Why Arab Americans don’t want to reelect Biden
Even before the Israel-Gaza war began, Arab and Muslim Americans were losing faith in the Democratic Party — for reasons that had little to do with foreign policy. They had become increasingly skeptical of the party’s leftward turn on cultural and social issues; lessons with LGBTQ+ themes in public schools had become a particular flash point. Those debates now seem small and fleeting.
In times of actual war, mere culture war is a luxury. Over the Thanksgiving break, disillusion about the Biden administration’s embrace of Israel during its bombardment of Gaza was the mood music for my dinner-table conversations with friends and family members, four of whom are Arab Americans. All four said they would not vote for President Joe Biden in 2024, after having done so in 2020.
Four people are just four people, of course, but these vote-or-don’t-vote conversations are widespread. According to an October survey of Arab Americans, only 17% plan to vote for Biden, down from 35% in April and 59% in 2020. And for the first time since polling firm Zogby Strategies started tracking them in 1996, more Arab Americans now identify as Republicans (32%) than Democrats (20%). Sixtyseven percent of respondents rate Biden’s response to the Israel-Gaza war negatively.
When I shared about my Thanksgiving conversations on X, the post garnered 7 million views. Hundreds of outraged replies came from liberals and other Trump opponents, many pointing out that Donald Trump wants to deport us. I suspect that patronizing arguments asking Arab Americans to suck it up and vote Biden regardless of his actual policies are unlikely to be effective. Their votes must be fought for. Trump’s unique danger doesn’t absolve Democrats of their responsibility to make an affirmative case for their candidate.
Casting a vote is an intensely personal act, and not just for Arab Americans, who are too often assumed to be emotionally blinded by the Palestinian cause. To expect anyone at the ballot box to calmly calculate a straightforward cost-benefit analysis ignores much of what is known about voter behavior. Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have found that the “most important factor in voters’ judgments (is) their social and psychological attachments to groups.” In other words, all politics is identity politics.
Everyone has a personal threshold beyond which they cannot, as a matter of conscience, vote for a particular candidate, even if they agree with that candidate on most other issues. If Biden woke up one day to say he thought women shouldn’t have a right to abortion, it wouldn’t be surprising if some liberals felt unable to lend him their unqualified support.
For better and worse, I have a contrarian instinct, so I reminded my sample of Arab Americans that Trump would be less sympathetic to Palestinians than Biden is. They said they understood the risk but needed some way to register their disgust. They mentioned Biden’s now-infamous remarks in which he questioned whether dead Palestinians were, in fact, dead. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” the president said. “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
Stripped of dignity in this life, Palestinians would be denied it in death. It was rhetoric, perhaps, but it captured a decades-long frustration: American politicians on all sides seem either unwilling or unable to view Palestinians as full-fledged human beings. As former Obama administration official Barnett Rubin put it recently, “Sometimes selfrespect outweighs self-interest. It would be humiliating to vote for Biden after he cheered on, funded, and armed people who slaughtered 15,000 of their fellow Arabs.”
In every presidential election, millions of Americans decide on principle not to vote for either of the two main candidates. That’s democracy.
If the 2024 election is close, Arab and Muslim Americans could be numerous enough to make a difference. Political scientist Youssef Chouhoud estimates that for every 10% of Middle Eastern and Muslim voters in Michigan who abstain, Biden will experience a net loss of about 11,000 votes, although in an interview Chouhoud reminded me that doing quantitative analysis on these communities is “so tough.” If Arab and Muslim voters abstain in unusually large numbers, others might follow suit. Note that 70% of young voters of all ethnicities disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war.
In the months ahead, a critical factor will be whether fallout from the war — and the devaluing of Palestinian lives — will continue to spill into everyday American life. In what is being investigated as a hate crime, three Palestinian Americans were shot in Vermont. Many of the Arab Americans who say they won’t vote for Biden also report discrimination and growing fears for their personal safety. Fortunately, for Democrats, the election isn’t being held today. In politics, a year is a long time. But memories are long, too.