Harris and Stein tied for Muslim-American vote in last poll before election day
A large group of Muslim Americans has split its vote evenly between Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the final national poll on Muslim Americans released before the upcoming US presidential election on 5 November.
The poll, published on Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), shows Stein and Harris in a statistical tie for the American-Muslim vote, with 42 percent now favouring the Green Party nominee and 41 percent backing the Democratic candidate. The poll has a 2.5 percent margin of error.
A Cair poll released on 29 August also showed Stein and Harris tied for the Muslim-American vote, with 29 percent of respondents saying they planned to vote for Stein and 28 percent planning to vote for Harris.
Donald Trump is expected to take around 10 percent of the Muslim-American vote, according to Friday’s poll, which is relatively unchanged from his support level in August.
The increase in those planning to back Harris and Stein appears to come from the amount of previously undecided Muslim-American voters, which stood at 16 percent in August and dropped to just 0.8 percent in Friday’s poll.
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“This final national poll of American-Muslim voters confirms that our community members are deeply engaged in the 2024 election, with 95 percent saying they plan to turn out to vote,” Cair said.
'Significant drop in support for major candidates'
The report reveals the increasingly visible electoral fault lines inside the Muslim-American community, with more Muslims choosing not to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate than in previous years.
A 2020 poll by Cair found that 69 percent of Muslims voted for Joe Biden in the previous presidential election.
“The significant drop in support for major presidential candidates compared to 2020 and 2016 is almost certainly a result of community concerns regarding the genocide in Gaza,” Cair said.
According to a Pew Study from 2017, Muslims make up around 3.45 million people in the US, many of whom live in several swing states across the US. Cair released data in late August showing there were 2.5 million registered Muslim voters in the country.
Palestine, and by extension, Israel's war on Gaza, is an issue that tops the list of priorities for many Muslims this time around, even beyond domestic concerns.
That outrage has emerged in a number of ways, including mass protests in major US cities and across university campuses, as well as voter outreach efforts.
'I've had enough'
The Abandon Harris (formerly Abandon Biden) campaign, is urging Muslims, Arabs, and voters against the war on Gaza to cast their ballots for a candidate other than Harris - a protest vote to show their widespread disapproval of her administration and campaign's support for Israel.
"We need to begin to look like Independents that can swing either way, so that both parties bid for our approval, such that we begin the process of making the two parties move towards Muslim Americans," Hassan Abdel Salam, a leader in the Abandon Harris movement, told Middle East Eye.
Saad Husain, a 62-year-old from Canton, a town in Wayne County, Michigan, told MEE he was voting for Stein because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. He was unswayed by the Democratic Party’s framing of Trump as “the lesser evil”, saying “I've had enough”.
Trump fairs better than Harris, however, in the swing state of Michigan, where both candidates are fighting for every vote. In an August Cair poll, Trump had 18 percent of the Muslim vote in Michigan, compared with Harris trailing at 12 percent.
CBS News reported on Friday that Trump is set to visit Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the US.
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