In yet another sign that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign might be haunted by the “uncommitted” vote, the mayor of a Muslim-majority city near Detroit announced his endorsement of former President Donald Trump.
This comes after the official group behind the “uncommitted” protest vote — the only major roadblock President Joe Biden had when it came to winning a practically unopposed nomination, only to give it all up after his campaign unraveled following a June 27 debate performance — announced it would not endorse Harris, either.
In Michigan, where the “uncommitted” movement started, Democratic Mayor Amer Ghalib of Muslim-majority Detroit suburb Hamtramck, said that Trump was “the right choice for this critical time” in a social media endorsement on Sunday.
“Let me be clear, so our expectations are realistic,” he said in the Facebook post.
“President Trump and I may not agree on everything, but I know he is a man of principles,” the message continued.
“Though it’s looking good, he may or may not win the election and be the 47th president of the United States, but I believe he is the right choice for this critical time. I’ll not regret my decision no matter what the outcome would be, and I’m ready to face the consequences.
“For this, and for many other reasons, I announce my support and endorsement for the former, and hopefully, the next president of the United States, Donald Trump,” he added. “Now, let the Caravan begin its journey. This is just the starting point.”
While Ghalib and Trump may make for strange bedfellows — especially considering he’s a mayor of a city where the council passed a resolution to name one stretch of road “Palestine Avenue” in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel — Hamtramck is also notably socially conservative, given its religious majority.
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Deadline Detroit noted that the same council also banned the display of the gay pride flag on city property last year and Ghalib met twice, first in September of 2023, with former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who warned that wokeism could threaten Islamic communities in the U.S.
And then, Fox News reported, Ghalib met with Trump in Flint, Michigan, for a private 20-minute one-on-one.
Ghalib told Fox News that the former president “knew a lot about me before the meeting.”
“We talked about various topics including the debates, the polls updates, the statistics of votes in Michigan and Wayne County, the Arab American concerns and the Yemeni Americans in particular. We also talked about the situation in Yemen,” Ghalib said.
And, while Ghalib might be in the minority of prominent American Muslims who endorse Donald Trump, what’s becoming increasingly clear is that the “uncommitted” vote in the primaries could come back to have a major effect on the presidential race, despite the fact that Joe Biden is gone.
As The New York Times noted in a report last week, the Uncommitted National Movement — “the national group that mobilized hundreds of thousands of primary voters to cast protest ballots against President Biden over the United States’ support for Israel in the war in Gaza” — declined to endorse Harris.
“The group said the decision had come after Ms. Harris failed to respond to its request for her to meet with Palestinian American families who have lost loved ones in Gaza, and for her to discuss the group’s demands for halting arms shipments to Israel. The group said it had asked for a response by Sept. 15,” the Times reported.
The move came Thursday, one day before Harris’ love-in with Oprah Winfrey during a Detroit-area Q&A.
“Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” said Abbas Alawieh, one of the co-founders of the organization.
However, the group also said it would not endorse Trump or any vote that helped him, either, saying that Trump “bragged about accelerating the genocide against Palestinians and promised to intensify the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S.”
Michigan had the second-highest percentage of uncommitted votes in the primary, after Minnesota, according to the Times.
Unlike Minnesota, which is seen as being more safely Democratic, Michigan is still in toss-up territory. All in all, roughly one in 10 votes in the primaries either went to “uncommitted” or a minor candidate, clear signs of trouble on the horizon.
What’s more, the lion’s share of this vote tended to be younger voters — a demographic that Harris was supposed to safely carry. While polls have showed that Harris fares better than Biden with voters under 30, she still performs well under Biden’s 2020 performance with that demographic.
Amer Ghalib might be an outlier, but he’s proof that swapping out candidates hasn’t revived the canary in the coal mine that is the uncommitted Democratic voter, who could very well sit this one out — or actively hand the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump.
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