Muslim-Americans turn their backs on Trump, Harris as final voting approaches

Alameen Templeton

The “undecided” Muslim Americans who were unsure who they’d vote for in the US presidential election are putting their Xs next to either Kamala Harris and Jill Stein, with the needle pointing to Donald Trump supporters still stuck at about 10%.
The last poll taken Monday before final voting day Tuesday shows Muslim support for independent Jill Stein at 42% and Kamala Harris at 41%.

But Stein’s strong showing is likely to favour Trump because her support is seen as bleeding votes away from the Democrats’ liberal camp. In this context, many pollsters have said “a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump”.
The surge in final-day support for Stein and Harris appears to come from the ranks of previously undecided Muslim-American voters who stood at 16% in August and dropped to just 0.8% in Friday’s poll.
About 95% of Muslim voters said they’d be turning up at the polls, with a significant downturn in support for the Republican party compared to previous elections, but that translated into increased support for Stein, rather than for the Democrats.
Many regret supporting ‘Genocide Joe’
A Cair poll in 2020 found 69% of Muslim-Americans voted for Joe “Genocide” Biden.
The 2024 race shows how deeply they regret that decision.
“The significant drop in support for major presidential candidates compared to 2020 and 2016 is almost certainly a result of community concerns regarding the genocide in Gaza,” Cair said.
It’s a difficult decision, with support for the Muslim genocide resolute in both the Democrat and Republican parties. Even Turkey’s government hasn’t been able to say which candidate would be best, or worst, for Ankara.
Observers in Turkey say President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is awaiting the election results before making some key decisions, including who to include in his Cabinet, Anadolu reports.
Erdogan has avoided meeting either candidate, restricting his communications to just one phone call to Trump after his ear was shot.
Other Muslim leaders, like the UAE’s president Mohammed bin Yazed Al Nahyan, have opted to meet both candidates.
Young Americans are even more confused. Generation Z – born after the mid-Nineties – now number over 40 million, and nearly half of them are people of colour.
Affinity with the oppressed
There are also 4.3million first-generation immigrants under 35 in the US; second-generation Americans under 35 are estimated to number about 14million.
So, that’s about 60million Americans who will be concerned about the anti-immigrant tendencies in both parties, who feel alienated by America’s wars and have an affinity with oppressed nations.
For them, the idea of voting for the same party that they deem as the perpetrator of genocide in Gaza, or even participating in electoral politics at all, is unacceptable.
Harris polls well ahead of Trump in this group. A Harvard Kennedy School poll has Harris leading Trump by 20 points among registered voters under 30, by 53% to 33%.
Middle East Eye reports Columbia University student Maryam Alwan is a first-generation Palestinian American, who used to “fully identify as a Democrat” when she was 18 and voted for Joe Biden for her first presidential election. Now, after seeing the Biden-Harris administration’s full-throated support of Israel’s war on Gaza, she is adamant that she will not be voting blue.
Instead, Maryam will be mailing her ballot to her home state of Virginia to cast her vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.
Trump fairs better than Harris, however, in the swing state of Michigan, where both candidates are fighting for every vote. In an August Cair poll, Trump had 18 percent of the Muslim vote in Michigan, compared with Harris trailing at 12 percent.
‘Swing either way’
CBS News reported on Friday that Trump is set to visit Dearborn, Michigan, in the final voting hours.
Middle East Eye reports a Pew Study from 2017 showed Muslims make up around 3.45 million people in the US, many of whom live in several swing states across the US. Cair data in late August showed there were 2.5 million registered Muslim voters in the country.
Palestine, and Israel’s Gaza genocide, is the issue that tops priority lists for many Muslims this time around, even beyond domestic concerns.
The “Abandon Harris” campaign is urging Muslim voters to cast their ballots for anyone other than Harris is a bid to exert pressure on the Democrats who are still seen as more amenable to opposing open genocide than the Republicans.
“We need to begin to look like Independents that can swing either way, so that both parties bid for our approval, such that we begin the process of making the two parties move towards Muslim Americans,” Hassan Abdel Salam, a leader in the Abandon Harris movement, told Middle East Eye.