An old adage suggests that foreign policy doesn’t decide elections.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” Clinton campaign strategist James Carville famously proclaimed in the lead-up to the 1992 elections.
But this year’s nail-biter presidential election could come down, in part, to war in the Middle East – and whether Vice President Kamala Harris can recapture support from the historically Democratic Arab-American community.
And according to activists in swing states, the Trump team is seizing on Arab Americans’ sour feelings about the Biden-Harris administration.
“For Democrats, outreach is pretty null towards the grassroots,” Samraa Luqman, a Dearborn-based Arab-American activist told Fox News Digital.
“The Republicans’ outreach has been like nothing I have ever seen,” said Luqman, who wrote in Bernie Sanders in 2020 and is now voting for former President Donald Trump.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a Univision town hall, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“The people that are surrounding the president have been in communication with grassroots organizers, local leaders, people like myself,” she went on. “I’m really not somebody on the national stage. . . . And yet, here I am with access” to those like Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, and Massad Boulos, father-in-law of Trump’s daughter, Tiffany.
Grenell, who may well find himself in a Cabinet-level job if Trump is elected, and Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman, have been leading the outreach to Arab American communities in swing states and “they’ve gotten progressives like myself on board to say that this is the right person for the job at this time, considering the alternative.”
For Luqman — who supports Medicare for all and student debt forgiveness – hers is a vote of protest more than an enthusiasm for Trump. “It’s really become an issue about genocide and how to hold administrations accountable for it, simply because we cannot reward an administration for genocide.”
To Luqman and Palestinian supporters in the U.S., President Joe Biden’s criticisms of Israel’s offensive campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon ring hollow when the U.S. continues to provide aid without conditions to the war effort.
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Biden is a “completely owned dog to Bibi,” said Luqman, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump, she said, “is not.”
“Trump is a wild card, and we saw him sour on Bibi towards the end of his presidency.”
“Perhaps he would say his America-first policy means that we are going to keep our billions at home,” she went on. “Perhaps he would say, you know, the whole ‘peace through strength’ . . . I told you to do something, and you didn’t do it, then possibly withholding the military aid would come next.”
A Palestinian woman carrying her child in her arms cries in front of a collapsed building as the dead bodies of Palestinians who died in Israel’s attack on the Bureij Refugee Camp are brought to the al-Awda Hospital for burial in Gaza City, Gaza on Sept. 19, 2024. (Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
As for what Trump might do better, “It really comes down to personality.”
Michigan, which Biden narrowly won in 2020, is a crucial battleground state this election. It has the second-highest population of Arab American residents – north of 300,000.
Trump won the state by just 11,000 votes in 2016 over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and then lost the state four years later by nearly 154,000 votes to Biden.
And while Arab Americans also historically favor Democrats, new polling suggests that could change. Of likely voters in the community, Arab Americans favor Trump over Harris 46% to 42%, according to new polling by the Arab American Institute.
“This is a shift that started several years ago, around 2022, when there was sexually explicit material in books in public school libraries, and the community felt, you know, [they wanted] to assert parental rights. They did not want their children exposed to these at whatever age it was,” said Luqman.
“I’m not one of those people that was in those buckets. I am very liberal. But once Oct. 7 happened, that solidified support for Republicans among some people within this community.”
Last month, Democratic Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Michigan, a town where 60% are believed to be Muslim Americans, announced his endorsement of Trump.
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Biden won 60% of the Arab American vote in 2020, but support from that community has cratered since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
The National Uncommitted and Abandon Biden movement launched a campaign calling on voters to cast uncommitted ballots in swing state primaries to send a message to Democrats, and more than a million did so.
Trump has said that for a Jewish American not to vote for him “shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” His campaign frequently suggests that Harris favors the Palestinian cause over the Israelis.
But in April, Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt “Israel is absolutely losing the PR war,” and criticized the images being shown of Gaza in ruins.
“You’ve got to get it over with, and you have to get back to normalcy. And I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory,” Trump said, without directly answering whether he was “100 percent with Israel.”
A man uses his mobile phone as flames and smoke rise at the scene of buildings hit by an Israeli airstrike in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein) (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Trump recently said that a post-war Gaza could be “better than Monaco.”
“It could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything,” he told Hewitt earlier this month.
“They never took advantage of it. You know, as a developer, it could be the most beautiful place,” he said.
Trump has blamed the current unrest in the Middle East on Harris and Biden for loosening sanctions on Iran, thus emboldening its proxies to carry out the attack last year.
But his growing support among Arab Americans is a stark shift from the post 9/11 years and comes despite a history of anti-Muslim remarks and a travel ban on people from Muslim-majority nations in his first presidential administration.
And it’s a reflection of how Harris refusing to put any daylight between herself and Biden could be damaging.
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After Luqman’s efforts to get the party to abandon Biden, “I think I could have considered possibly voting Democrat,” she said.
“But after she came out with her policy stances, declared that there was no change in course, they were 100 percent exactly the same,” Luqman went on. “It became evident to me that she had to lose as well.”