Trump breaks GOP losing streak in nation's largest majority-Arab city

By Joey Cappelletti and Mike Householder

Nov. 11, 2024 9:50 AM PT

DEARBORN, Mich. — Faced with two choices she didn’t like, Suehaila Amen chose neither.

Instead, the longtime Democrat from the Arab American stronghold of Dearborn, Mich., backed a third-party candidate for president, adding her voice to a remarkable turnaround that helped Donald Trump reclaim Michigan and the presidency.

In Dearborn, where nearly half of the 110,000 residents are of Arab descent, Vice President Kamala Harris received roughly 2,500 fewer votes than Trump, who became the first Republican presidential candidate since former President George W. Bush in 2000 to win the city. Harris also lost neighboring Dearborn Heights to Trump, who in his previous term as president banned travel from several mostly-Muslim countries.

Harris lost the presidential vote in two Detroit-area cities with large Arab American populations after months of warnings from local Democrats about the Biden-Harris administration’s unwavering support for Israel in the war in Gaza. Some said they backed Trump after he visited a few days before the election, mingling with customers and staff at a Lebanese-owned restaurant and reassuring people that he would find a way to end the violence in the Middle East.

Others, including Amen, were unable to persuade themselves to back the former president. She said many Arab Americans felt Harris got what she deserved but aren’t “jubilant about Trump.”

“Whether it’s Trump himself or the people who are around him, it does pose a great deal of concern for me,” Amen said. “But at the end of the day, when you have two evils running, what are you left with?”

As it became clear last week that Trump would not only win the presidency but likely prevail in Dearborn, the mood in metro Detroit’s Arab American communities was described by Dearborn City Council member Mustapha Hammoud as “somber.” And yet, he said, the result was “not surprising at all.”

The shift in Dearborn — where Trump received nearly 18,000 votes compared with Harris’ 15,000 — marks a startling change from just four years ago, when Joe Biden won in the city by a nearly 3-to-1 margin.

No one should be surprised

The results didn’t come out of nowhere. For months, in phone calls and meetings with top Democratic officials, local leaders warned, in blunt terms, that Arab American voters would turn against them if the administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war didn’t change.

The Biden-Harris administration has remained a staunch ally of Israel since the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took over 200 hostages. The war between Israel and Hamas has killed more than 43,000 people in Gaza, Palestinian health officials say. They do not distinguish between civilians and combatants but say more than half the dead were women and children.

While Harris softened her rhetoric on the war, she didn’t propose concrete policies toward Israel or the war in Gaza that varied from the administration’s position. And even if she had, that might not have made much of a difference in places such as Dearborn.

“All she had to do was stop the war in Lebanon and Gaza and she would receive everyone’s votes here,” said Hammoud.

More voters thought Trump would be better able to handle the situation in the Middle East than Harris, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. About half of voters named Trump as better suited, compared with about a third who said Harris.

Among those who opposed more aid for Israel, 58% backed Harris in the presidential election; 39% supported Trump.

Even some Harris voters had their doubts. About three-quarters of Harris voters in Michigan said she was the better candidate to handle the situation. Few preferred Trump, but about two in 10 Harris voters said they were equivalent or neither would be better.

In the absence of support for Harris in the Arab American community, Trump and his allies stepped in.

A key part of the electorate of Michigan — a state Trump won by nearly 11,000 votes in 2016 before he lost it by nearly 154,000 to Biden in 2020 — Arab Americans spent months meeting with Trump allies, who encouraged community leaders to endorse him.

Things began to move in September, when Amer Ghalib, the Democratic Muslim mayor of the city of Hamtramck, endorsed Trump. Shortly after, Trump visited a campaign office there.

That was a turning point, said Massad Boulos, the father of Trump’s younger son-in-law who led his outreach with Arab Americans.

“They very, very much appreciated the president’s visit and the respect that they felt,” Boulos said. “That was the first big achievement, so to speak. After that, I started getting endorsements from imams and Muslim leaders.”

An apparent shift toward Trump in final week

While support for Harris had been declining for months — especially after her campaign did not allow a pro-Palestinian speaker to take the stage at August’s Democratic National Convention — some voters say the last week of the campaign was pivotal.

At an Oct. 30 rally in Michigan, former President Clinton said Hamas uses civilians as shields and will “force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”

“Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable,” he said. “Well, I got news for them, they were there first, before their faith existed, they were there.”

The Harris campaign wanted Clinton to visit Dearborn to speak in the days following the rally, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about them. The potential visit never materialized after backlash over Clinton’s comments.

“That comment was the talk of the town. It hurt many like me, who loved him,” said Amin Hashmi, who was born in Pakistan and lives in suburban Detroit. A self-proclaimed “die-hard Dem,” Hashmi said casting a ballot for Trump “was a seismic move” that came after he stood in the voting booth for 25 minutes.

On the Friday before the election, Trump visited the Great Commoner, a Lebanese-owned restaurant in Dearborn. That stood in sharp contrast with Harris, who met with Dearborn’s Democratic mayor, Abdullah Hammoud — who didn’t endorse in the race — but never came to Dearborn herself.

Trump “came up to Dearborn. He spoke with residents. Whether some people say it wasn’t genuine, he still made the effort. He did reach out and try to work with them, at least listen to them,” said Samia Hamid, a Dearborn resident.

Amen said that at polling places in Dearborn on Tuesday, “people were coming out and saying they were either voting third party or they were voting for Trump.” When she asked what led them to support Trump, “they said, at least he came out here and he talked to us, he acknowledged our community.”

Although Arab American support didn’t propel him to the White House, Trump has made several promises that stuck in voters’ minds. Mainly, they’ll be watching to see if he’ll follow through on his vow to end the war.

They also hope his next term will differ from his first, when he enacted the travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries. His rhetoric on that score has been mixed — he even pledged to expand the ban to refugees from Gaza.

Osama Siblani, publisher of Arab American News based in Dearborn, said people will “hold him accountable.” Regardless, Siblani added, the community “survived the first four years” of Trump.

“We will survive the next four,” he said.

Cappelletti and Householder write for the Associated Press. Cappelletti reported from Detroit. Associated Press journalist Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report.