American Muslims are continuing to reject Joe Biden.

 

Pro-Hamas supporters in Dearborn Michigan on October 10th, just days after the October 7th terror attacks. The Guardian/AP.

American Muslims are continuing to reject Joe Biden and his administration due to his support of Israel in the Israel-Hamas conflict. The Guardian. In Michigan, which has a large Muslim-American population, leaders in Dearborn rejected outreach efforts from the Biden administration saying they would not support Joe Biden in 2024. In a similar move an effort to have Secretary of State Anthony Blinken meet with prominent Palestinian Americans was also rejected on the same grounds. Biden's team says they have tried to engage with Muslim Americans after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war but Muslims are largely rejecting the efforts, as they consider Biden's support of Israel to be tantamount to genocide. This could be very dangerous for Biden due to the fact that Michigan is a critical swing state. Indeed, Muslims in Michigan are now calling for Muslim-Americans to vote "uncommitted" in Michigan's primary election. 

My Comment:

I know I have written about this issue for the Biden campaign before but that was fairly early in the war cycle. It is very interesting to me that not only has the Biden campaign realized how big a threat this is for them but also how their efforts are being flatly rejected by the Muslim American community. 

I don't think that Biden will be able to win these voters back. Muslims in America are trending to being single issue voters and that issue is hating Israel and supporting the terrorists in Gaza. They really do view Israel as the bad guys in the region and think they are committing a "genocide" against the terrorists that run Gaza. Given that Biden appears to be all in on Israel, there is pretty much no way these folks are going to vote for Biden during the primary or general election.

To be clear, the vast majority of these votes are not going to go from Biden to Donald Trump. Trump's even more pro-Israel than Biden and the Republican Party doesn't really have an anti-Israel faction like the Democrats do. Instead these folks will by and large stay home on election day or vote for a pro-Hamas candidate from a third party. 

Biden is stuck here as his party has fragmented on the issue of Israel. He certainly has a large faction of pro-Israel supporters, but Muslim Americans are not the only ones that are upset with him about supporting Israel. Many young people have bought Hamas propaganda uncritically and now hate Biden for supporting the war. And the "woke" left see the conflict in those terms and consider Israel to be "white oppressor's". 

To be fair, there is some of that in the Republican party as well, but it's not really a threat for Donald Trump. Most of the true anti-Israel voices on the right have been exiled and the ones that haven't have no real power. And many of the far right that hate Trump's pro-Israel stance (they call him Zion Don) are still going to vote for him just because he angers the left so much. 

But Biden? He might be screwed because of this issue alone. If Muslim American voters don't show up in Michigan, Trump wins the state. He might have won it regardless given how unpopular Biden is right now, but without Muslims Biden is screwed. And it might not just be Michigan. There are large Muslim populations in other swing states (I should know as I live in a swing midwestern state and see Muslims every day) and they could prove critical if the election is close. 

I also don't think that this problem goes away for Biden even if the war ended today. Muslim Americans took Biden's support of Israel personally and likely won't ever vote for the man again, regardless of the circumstances. To them, the difference between a Biden White House and a Trump one is mostly academic, even if the war ends. They want zero support for Israel and they aren't going to get that from Joe Biden.