Though domestic issues tend to motivate most U.S. voters, the war in the Middle East may be the dominant issue in mind for an increasingly important voting block: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, members of these communities have watched the rising death toll and heard vivid accounts of the horrors befalling Palestinians in Gaza as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to bombard the enclave with the support of the Biden administration.
For some Arab Americans, a community that overwhelmingly voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election, that support may have negative consequences on Biden’s attempt to regain the White House in 2024. In fact, numerous Middle Eastern and Muslim American leaders have called for their communities to “abandon Biden” in the upcoming presidential election.
The question, then, is what effect such defections could have on Biden’s chances of winning reelection.
As a whole, the number of Middle Eastern or Muslim Americans is quite small. According to the 2020 census – the first year such data was recorded – 3.5 million Americans reported being of Middle Eastern and North African descent, about 1% of the total U.S. population of nearly 335 million citizens.
But the outcome of the 2024 presidential election may come down to results in a few swing states where Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans are concentrated, such as Michigan, Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In the 2020 presidential election, for instance, Biden won the state of Michigan by a total of 154,000 votes. The state is home to overlapping groups of more than 200,000 registered voters who are Muslim and 300,000 who claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa.
Working around statistical erasure
As a social scientist, I specialize in statistical analysis and research on how race, ethnicity and religion affect political outcomes in the U.S. I know from firsthand experience that any effort to gauge the attitudes and behaviors of Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans requires a bit of analytic gymnastics.
For starters, since 1977, the U.S. government has categorized those with ancestral ties to the “original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East” as “white,” according to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
That stipulation is found in that agency’s Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting and is used in U.S. census reports.
As a result, members of this community are subsumed within an expansive grouping of “whites” that effectively renders them invisible in nearly all administrative data and public opinion polls.
Though domestic issues tend to motivate most U.S. voters, the war in the Middle East may be the dominant issue in mind for an increasingly important voting block: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, members of these communities have watched the rising death toll and heard vivid accounts of the horrors befalling Palestinians in Gaza as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to bombard the enclave with the support of the Biden administration.
For some Arab Americans, a community that overwhelmingly voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election, that support may have negative consequences on Biden’s attempt to regain the White House in 2024. In fact, numerous Middle Eastern and Muslim American leaders have called for their communities to “abandon Biden” in the upcoming presidential election.
The question, then, is what effect such defections could have on Biden’s chances of winning reelection.
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