Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, especially in the city of Dearborn, shifted away from the Democratic Party and toward President-elect Donald Trump in 2024. The Biden-Harris administration’s unwavering military assistance to Israel—and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s willingness to continue this policy—drove Arab American voters in Michigan away from a party that the community had consistently supported since the early 2000s. Trump won the state by more than 80,000 votes after losing it to outgoing President Joe Biden by more than 150,000 votes in 2020.
Trump won Dearborn, where more than half the population is of Middle Eastern or North African descent, by capturing 42 percent of votes to Harris’s 36 percent; the Green Party’s Jill Stein also took a substantial 18 percent of the vote in the city. In neighborhoods within the city where Arab Americans are the majority, such as eastern Dearborn, Harris performed even worse.
For example, in 2020, Biden beat Trump in eastern Dearborn by nearly 10,000 votes. On Election Day this year, the Detroit Free Press reports that Trump defeated Harris in eastern Dearborn by nearly 3,700 votes, accumulating 45 percent of the vote in 2024 after receiving only 18 percent in 2020 resulting in a 27 percent swing toward Trump that demonstrates how the Democrats’ refusal to restrain Israel as it destroyed Gaza likely pushed Arab Americans to the right.
Election results in the state came down to many factors—but a crucial one was who could make the biggest inroads with the Arab American community. The Democrats’ failure is clearest in Michigan’s 12th Congressional District, which includes Dearborn and Detroit and is represented by Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Preliminary results indicate that she won her reelection bid by nearly 161,000 votes against Republican challenger James Hooper—more than double Trump’s entire statewide margin.
One cannot help but think that had the Harris campaign worked harder for Arab American votes, then maybe those from Tlaib’s district who backed her would have been more inclined to also support Harris, rather than splitting their tickets.
It’s a question that may haunt Democratic strategists for years.
Differing perspectives on how to express dissent against the Democratic Party for its role in enabling actions that many international observers have deemed war crimes in Gaza and south Lebanon split members of Michigan’s Arab American community. Many voters supported Trump despite him being the architect of the 2016 executive action widely known as the “Muslim ban,” which prevented people from six Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, and frequently invoking anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Some, who were repulsed by Trump, decided instead to vote for Stein, the Green Party candidate. Others told Foreign Policy that they chose not to vote at all.
For 19-year-old Yemeni American Ali Aljahmi, a member of the family which owns Sheeba, a popular Yemeni restaurant in Dearborn, Trump’s victory could mark a new era in the Middle East: “I met Mr. Trump briefly along with his team. … They promised to stop the genocide [in] Gaza and what’s happening in Lebanon. Trump wants peace,” Aljahmi said.
Richard Grenell, the former U.S. acting director for national intelligence—working alongside Lebanese American Massad Boulos, whose son Michael is married to Trump’s daughter Tiffany—played a vital role in spearheading Trump’s engagement with Arab and Muslim voters in Dearborn.
Aljahmi told Foreign Policy that Trump and his team’s willingness to engage with Dearborn’s Arab-Muslim community, coupled with the Harris campaign actively avoiding Dearborn, contributed to him supporting Trump: “It was a stab in the back by the Democrats and Harris to not even talk to us,” Aljahmi said. “How many years have Arabs here been loyal to Democrats? Trump at least came here and spoke with us. I know he is flawed, but better the devil you know than the devil you do not. I have faith he will stop the wars. But if he does not, we will hold him accountable.”
Harris’s refusal to visit Dearborn’s Arab Americans—as well as the Democratic Party’s decision not to allow the Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, or any Palestinian speaker, to speak at the Democratic National Convention in August—was a slap in the face to the community. Harris essentially sent a message to the Arab American community that they were not welcome in the alleged big tent of the Democratic Party. This left an opening for Trump to make headway in Michigan.
Aljahmi’s faith in Trump is not unique in the area. Dearborn Heights’ independent mayor, Bill Bazzi—a Muslim immigrant from Lebanon who served in the United States Marines—also supported Trump. In an interview with Politico, Bazzi expressed his anger toward Harris’s campaign: “My main objective is about peace and economic prosperity for our country. But what really pushed me over the edge is when Kamala Harris brought Liz Cheney to our backyard.”
Disdain for the Cheney family was a widespread theme among Michigan’s Arab Americans. Online chatter, news coverage, and informal interviews conducted by Foreign Policy confirm that many of these voters were turned off by Harris’s public flaunting of an endorsement from the Cheneys.
“I just had a flashback to when her dad [former Vice President Dick Cheney] started the war in Iraq. … So now you bring a Cheney to our backyard, whose family started a war, and now we’re in a war,” Bazzi told Politico, adding, That’s when I was like, enough of this! I decided to go forward with a public endorsement after I chatted with President Trump to find out his platform. He’s a man of peace.”
For many in the community, Harris’s embrace of the Cheneys was seen as an embrace of neoconservatism, an ideology that many of Michigan’s Arab Americans see as the cause for their marginalization in the United States and the destruction of the Middle East. Moreover, Harris’s choice to campaign with the Cheneys was widely perceived as appealing to a pro-Iraq War constituency that no longer exists—adding to the sense that Harris was a candidate out of her depth politically.
However, not all of Michigan’s Arab Americans agree with either Bazzi or Aljhami. Lebanese American Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud refused to endorse either Trump or Harris. And when Trump’s campaign asked to meet with the Dearborn mayor, Hammoud refused.
In an interview with Democracy Now published the day before the election, Hammoud skewered Trump: “This is the president that ushered in the Muslim ban, that wants to be the architect of the Muslim ban 2.0. This is somebody that annexed the Golan Heights. … This is somebody that provided Saudi Arabia with the arms to kill over 30,000 people, innocent civilians, in Yemen. And so, I’m not here to be fooled by President Donald Trump,” he said.
However, despite their disdain for the president-elect, some voters in Michigan believe that the conditions in Gaza and South Lebanon cannot get any worse regardless of who is the next U.S. president.
Saba Saed, a Palestinian American who voted for Stein, echoed a similar sentiment to Foreign Policy, expressing her indifference toward the idea that Trump will exacerbate Palestinian and Lebanese suffering any further: “It’s hard to care when they’re clearly just lying [about Gaza and South Lebanon]. I don’t know anymore. What’s worse than what’s going on right now in Gaza?” Saed asked.
It is possible that a Trump presidency could be worse for both Palestinians living in the diaspora in the United States and those in the illegally occupied West Bank. During his campaign, Trump dubbed pro-Palestine student as “Hamas supporters” and said he would deport Palestinian visa-holders who participated in pro-Palestine rallies.
Then there’s the concern that Trump will once again fill his administration with the pro-Israel hawks who were once the engineers of the most anti-Palestinian policies in the history of the United States during his first term. There are concerns from those in the community that it is possible that Trump allow for the West Bank to be formally annexed, leading to the mass expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank at a level unseen since what Palestinians call the “Nakba” in 1948.
Trump has just nominated former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to the post of U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has a history of anti-Palestinian racism. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Huckabee told a rabbi: “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” He did not stop there. In 2017, Huckabee told CNN: “There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They are communities, they’re neighborhoods, cities. There is no occupation,” said Huckabee. Trump has also tapped pro-Israel real estate investor, Steven Witkoff as his Special Envoy to the Middle East.
However, Saba’s viewpoint that things cannot get worse is one that many Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan share—regardless of who they voted for. While they recognize the risks associated with a Trump presidency, most of these voters who have spoken publicly or with Foreign Policy assert that the destruction of Gaza and the dehumanization of Arab Americans at home became possible due to Biden and Harris ignoring U.S. law as they supported unwavering military assistance to Israel.
Despite credible evidence from international observers indicating that Israel has used U.S. weapons to facilitate war crimes in Gaza and block aid from coming into the enclave, both blatant violations of the United States’s Leahy Law and Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, Biden ignored such concerns and continues to indulge Israel with unfettered arm shipments (totaling $17.9 billion of military aid to Israel in the year following Oct. 7, 2023).
And while much has been made of the possibility that Trump may allow Israel to formally annex the West Bank and permit Israeli resettlement in Gaza, many Michigan voters find it difficult to forget that Biden and Harris enforced Trump’s policies on Israel-Palestine, including recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the shuttering of the Palestinian consulate in East Jerusalem.
They have watched for four years as Palestinians were forbidden from building in most areas of the West Bank and left defenseless in the face of rampant state-backed violence from Israeli settlers while Israel has also allegedly blocked humanitarian aid from entering Gaza in what several human rights organizations deem a breach of the ultimatum that Biden laid out in October.
All of these things have happened under a Democratic president, leaving many voters in Dearborn to conclude that Trump’s possible erasure of Palestine is simply an extension of the status quo established by Biden and Harris.
Given the widespread perception that Democrats are no better than Trump, there are also those who refused to partake in the election entirely because they were disgusted by both candidates’ stances.
Nancy, a Dearborn resident who hails from south Lebanon and asked that Foreign Policy use a pseudonym to protect her identity, expressed anger toward the electoral system: “I did not vote in the election because I refuse to participate in a system that is against people.” She also expressed a popular viewpoint expressed by many Arab Americans: “I am glad Kamala Harris lost because her and the Democrats are shamelessly carrying out genocide in Gaza,” Nancy said.
For many of Dearborn’s Arab Americans, surviving Trump’s first term meant having to witness the deportation of their loved ones, an experience that deeply impacted Michigan’s Iraqi population. Those draconian measures instilled within them a sense of steadfastness that has prepared them once again to take a stand against U.S. foreign policy toward both the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
While the community is still contemplating on whether to engage with Trump from an advocacy and outreach standpoint, their message is now clear.
Dearborn’s Arab Americans and many voters across the country are sick of endless war in the Middle East. They now demand a foreign policy rooted in restraint, the rule of law, and relationships with nations that serve U.S. interests.
Beyond that, Arab Americans protesting Democrats now hope that the party finally understands that being ardently anti-Palestinian, pro-Israel, and enabling what they view as genocide in Gaza has electoral consequences.
The post Why Michigan’s Arab Americans Voted for Trump appeared first on Foreign Policy.
