President-Elect Donald Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the densely populated Arab-American community of Dearborn, Michigan, where he lost by a steep margin to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump has been declared the winner of Michigan and its 15 electoral votes, completing a sweep of swing states in the Rust Belt. One substantial trend in the Wolverine State indicates Vice President Kamala Harris lost a significant amount of support among Arab American voters compared to that of President Joe Biden in 2020.
Unofficial results from Dearborn, where the BBC notes a majority of citizens are of Arab descent, show that Trump landed 17,796 votes, while Harris garnered 15,189 votes, marking a seismic shift compared to 2020. Meanwhile, the Green Party’s Jill Stein received 7,697 votes.
In the last cycle, Biden more than doubled Trump’s total with 30,718 votes to his 13,239.
Driving this trend seems to be deep frustrations over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the conflict in the Middle East. In Michigan’s Democrat primary, the Listen to Michigan campaign sought to garner 10,000 uncommitted votes to protest the administration’s policies.
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The primary vote was meant to serve as a warning to Democrats that unless a ceasefire were achieved, these voters would not vote for the Democrat candidate in the general election.
The group smashed its goal as more than 100,000 Democrats voted uncommitted in the primary, and the movement expanded to the national level. And as Biden and Harris both failed to reach a ceasefire, the Dearborn results suggest many Arab Americans seem to have followed through on their pledge not to vote Democrat.
Stein received a vital chunk of the Dearborn support that went to Biden in 2020. She was a prominent pro-Palestinian advocate during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which was clouded with protests over the conflict in the Middle East, and she polled well with Arab Americans in recent months.
And while Dearborn and other Arab-dense communities like Hamtramck are in Wayne County, Oakland County, which also has a robust Arab-American population, saw the vote total move significantly in Trump’s favor and away from Democrats compared to 2020.
Trump garnered 337,592 votes in Oakland County, with less than five percent of the vote yet to be reported, according to the New York Times’ election results as of midday Thursday. This is 11,621 more votes than the 325,971 he received in 2020.
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Conversely, Harris’s 419,121 total is 15,027 votes less than the 434,148 number Biden in Oakland County four years ago, per the Times. Overall, Oakland County has moved a net 3.5 percentage points toward Trump since the last cycle, while Wayne County has moved a staggering 9.9 percent toward him and away from Democrats.
Hamtramck Mayor Ameer Ghalib (D), who endorsed Trump after frustrations with both Biden and Harris over a lack of policy change, spoke with Sirius XM’s Breitbart News on Saturday, September, about the impact shifting dynamics in Michigan’s Arab communities could have on the state’s outcome.
“I mean, we saw in the past that some candidates will, presidential candidates will win Michigan by just 10,000 or 20,000 votes,” he said. “So it is definitely a critical number that will have a major effect, especially in a tight race and swing state like this 20,000, 30,000 votes will be a major determinant of the outcomes of this election, and especially if you get those votes from a community that was never supportive of you. So this is a major change.”
As of this writing, the New York Times election results show Trump had 82,128 more votes than Harris statewide.
