By Emma Delahanty and Ikroop Singh
Public health advocate Malaak Elhage was volunteering for an organization in her parents’ hometown of Ghazieh, Lebanon, when the conflict in Gaza started last October. It brought her painful memories of bombings her family escaped in the same city almost 20 years ago, when she was 6 years old. Now a resident of Dearborn, MI, she’s unhappy with how President Joe Biden is handling the war, and she voted uncommitted in the primaries.
How will she vote in November? “I have no idea,” she said.
More than half of the nearly 110,000 residents of Dearborn are of Arab descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Michigan has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. Both communities were mostly united in opposing President Biden’s response to the Israeli military action in Gaza, following the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, as were many young voters. They created the Listen to Michigan campaign, garnering 100,000 uncommitted votes in the Michigan Democratic primary election. The movement spread nationwide, including to New York, Hawaii, Colorado and Illinois.
Muslim voters are an important voting block, particularly in the swing state of Michigan. There were 200,000 registered Muslim voters in Michigan in 2020 and President Biden won the state by 154,000 votes. But as those who voted uncommitted struggle with how to vote in November — or whether to vote at all — some fear that the movement might backfire and disengage voters altogether.
Emgage, an organization that helps mobilize and educate Muslim voters, got one million Muslims to vote in the U.S. elections in 2020. But Hira Khan, Emgage’s executive director for Michigan, said there is still a lot of voter apathy and she doesn’t believe that Michigan’s Arab and Muslim voter turnout will match the level of 2020. “If even 145,000 Muslims come out and vote again, I think that is even a challenge,” she said.
Michigan elected officials argue the best way to engage voters is to motivate them to show up on election day. “We know that if you vote in the primary, you are something like 95 percent likely to vote in the general election,” said State Representative Joey Andrews, who represents parts of Allegan, Berrien and Van Buren counties.
Berrien County Commissioner Chokwe Pitchford said he supports protests, but argued that this is not the moment for a protest vote with the elevated risk to American democracy if Donald Trump wins. On the other hand, he explained, if people protest vote and Biden still wins, “you completely dismantled your entire movement,” Pitchford said.
Many in Dearborn are refugees or children of refugee immigrants, and they are deeply affected by the conflict.
“What the war in Gaza has done, it has created PTSD for people,” said Assad Turfe, deputy executive of Wayne County, explaining that many local residents are traumatized by war because they’ve lost many family members over the years.
Turfe’s parents immigrated from Lebanon and he grew up in Dearborn, but both his grandmothers died as a result of conflicts. “They didn’t die of old age, they died of Israeli bombs,” he said. Turfe is a life-long Democrat who says he will never support Trump. But he wouldn’t say whether he will vote for President Biden either.
Ted Widmer, the former chief foreign policy speechwriter to President Clinton and a Macaulay Honors College professor teaching a course in the fall that will closely follow the 2024 election, understands why many people voted uncommitted. However, he said that he “can’t imagine that most people who voted uncommitted would prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden.”
One of the reasons for that, he said, is that many pro-Palestinian voters believe the best way to resolve the conflict in Gaza is with a two-state solution. “Biden and his team have been talking a lot about a two-state solution, Trump never talks about a two-state solution,” said Widmer.
Current polls are showing a different story. As of May 22, Trump was leading Biden by about 5 points in Michigan.
Rami Al-Kabra, deputy mayor of Bothell, WA, and the first immigrant Muslim American elected to Bothell City Council, believes things need to change immediately. “President Biden needs to hear our call: We cannot commit to you until your policies reflect what is moral and just,” he wrote in an op-ed in the Seattle Times.
The Youth Vote
Michigan’s college students are just as upset about the conflict as Muslim and Arab Americans, but according to Dante Chinni, a research specialist at Michigan State University, youth voters may not abandon the Democratic party as much as the primary vote suggests. Chinni believes that three key issues will decide whether voters aged 18-29 will turn up to the polls: Gaza, abortion and the fact that Trump is back on the ballot.
Chinni made one point clear about the influence of the Gaza conflict on this year’s election: “It’s still May,” she said. In the months leading up to November, a ceasefire may come about and different issues may take the media spotlight. Younger voters “are more sensitive to the climate around the election,” he said.
Chinni believes that the driving factor on election night will be similar to what it was in 2022, when the youth-vote turnout was 37 percent in Michigan, well above the national average of 23 percent, with much of it driven by abortion rights. The record turnout made it possible for the Democratic party to establish the first “Democratic trifecta” in Michigan in almost 40 years, with control of the governor’s office, the local Senate and House of Representatives.
Emgage is a bipartisan organization and it is still trying to figure out which presidential candidate to endorse. For Congress, it is endorsing Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent. In the meantime, Emgage is trying to motivate people to vote on other issues. “When you fill out a ballot, maybe you don’t have to fill out the whole, entire ballot,” Khan said.
That might be a hard sell. In presidential election years, when about 50 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, one third or more vote only for the top of the ticket, and ignore the bottom entirely.
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Patricia Prado contributed reporting.