Ameen Almudhari was one of thousands of people in the majority-Arab community of Dearborn, Mich., who helped Joe Biden win the city and defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Four years later, Mr. Almudhari had had enough.
This week, he joined thousands of other Dearborn residents in voting for Mr. Trump, helping him score a stunning win in a place that seemed an unlikely source of support in the former president’s bid to return to the White House.
Standing next to his 10-year-old son outside an elementary school on the north side of Dearborn on Tuesday evening, Mr. Almudhari, 33, explained his change of heart, part of a remarkable turnabout in Dearborn, which is just outside Detroit.
He was, he said, fed up with Mr. Biden’s support of Israel and Ukraine and said the death and destruction being underwritten by the United States drove his decision to back Mr. Trump.
“The first time we vote for Joe Biden, but what we see right now, he didn’t stop the genocide in Gaza,” said Mr. Almudhari, a Yemeni American, who faulted the president for spending American money to support the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
His son, Khaled, interrupted him with a smiling comment: “Trump will end the war!”
Indeed, Mr. Trump has said as much, and the promise was among a host of reasons cited by voters in Dearborn for the wave of support from Arab and Muslim Americans for Mr. Trump.
Unofficial results released by the city of Dearborn show that Mr. Trump won 42 percent of the vote in Dearborn, compared with 36 percent for Ms. Harris and 18 percent for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.
In 2020, similar results released after the election showed that Mr. Biden had won almost 70 percent of votes by Dearborn residents.
Ms. Harris, who became the Democratic nominee after Mr. Biden withdrew over the summer, was ultimately unable — or unwilling — to escape the shadow of the Biden administration’s decisions in the Middle East. She sought to project more empathy for the plight of Palestinians caught in the conflict, which has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, and she tried to take a firmer tone with Israel, insisting in several speeches that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed to follow international law. It was not enough for many voters here.
Not making a clear break with Mr. Biden, even as she was vying for the White House, made Ms. Harris resoundingly unpopular in Dearborn. Her campaign chose not to have her hold public rallies or meetings in the city, perhaps fearing that any such event would be greeted with protests.
This week, the sentiments of Arab and Muslim Americans in Dearborn were heard through the ballot. In interviews with The Times on Tuesday outside polling stations, voters backing Mr. Trump said they wanted to give him a chance to rein in wars across the world and bring peace to the Middle East.
Nadeen Alsoufi, 22, was one of the many Trump backers. A first-time voter, she had immigrated from Yemen nearly a decade ago.
“I really hope that what he meant is actually what he’s going to do if he wins president,” she said. “That’s the only thing that literally pushed me to vote.”
Many voters brushed aside comments Mr. Trump has made that were critical of Muslims, and some of them cited his willingness to visit Dearborn and bring prominent local Muslim leaders onstage at a recent campaign rally as evidence of an olive branch.
Others in the city said that a bigger reason for their support was that they believed Mr. Trump was better on the economy. Concerns over incorporating L.Q.B.T.Q. issues in local schools’ curriculum came up among some voters as well.
Abdullah Hizam, 34, said that people had tried “to scare us from voting for Trump” by citing such things as Mr. Trump’s restrictions on migration from some Muslim-majority countries such as Yemen, where Mr. Hizam is from.
But that didn’t shake his support.
“It’s just the propaganda of the Democrats to kind of push that and scares us — ‘oh you’re not going to have any your family or relatives come here under his administration,’”— said Mr. Hizam, who backed Mr. Biden in 2020.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning at a pro-Trump election night party held in a Dearborn hookah lounge, Bishara Bahbah felt a sense of relief.
A Palestinian American and founder of Arab Americans for Trump, he had visited the area regularly from his home in Arizona to help deliver for Mr. Trump the Arab American vote in Michigan.
Mr. Bahbah said his efforts were aided by Ms. Harris’s unwillingness to heed several community demands — including not having a Palestinian American speak at the Democratic National Convention and not calling for a partial arms embargo on Israel.
“She shot herself in the foot,” he said, theorizing that Ms. Harris could have captured more Arab American voters had she staked out clear positions and had prominent meetings in the area like Mr. Trump did.
Earlier, across town at an election event held at a food hall, Ali Dagher, a Dearborn-based lawyer who supported Ms. Harris, looked uneasy as early results indicated that Mr. Trump was going to win. He believed those who backed the Mr. Trump or decided not to vote for Ms. Harris would come to regret their decisions.
Mr. Dagher, a Lebanese American, said he had urged Democrats to more forcefully make their positions clear on Gaza and to provide a road map for Arab Americans to support Ms. Harris.
“We wanted a plan. She presented no plan, and by failing to present a plan, our community perceived it as her lack of leadership and weakness,” he said Wednesday morning. “When Trump came in and said, ‘I will bring peace,’ they took his words literally and absorbed him.”
Mr. Dagher, however, said that Arab and Muslim Americans who backed Mr. Trump were part of what turned out to be a broad array of voters deeply unhappy with Mr. Biden and unwilling to elect his vice president to succeed him.
“I’m disappointed that people acted in anger, but I understand. I’m not blaming my community for what they did,” he said. “My community acted like every other community in the United States, and obviously the overwhelming sweep is part of that.”
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