one percentage point over Harris, at 42 percent to 41.
The remaining 17 percent is almost equally divided between third-party candidates and those who are unsure how they want to vote.
Among those who identified as Democrats, only 79 percent support Harris, while 89 percent of those who identified as Republicans said they support Trump.
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“[Harris] has certainly rebounded from where Biden was when we polled last - from 17 to 41. But it also says that she has not regained the numbers that Biden had in 2020, or I believe what Democrats need to win,” AAIUSA president James Zogby told Middle East Eye.
Support for Donald Trump between 2020 and 2024 remained mostly stable, from 35 to 42 percent, while the undecided respondents dropped from 25 to just five percent.
The Gaza factor
Among those who identified as Democrats, the respondents said the war on Gaza is their number one issue.
Across all those polled, 26 percent put Gaza in the top three issues which would impact their ballot.
When asked how it would affect their vote if Harris demanded an Israeli ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian aid into Gaza, 54 percent of Arab-American voters said they’d be more likely to support her, and that includes 35 percent of the respondents who said they would vote for Trump.
The figure increases slightly when voters are asked about Harris ending arms shipments to Israel: 56 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to lend her their support.
Arab Americans also said they would have been more likely to support Harris had the Democratic Party allowed a Palestinian-American speaker on the main stage at its August convention: 55 percent of them would have been willing to change their approach.
“What that says to me is not ‘I'm for Trump’. It's ‘I'm against her - but if she did this, well, I’d think differently about it,’” Zogby told MEE. “There's a softness to the rejection that could be turned around if she did something. The question is, will she do it?”
Rejection of Democrats
AAIUSA's executive summary said that the results are unprecedented.
“In our thirty years of polling Arab-American voters, we have not witnessed anything like the role that the war on Gaza is having on voter behaviour.”
“The year-long unfolding genocide in Gaza has impacted every component sub-group within the community - with only slight variations among religious communities and countries of origin, immigrant or native-born, gender and age groups.”
That is seen to have contributed to the drop in enthusiasm for voting, according to the survey.
Only 63 percent of respondents said they were eager to vote in this year's November election.
“Our turnouts have always been high,” Zogby said, pointing out the usual 80 percent range. Now, he warned, there is a “danger” of fewer people making their voices heard.
Just 67 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about voting, compared to 80 percent of respondents who identified as Republican.
When asked which side should control Congress, significantly more Republicans than Democratic respondents picked their own party.
Eighty-four percent of Democrats preferred Democratic control of Congress, compared to 96 percent of Republicans who preferred Republican control.
“I'm getting the feeling that there's a rejection here of things associated with Democrats,” Zogby said. “There's a real frustration right now with some parts of the community.”
Sally Howell, a professor of history and Arab-American studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said that was an understatement.
She told MEE she’s surprised by the figures which suggest at least 40 percent of Arab Americans could turn out for Harris or the Democrats.
“Most of the people who are on the left are moving toward someone like [Green Party candidate Jill] Stein or they're moving toward not voting in the presidential election,” Howell said. “They're not moving toward voting for Trump… I can't imagine either candidate getting 40 percent of the Arab American or Middle Eastern American vote in Michigan.”
‘Beyond the pale’
Michigan, a battleground state that could go either way in the election, is pivotal to winning the White House. And within it lies the largest Arab and Muslim community in the US, which also heavily skews Lebanese.
The AAIUSA survey was conducted between 9-20 September and includes the period during which Israel carried out two waves of pager explosions across southern Lebanon but before the heaviest bombings that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
The city of Dearborn, a Detroit suburb, saw a number of funerals in absentia for family members killed by Israel.
Howell said there has been a “complete disregard of Arab life” by the Biden administration as the violence escalates.
“You can't vote for an administration that supports these policies. You just can't. That's what I'm hearing people say,” she told MEE. “What's already happened is beyond the pale, and people are just not going to vote for either of the two major candidates.”
AAIUSA estimates that some 3.7 million people in the US identify as Arab.
When MEE asked why the presidential campaigns should pay attention to this latest poll, Zogby had one question in return.
“Want to win Michigan?” he said.
Howell added that “people are desperate for this administration to reach out to them to show that they value the lives of Arab people”.
“If that happens, if they are treated as though their votes matter, their political contributions matter, their contributions to American society and culture - which are vast - matter… then people would love to work with the Democrats.”
The AAIUSA survey is based on 500 respondents who identify as Arab Americans and who are all registered to vote.
In the US, citizens over the age of 18 must actively register to vote in their state of residence, sometimes months before an election takes place.
The margin of error for the 500 respondents in this survey is +/- 4.5 percentage points.
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