A chunk of American voters who were behind President Joe Biden in 2020 could abandon him this fall.
One symptom of the disaffection from Arab American and Muslim voters came when Dearborn, Michigan, leaders refused to meet with campaign staff, according to the Guardian, which wrote that flagging support from Arab Americans and Muslims “may cost him the election.”
“They’re approaching the community now to speak about the issues unfolding as if they’re electoral problems or political ones. And for us, that’s not what these are,” Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said. More than half the people of this city of almost 110,000 have their roots in the Middle East or North Africa.
“This is an issue of humanity. Palestinians are not important because of polling numbers,” he said.
Ghada Elnajjar, a Palestinian-American organizer, said in 2020, the Biden campaign was actively seeking meetings with Muslim and Arab American voters. And now?
“The current outreach strategy to Arab American and American Muslim voters has been inept and awkward,” she said.
In rejecting a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Institute for Middle East Understanding sniped that “A meeting of this nature at this moment in time is insulting and performative,” according to CNN.
The discontent may manifest itself in action. Last month, Muslim Americans from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania met to launch the #AbandonBiden 2024 movement, according to Axios.
“Leaders from swing states will work together to guarantee Biden’s loss in the 2024 election,” organizers wrote in a statement.
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Organizer Jaylani Hussein, of Minneapolis, said that the group is not supporting former President Donald Trump as much as seeking recognition of its importance by the Democratic Party.
“We recognize that, in the next four years, our decision may cause us to have an even more difficult time. But we believe that this will give us a chance to recalibrate, and the Democrats will have to consider whether they want our votes or not,” he said.
Axios noted that taking a statistical look at the 2020 voting, a loss of votes from Muslim and Arab American voters could make a difference in November.
For example, Biden’s winning margin in Michigan – 154,000 votes – is slightly more than half of the estimated 278,000 Arab Americans in the state. Biden’s margin in Arizona was 10,500, which is well below the estimated Arab American population there of 60,000.
“In this area, 8 out of 10 Arab and Muslim voters voted for Joe Biden. Obviously Joe Biden does not represent those people anymore.” — Khalid Turaani, co-chair of the #AbandonBiden campaign pic.twitter.com/Vruy9azg7m
— Neoliberal tears 💦🌊 (@Neolibtears) February 2, 2024
The Arab American Institute has estimated that far from the 59 percent of Arab American voters who backed Biden in 2020, he was polling at about 17 percent support last fall.
The division among Democrats is likely to be on display throughout the campaign, one activist said.
“I don’t think that there’s going to be anywhere that Biden goes during this campaign where he won’t be disrupted or where there won’t be dissent,” Sandra Tamari, the executive director of the Adalah Justice Project, said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
