By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-24 19:25:56 | Updated at 2024-10-24 21:23:20
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The Mideast war is threatening Vice President Kamala Harris’s support among Muslim and Arab American voters, a traditionally Democratic constituency, in critical swing states.
Oct. 24, 2024, 3:10 p.m. ET
Two weeks ago, an influential group of 15 Muslim religious and business leaders convened at an office space in Dunwoody, Ga., a suburb north of Atlanta, to discuss Vice President Kamala Harris.
Most were wary of her.
In Georgia, as elsewhere, her standing among Arab American and Muslim voters, a traditionally Democratic bloc, is precarious. As the Biden administration stands firm in its support for Israel as it wages war in Gaza and now Lebanon, an erosion of support for the Democratic ticket could cost Ms. Harris in multiple battlegrounds, including Michigan, where these voters have traditionally made up a critical portion of her party’s winning coalition.
With polls still showing the presidential race a dead heat against former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Harris’s Muslim backers in Georgia are making a frantic push to reach voters who are angry and upset about the escalating violence in the Mideast. One attendee showed up to the gathering in Dunwoody with a message he hoped the others there would hear, and spread — that if the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was their top concern, Mr. Trump and Republicans would be worse.
“We want them to move mountains for Gaza,” Omar Ali, an Atlanta-based businessman who is Black and Muslim, said of the Biden-Harris administration. “They can’t in the way that we want. But you rest assured we can get more with one particular party than the other party and that particular party has more of a heart than anything — and I’m talking about the Democratic Party.”
Georgia Democrats have credited the state’s Muslim and Arab American voters for helping them flip the state — winning it by fewer than 12,000 votes — in 2020. That year, election data showed roughly 57,000 Muslim and Arab Americans voters went to the polls in the state. The heads of some Muslim organizations in Georgia now put the figure at well above 100,000.
Many of those voters were motivated to go to the polls in the last presidential election by animus toward Mr. Trump, who barred travelers from certain majority Muslim countries from entering the United States under his presidency and whose anti-immigrant talking points on the campaign trail have included broadsides against those from the Middle East.
