Loading ...Arab Americans in Michigan could be a major force in the presidential election
Lauren Gibbons
MLive.com
With at least 186,000 Michigan residents claiming Arab ancestry, Michigan’s Arab American population has the potential to significantly impact where the state falls in the presidential race.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that almost 97,000 Michigan residents were born in Middle Eastern countries, including about 47,300 born in Iraq, the single largest group. That’s about 1 percent of the state population. And southeast Michigan is home to one of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the country.
If current trends hold, the majority of Arab Americans will likely vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. In a survey of likely Arab American voters conducted nationally by Zogby Analytics between Oct. 4 and Oct. 12, and released Tuesday by the Washington, D.C.-based Arab American Institute, Clinton tops Republican Donald Trump — 60 percent said they’ll vote for Clinton, while 26 percent side with Trump.
But in the final weeks of the election, both campaigns are making outreach efforts to Michigan’s Arab American community as voters prepare to go to the polls.
Consolidating Democratic voters
Since Clinton accepted the presidential nomination, the Hillary for Michigan campaign has made several efforts to reach out to Arab Americans and Muslims living in Michigan — opening an office in Dearborn, hiring several Arab and Muslim Americans to senior staff positions and organizing specially-designed phone banks and canvass events.
The campaign also sent a surrogate to Dearborn who was especially popular in Michigan — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination chalked up one of his key victories in the Great Lakes State.
Sanders won Michigan with 49.8 percent of the votes to Clinton’s 48.3 percent, but in Dearborn, that margin was much wider. Sanders defeated Clinton in the city with 60 percent of the vote there.
Samia Hamid, a Clinton campaign organizer based in Dearborn, understands where those voters were coming from. She voted for Sanders in the primary too.
“In the beginning, there was a lot of pullback,” she said. “One person I called, he goes, ‘I still have my Bernie sign out, and I’m not taking it down.’ But then as it draws closer to the election, I notice people are now finally shifting over for Hillary, because look at the alternative.”
It helped to have Sanders return to Dearborn and discuss why he was endorsing Clinton, especially honing in on education issues and the minimum wage policies he worked on with Clinton, Hamid said.
But Hamid said as she talks with people throughout the community, she’s not focusing on why people should vote against Trump, although she has several personal feelings on the matter.
“I’m talking to them and telling them to vote for Hillary,” she said. “That’s my base of the argument, and of the campaign, and this job for me. It’s historic.”
Other Clinton surrogates who have visited Dearborn to stump for their chosen candidate include Congressman Keith Ellison and Huma Abedin, vice chairperson of the Hillary for America campaign and longtime Clinton aide. Ed Gabriel, former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco, also is campaigning for Clinton at a series of events in Dearborn and Sterling Heights this week.
Abbas Youssef, an engineer and technology consultant from Dearborn Heights, also voted for Sanders in the primary based on his education stances. Now, he not only supports Clinton, but also is urging others that the alternative of Trump could have lasting impacts.
“I feel ashamed that a person with his vulgarity has come to represent a major party like the Republican Party,” Youssef said, referring to Trump. “It’s unfair to Republicans, it’s unfair to us as Americans, because we are a better society than that.”
Clinton has been an inspiration for Channaz Homayssi, a Dearborn real estate agent who was motivated to volunteer for a political campaign for the first time ever this year.
Clinton, Homayssi said, would accurately represent her daughter and her granddaughter, her son who is working to afford his college education, and herself.
“I see her like me,” she said. “She’s a hard working woman, she’s a family woman, she is everyone that you think of who’s went through a hard time…She represents me, I want her to be president, so I’m working for free just to put her in office.”
‘Interested in the same issues everyone else is’
Trump’s campaign has also made recent efforts to reach out to Arab Americans in Michigan, meeting with several community members prior to a rally in Novi held Sept. 30. And this week, the campaign rolled out a Middle Eastern Leadership Team for advisory work and voter outreach.
John Akouri, a former Farmington Hills city council member and state co-chair of the Trump campaign, said the idea of all voters of Middle Eastern descent lining up to support Clinton is a false narrative.
“Arab Americans happen to be interested in the same issues everyone else is, such as jobs, the economy, education, public safety and national security,” Akouri said. “Mr. Trump is speaking to all voters as Americans, instead of trying to divide us up for political gain.”
Akouri added that he and many other Arab Americans support Donald Trump because “we know he is the only candidate who can bring the necessary change needed to unleash our economy and make the world a safer and more peaceful place.”
Sheikh Mohammad Al Hajj Hassan, a Dearborn imam who supports Trump, said in a statement that his friends and family overseas have been “personally victimized” as a result of the creation and spread of ISIS, and does not believe Clinton has the appropriate judgement to stop it.
“We will be doing everything we can to get out the vote for Mr. Trump on Nov. 8 because we know he is the only candidate who will bring the change needed to unleash our economy and make the world a safer and more peaceful place,” he said.
Other members of Trump’s coalition in Michigan include Saad Abbo of Detroit, Samir Hanna of Troy, Ed Haroutunian of Detroit, Bobby Hesano of Orchard Lake, Joseph Kassab of Farmington Hills, Fr. Anthony Kathawa of West Bloomfield, Dr. Zina Salem of West Bloomfield, Sam Yono of Waterford and Milad Zohrob of Farmington Hills.
Controversial comments
For many Arab Americans who are Muslim, comments Trump has made about immigration and Muslim Americans has had lingering effects on the election, said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR-MI.
A highly controversial proposal from the Trump campaign for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” was alarming to many Michigan Muslims, Walid said.
Walid added that Trump’s recent comments at the Oct. 9 presidential debate saying his plan had morphed into “extreme vetting” did little to dissuade concerns for many of Michigan’s Muslim Americans.
“The rhetoric relating to Muslims has not died down as much in terms of being more Muslim friendly – I think that Mr. Trump has been sidelined with other issues,” Walid said, calling the Trump campaign’s outreach to Arab and Muslim Americans “superficial.” “I don’t know what type of Hail Mary he could throw at this point.”
A national survey of Muslim Americans released by CAIR Oct. 13 showed 72 percent of likely voters said they would vote for Clinton, 4 said they would vote for Trump, 3 percent would vote for Jill Stein and 2 percent would vote for Gary Johnson. Another 12 percent of those surveyed were still undecided at the time about who they would support for president in the election.
Walid said some of Clinton’s support among Michigan’s Muslim American community is a result of pragmatism — “a lot of people wish that Sen. Sanders was the actual nominee,” he said — but noted that interest in down ballot races continues.
High turnout
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, said of those likely Arab American voters surveyed this October, 91 percent said they were headed to the polls on Nov. 8, meaning the demographic could impact states like Michigan when voters decide whether to elect Trump or Clinton.
“People are looking at candidates who are literally turning voters off,” Berry said. “To see a constituency like ours impacted by bigotry fully participating instead of recoiling away from the process is encouraging.”
The top policy concerns among Arab Americans polled included jobs and the economy, healthcare and other domestic matters, including immigration and police issues facing the U.S., Berry said. Also of interest was foreign policy and discrimination, which 50 percent of Arab Americans and 63 percent of Arab Americans who are Muslim surveyed said they’ve faced.
Michigan’s Arab American populations in particular are likely to turn out in force, Berry said, not only because they care about the outcome of the presidential election, but also because many Arab Americans are running for local and state seats this year.
“I think they’ve demonstrated in the way that they’ve organized that they’re going to have a very big impact on Nov. 8,” Berry said.