Two weeks ago, an influential group of 15 Muslim religious and business leaders convened at an office space in Dunwoody, Ga., a suburb north of Atlanta, to discuss Vice President Kamala Harris.
Most were wary of her.
In Georgia, as elsewhere, her standing among Arab American and Muslim voters, a traditionally Democratic bloc, is precarious. As the Biden administration stands firm in its support for Israel as it wages war in Gaza and now Lebanon, an erosion of support for the Democratic ticket could cost Ms. Harris in multiple battlegrounds, including Michigan, where these voters have traditionally made up a critical portion of her party’s winning coalition.
With polls still showing the presidential race a dead heat against former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Harris’s Muslim backers in Georgia are making a frantic push to reach voters who are angry and upset about the escalating violence in the Mideast. One attendee showed up to the gathering in Dunwoody with a message he hoped the others there would hear, and spread — that if the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was their top concern, Mr. Trump and Republicans would be worse.
“We want them to move mountains for Gaza,” Omar Ali, an Atlanta-based businessman who is Black and Muslim, said of the Biden-Harris administration. “They can’t in the way that we want. But you rest assured we can get more with one particular party than the other party and that particular party has more of a heart than anything — and I’m talking about the Democratic Party.”
Georgia Democrats have credited the state’s Muslim and Arab American voters for helping them flip the state — winning it by fewer than 12,000 votes — in 2020. That year, election data showed roughly 57,000 Muslim and Arab Americans voters went to the polls in the state. The heads of some Muslim organizations in Georgia now put the figure at well above 100,000.
Many of those voters were motivated to go to the polls in the last presidential election by animus toward Mr. Trump, who barred travelers from certain majority Muslim countries from entering the United States under his presidency and whose anti-immigrant talking points on the campaign trail have included broadsides against those from the Middle East.
But more than a year into the conflict, Muslim and Arab American voters now point to the White House under President Biden and Ms. Harris as complicit in the catastrophes. Israel’s war against Hamas in retaliation for the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 — the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust — has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and displaced thousands more.
Despite Ms. Harris’s repeated calls to end the war and her expressions of dismay over the loss of life in both Palestine and Israel, she has not distanced herself much from Mr. Biden’s foreign policy stance — fueling the feelings of anger and discontent that Muslim and Arab voters say they intend to express at the ballot box. The fracture is playing out in Michigan, too, where the violence in the Mideast is also threatening Ms. Harris’s prospects.
Her supporters in Georgia have tried to pull voters back to her in the closing days of the presidential contest by arguing that Mr. Trump, who has claimed he “did more for Israel than anybody,” presents a far worse danger to their communities at home and abroad. While Mr. Ali said he thought he had persuaded some in his cohort, others outside that room have found the case less than convincing.
“I have yet to have a conversation with any Muslim person or any Arab person — literally not one — who has not brought this up as an issue. And the part that concerns me the most is how many of them follow that up with: ‘I can never vote for genocide,” said Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American organizer and Georgia state House representative who has been encouraging Muslim and Arab voters in the state to support Ms. Harris, with limited success.
In a statement, Nasrina Bargzie, the director of Muslim and Arab American outreach for Ms. Harris’s campaign, said the vice president was committed to ending the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. She criticized Mr. Trump’s policies relating to Muslims and immigrants from majority Muslim and Arab countries.
“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” she said.
Some on the ground say they expect a larger share of Black Muslim voters in Georgia to support the Democratic ticket in spite of frustrations with Ms. Harris — because of Mr. Trump.
“It’s a difficult decision, but I’ve never been able to be a one-issue voter,” said Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, a Black Muslim organizer who has participated in some of the Harris campaign’s outreach to Muslim voters and is the former chair of the Muslim Voter Project, a Georgia-based group that focuses on political engagement among Muslims in the state. “I am disappointed with how the Democratic Party is intervening in the Middle East, but it is not enough for me to vote a third party. And I cannot vote for Trump.”
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