Why Trump is doing so well with the Arab vote

Some experts believe that Donald Trump is on course to win a bigger share of the African American vote in 2024 than any previous Republican presidential candidate. 

You can’t trust experts. A number of highly-informed pundits made the same prediction in 2020 — and Joe Biden ended up winning 90 percent of black voters that year. Kamala Harris, as the vice president of an unpopular administration, may struggle to reach that number. Yet Democratic strategists remain quietly confident that she’ll achieve something close. 

Team Harris-Walz is possibly more concerned about another, smaller subsection of the American electorate. According to a new Arab News/YouGov poll, among Arab Americans, Trump has a slight edge over Harris: 45 percent to her 43 percent. That’s a particular worry for Democrats because Michigan, with its 220,000 Arab residents and fifteen electoral college votes, is one of six or seven swing states that will decide the election. 

The Michigan Muslims headache has been troubling the Democratic Party ever since the war in Gaza broke out towards the end of last year. As vice president, and as the Democratic nominee, Harris has sought to toe the Biden administration’s wobbly line: reassuring Palestinian supporters that the United States government is pro-ceasefire while supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. (It’s worth noting that Pennsylvania, an even more crucial battleground state, has more than 400,000 Jewish voters.) 

Trump is more avidly pro-Israel. He casts himself as Israel’s “big protector” and suggests that the Jewish state faces “total annihilation” if he is not elected. Yet Arab American voters are not nearly as allergic to him as Democrats might hope — at least if yesterday’s poll is to be believed. 

Why might that be? One obvious reason is that Arab Americans are not as preoccupied with foreign policy as many analysts think. Another is many Arab Muslims feel betrayed over Gaza by the Democratic Party, which makes sympathetic noises about Palestinians even as it funnels billions more to Israel in military aid. Trump is at least clear in his analysis of the Middle East. 

Perhaps Arab voters also understand, or intuit, that, while Trump is hardly a friend of Islam, he is not a conventional hawk when it comes to the Middle East. As president, yes, he tore up the Iran nuclear deal and killed the Shadow Commander Qasem Soleimani. Yet last week he told Patrick Bet-David, the Iranian-American podcaster, that he didn’t want to pursue regime change in Tehran. “We can’t get totally involved in all that,” he said. “We can’t run ourselves, let’s face it.”

Yesterday, Trump offered his own thoughts as to why Arab Americans might be abandoning Harris. It’s worth quoting at length: 

Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with “dumb as a rock” War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.

If Kamala gets four more years, the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to War, maybe even a Third World War, something that will never happen with President Donald J. Trump in charge. For our Country’s sake, and for your kids, Vote Trump for PEACE!

That hyperbolic style makes everyone laugh. Yet the same Arab News survey showed that 39 percent of respondents believed Trump is “more likely to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict,” compared to just 33 percent who said the same of Harris. For a significant number of Muslims, it seems, Trump has a point about “PEACE.”

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.