Muslims are largely abandoning the Democratic Party, election data shows, and it’s not surprising after the Biden-Harris administration supported Israeli genocide in Gaza by continuing to send the Jewish state money and weapons to carry out its campaign there.
According to data compiled by Leftie Stats from Pew Research, Change Research, and Muslim advocacy group CAIR, 93% of Muslims voted for Democrats in 2020, while just 20% did so in 2024. When looking at CAIR data specifically, only 20% of voters said they backed Harris while 69% said they voted for Biden during their exit poll in 2020.
Needless to say, that represents a huge drop and speaks volumes about their opinion of the party’s Middle East policies. Although Biden’s pro-Israel policies might have attracted a lot of donors, it didn’t go over nearly as well with voters, especially Muslim ones.
That does not mean, however, that they voted Republican instead; this particular set of data shows that 53% of them voted for the Green Party this time around, while 21% voted for Trump.
Other data seems to tell a different story, with 2024 voter analysis by Fox News showing Harris getting 63% of the Muslim vote and Trump getting 32%, but the media has been focusing heavily on the fact that Arab and Muslim voters have moved away from the Democratic Party.
The situation is so dire that some community leaders have been warning that this longstanding Democratic voter base may be undergoing a lasting shift of loyalties. NBC News admitted that Trump won by enough of a “comfortable margin” that this group did not make a difference in the outcome of the election, but it nevertheless could be a taste of what’s to come.
Democrats could lose Muslim voters in the long term
The co-chair of Uncommitted, a national movement that emerged in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, is one of those voices warning about the new reality.
Layla Elabed said: “We may see a mass exodus of multigenerational Democrats from the party. 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.”
Trump even managed to win in the nation’s most heavily Arab city, Dearborn, Michigan, where he took 42% of the vote in a gain of almost 15 percentage points over 2020. More than half of the city’s residents are of Middle Eastern descent. Harris captured just 36% of the vote there, which was just over half of the share that Biden attracted in 2020. Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who campaigned on putting an end to the genocide in Gaza, took a remarkable 18% of the vote there despite getting less than 1% nationwide.
A similar trend was seen in nearby Dearborn Heights, which also has a sizeable Middle Eastern community. Trump spent more time meeting with local community and religious leaders in and around Dearborn than Harris did in the lead-up to the election, and Dearborn’s Democratic mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to endorse Harris.
Prominent Muslim and Arab Democrats have expressed frustration that their party did not take their anger over genocide seriously and suggested that Democrats assumed they would still vote for Harris over Trump.
CAIR National Government Affairs Director Robert S. McCaw told NBC News: “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.”
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