US elections 2024: The Arab capital of America voted for Trump. Now, the work begins

Put simply, it was not Dearborn, Michigan, that brought down Kamala Harris.

Yes, the Arab-majority suburbs of Democrat-blue Detroit went Republican-red on Tuesday, with voters overwhelmingly choosing Donald Trump over the vice president. 

But ultimately, it was the direction much of the United States decided to take. Whether it was due to conflicts bankrolled by the US, culture wars over identity and gender or the soaring price of groceries, Trump won six of the seven battleground states and the race was effectively over by 1am (6am GMT) on election night. 

The Democrats were handily defeated - a result that many Arab-Americans here were not disappointed by, given they feel the party abandoned them over the past year. 

At the same time, the realisation has now set in, for better or worse: the brash, unpredictable, and very unconventional former president - twice impeached and now a convicted felon - is going to lead this nation once again. 

“I think the entire country is going to have buyer's remorse in the next few months,” Sally Howell, director of the University of Michigan-Dearborn's Center for Arab American Studies, told Middle East Eye.

“And I think that the Arab American community is definitely going to have buyer's remorse, but I also think that there's a moral principle here: I don't know where else the Arab American community could have gone,” she said. 

There was, of course, a third-party option: Green Party candidate Jill Stein, an openly anti-Zionist, anti-war candidate with no chance of ascending to the Oval Office. Even though she was an option, she received far fewer votes than Harris.

Nationwide, Stein barely reached 1 percent of the tally. 

Trump had sent a steady stream of surrogates here since May - including his new Lebanese relatives, Massad Boulos and his son Michael - and pledged to end the wars in the Middle East. 

Just a few days before the election, the former president himself came to Dearborn. Though the visit was brief, no other presidential candidate had done the same before. 

“It might sound to you like it's a low bar, but it's a really important symbolic bar,” Howell said.

Howell notes that Arab Americans spent the past year doing everything they could to salvage their relationship with the Democratic Party.

“It is really a measure of how abandoned this population feels by the Democratic Party.”

“I don't know what they could have done more than they did. They tried to raise [the wars on Gaza and Lebanon] issue. They've worked on every single level of society to try and raise this issue, and no one paid attention to them.”

‘I wash my hands of this issue’

Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, a Palestinian-American writer and political analyst in the Dearborn area, said he voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and described himself as sometimes Democrat, sometimes Libertarian. 

After Michigan opened up early voting this year, Abdelrahman filled out his ballot on 29 October and shared a photograph on X. 

Rather than choosing any listed candidates, he cast his vote as a write-in, naming Palestinians Hind Rajab and Muhammed Bhar as his presidential ticket.

🧵As a Palestinian American and resident of Michigan, I casted my vote today for Hind Rajab and Muhammed Bhar.

Rajab was trapped inside of an ambulance that was shot over 300 times by the IDF.

Bhar was a defenseless man with syndrome mauled to death by an IDF attack dog. pic.twitter.com/jHohwEQZPF

— Abdelhalim Abdelrahman- عبد الحليم عبد الرحمن (@AbdelA1924) October 29, 2024

Six-year-old Rajab was left to die in Gaza after Israeli tanks surrounded her family’s vehicle and killed the first responders trying to reach her. 

Twenty-four-year-old Bhar, who had Down syndrome, was mauled to death by an Israeli army dog in his own home. 

“I wanted to honour the fallen, and I wanted people to just know that the genocide is on the ballot and that there will be electoral consequences for being engineers of one of the deadliest crimes in humanity in the 21st century,” Abdelrahman told MEE. 

His ballot was likely added to a pile with other write-ins, disregarded unless the write-in candidate had filed paperwork to run.

'The question becomes how do we assert ourselves as Arabs and Muslims? How do we become a political block that is a force to be reckoned with?'

-Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, Palestinian-American writer

Wayne County, home to Michigan's Arab-majority suburbs, has yet to post its results from all precincts. But as of 6.48am (11.48 GMT) on election day, 1.3 percent of ballots cast included write-ins for president and vice president. 

“The way I view it is, I wash my hands of this issue entirely in terms of did I contribute to Trump winning or Kamala losing and vice versa?" Abdelrahman said.

He added that the Muslim and Arab communities have often not had a choice but to engage in a damage control-driven "race to the bottom" in elections.

“We were going to suffer, whether it be through Islamophobia and racism here in the United States or one of these candidates’... imperialistic foreign policy,” he told MEE. 

Write-ins are often seen as protest votes, sometimes dismissed as throwaways, especially if they siphon support from the shoo-in candidate - in this case, the Democrat. 

So, the question remains: did Abdelrahman and others like him inadvertently help Trump win?

“We're prepared for it. We're ready to bear the consequences of it - not because we want to or because we love it. But we're trying to change the status quo and we want to make Palestine a pre-eminent foreign policy issue,” Abdelrahman said. 

Abandon Trump?

At the Green Party’s election night event in Dearborn, co-hosted by the Abandon Harris campaign, results projected on to a big screen at midnight showed Trump with a clear, commanding lead over Harris. He had 230 electoral votes to her 205, with 270 needed to win. 

Egyptian-American Hassan Abdel Salam, co-founder of the Abandon Biden and now Abandon Harris movement, looked up at the screen and allowed himself a small smile.

If those numbers held, would it be a victory for his movement? 

“Yes, we won. But there's also the case of establishing with our data that we were the reason for peeling the significant percentage away from the vice president,” he told MEE. 

“That has been our goal: to punish the vice president for her genocide, then take the blame for her defeat, which we will happily do in our press conferences,” he added.

Now, Abdel Salam faces the potential risks of a Trump presidency for Arab and Muslim Americans, especially if Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric intensifies and Israel is not reined in. 

Abdel Salam said he is already considering issuing an ultimatum to President-elect Trump, similar to those his movement directed at Biden and Harris: end the war on Gaza or the campaign against you will escalate.

“If he doesn't respond, [we will begin] an organisation to abandon Trump,” he told MEE.

Such a movement, he added, would depend on the demographic that actually turned out for the former president.

Figures now show that Trump soared among Arab Americans.

“You can only abandon a candidate that you voted for,” Abdel Salam said. 

“We will have leverage… if he doesn't fulfil his promises of peace, of not having a Muslim ban, of not being an Islamophobic president, of ensuring that Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, people who are dedicated to just policy in Gaza, have to be in his administration.” 

The Trump campaign was keenly aware of the Abandon Harris movement’s impact in swing states, where much of the movement’s grassroots efforts were concentrated. In fact, Abdel Salam shared that Republicans even sought the group’s endorsement.

“They've tried to come and get us to say that we're going to side with them. So it shows that when you actually establish yourself as a credible threat,  people want your endorsement. So we intend to do everything we can to ensure that this administration is held to account.” 

Meanwhile, Howell said Arab Americans should not have any regrets about their ballots. 

“They're not to blame for what happened, and they can - just equally with the rest of America - mourn the loss of rights or opportunity or freedoms that are going to come with this administration.”