Arab and Muslim Americans who turned away from Democrats in the 2024 presidential election because of their support for war in Gaza now say they’re being unfairly scapegoated.
As President Donald Trump makes cuts to federal programs, sends migrants to Guantanamo Bay and threatens to displace Palestinians in Gaza, they hear a chorus of “I told you so” in messages ranging from smug, to angry to obscene.
“We got a spate of [messages] after Trump’s Gaza announcement,” said Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a national advocacy group. “They were, ‘You get what you deserve,’ ‘It’s your fault’ and ‘Why are you crying about this now?’ ”
The anger is misplaced, said Zogby, also a longtime Democratic National Committee member.
Aref Assaf of Denville said Democrats’ failure to listen to voters outraged over war in Gaza hurt them in the 2024 election.
“If every Arab and Muslim had voted for Harris,” Zogby said, “she might have won Michigan, but how does that account for Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Arizona? Even if every Arab in the country had voted for Harris, she still would have lost the popular vote. There were obviously problems with the campaign and overall strategy.”
A once reliable Democratic base, these voters were split in 2024. Some supported third-party candidates or voted for Trump or opted not to vote at all. Others, like Zogby, endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris despite criticisms, believing Trump would be worse on domestic policies and the Middle East.
They hammered President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris over support for war in Gaza, but they are not to blame, said advocates. They argued that party leaders’ failure to listen to voters on many issues – from Gaza to the economy – sent voters of diverse backgrounds packing.
‘Do you have regrets?’
For many Democrats, the kicker was when Trump said he would drive 2 million Palestinians in Gaza off their land so he could take ownership of Gaza for real estate development.
On news talk shows, in news stories and on social media, critics and commentators demanded to know: Do you regret your vote now?
Some voters were seduced by Trump’s promises that he would end war in the Middle East and later horrified by his proposal to take over Gaza. But most were not shocked, knowing that Trump was strongly aligned with Israel’s far right and that his son-in-law Jared Kushner publicly pined over “valuable” waterfront property in Gaza back in March.
Many voters said they could not bring themselves to support the status quo, after seeing killing and devastation in Gaza. Trump’s Gaza proposal also didn’t put Democrats in a better light, said Aref Assaf, founder of the New Jersey-based Arab American Forum.
“Trump is saying Gaza was destroyed and demolished and not livable,” said Assaf. “No one asked who was behind that. Wasn’t it our weapons and [Israel Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s army that destroyed Gaza?”
Sadaf Jaffer, a Muslim Democrat and a former New Jersey Assemblywoman, also chastised Democrats for ignoring voters’ concerns.
“They could have worked harder to get the Biden-Harris administration to change policy and be in line with what the public wanted, rather than pointing fingers,” she said. “Lots of the Democratic base was disgusted and didn’t show up to vote and that was fully on the Biden Harris administration. It’s ludicrous to blame voters, when they did nothing to earn their support.”
‘Flawed agenda’
It’s a tense time as Democrats see Trump work to dismantle large swaths of U.S. government and strip away hard-won rights from diverse groups of Americans. To many, it seems that democracy is in peril. In this climate, some have directed anger at Arab and Muslim voters, but Gaza was a huge issue for other voters too.
A YouGov poll, backed by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, showed that among the 19 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote in 2024, nearly a third named Gaza as a top reason for staying home. In the survey, 29% of Biden voters cited war on Gaza as a top reason, above the economy at 24% and immigration at 11%.
Isaac Jimenez, an organizer with the North New Jersey Democratic Socialists of America, said young people struggled to rally behind a party they felt neglected their concerns over war and the economy. He was part of a movement that netted more than 42,000 “uncommitted” votes in the Democratic primary in New Jersey in protest of Biden’s support for war.
“The bottom really fell out of the Democratic Party when you don’t run on the economy or social issues like Palestine — the ceasefire was the bare minimum — and fail to speak to the everyday reality of voters,” Jimenez said. “Trump was talking and lying about it, and the Democratic Party was not talking at all about those things.”
Salaheddin Mustafa, a Palestinian American community leader active in state politics, said the party should be rebuilding voters’ trust rather than doling out blame.
“If this is their strategy,” he said, “then the party itself is going to be in the wilderness forever, if their view is that it was Arab and Muslims that caused this. They are not listening to the needs and desires of whatever coalition that [former President] Barack Obama built.”
“They lost huge huge populations of other minorities who did not vote for them because their agenda was flawed. Part of their agenda was the open dismissive nature of the atrocities they were enabling.”
Zogby worried that the Democrats’ woes would continue if they didn’t correct course. He recalled a meeting for the Harris campaign, where party pollsters advised against investing money on groups they assumed would vote blue anyway.
“We’re handing these folks to Republicans on a silver platter,” he said. “The best they had to offer us was Liz Cheney trying to win over suburban Democratic women and it actually hurt us with working class voters. That followed through in the whole campaign. We allowed Trump a free hand in wining over those voters in Pennsylvania in particular. We abandoned Ohio. We lost senators we shouldn’t have lost.”
“These were people who had always been Democrats, and we abandoned them, so I don’t expect blame on Arab Americans for this.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ Arab, Muslim voters don’t want to be blamed for Trump policies
