Crashing Arab American Support Spells Danger for Kamala Harris in Michigan
A new poll conducted for the Arab American Institute carries a stark warning for Kamala Harris and Democrats: Israel’s bloody war in Gaza has eroded support among a once reliable constituency with a major presence in must-win Michigan.
While Arab Americans voted nearly 60 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, with Donald Trump garnering just 35 percent of their support, the new poll finds Trump winning the Arab American vote 42 to 41 percent over Harris. The picture among likely voters is even worse, with Trump leading 46-42, pointing to a politically perilous enthusiasm gap.
“Gaza looms large over Arab Americans this year,” says James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. Zogby, who is Catholic and of Lebanese descent, has been an advocate for Palestinian human rights since the 1970s. He has also been an influential figure in Democratic Party politics for more than three decades, including a long stint on the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee. An ally of Jesse Jackson, he earned a speaking role at the 1988 Democratic convention. He later served as a Bernie Sanders appointee on the Democratic National Convention’s platform committee in 2016.
Rolling Stone spoke to Zogby about the 2024 election and the impacts of the widening conflict in the Middle East, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s militant government in Israel now expanding war into Lebanon. The conversation also took stock of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and why Democrats’ indifference to young voters appalled at the mounting civilian body count in Gaza runs the risk of tipping the election Trump.
The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
For readers who are not familiar, please describe your history working on Palestinian rights.
I started the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in the 1970s. It was a period of effervescence. I had come out of the anti-war and Civil Rights movement, so the first thing I did was connect with Jesse Jackson, and we built a base with Black leadership. A lot of folks from the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] joined our board. I knew Don Luce and Dave Dellinger and Pete Seeger — and got them all involved. We had a big support base among the Arab community, because nobody had done anything around Palestine before. But that period passed, and we went into a kind of a lull, where there was not much action on the question.
The current situation is anything but a lull.
In the last year, we saw something new. A different demographic came to the forefront: young people. It was that intersectional movement we first saw with the Women’s March and then with Black Lives Matter, and then on guns — the Our Lives Matter student movement.
I would look around and I’d say: Where did these people come from? They never embraced Palestine before. It wasn’t an Arab-led thing. There were takeovers of Union Station and Penn Station in New York, and then the Capitol building here [in D.C.]. It was progressive Jews who were doing it, and the student encampments were everybody. We’d never seen that kind of response on this before. It empowered my community.
We’ve all seen the protests on campuses and in the streets. What have you seen in the public opinion data? [Editor’s note: James’ brother John is the pollster behind the well-known Zogby polls.]
In the Democratic camp, this was the first time more Democrats favored Palestinians than favored Israel, Israelis. That had never happened before either. And the numbers in some cases were 2-to-1.
We then started polling around the 2024 election — first with Biden and then later with Harris, the last one we did was in August — it was, sure, as Mark Penn would say, “only 5 percent” of Americans saw Gaza as their most important issue.
But that’s a lot of people. And when we looked at the demographics of that 5 percent — it was young people, it was non-white voters. And in those subgroups, it was 10 percent, 15 percent of them saying, This is going to be an important issue for my vote.
What is the view among Arab Americans?
In the recent past, when we would poll Arab Americans on their most important issues, they’d say, jobs, the economy, health care. Go down the line, they’d be no different than the rest of the country. Now when we polled Arab Americans, we also found something we hadn’t seen before. Because now they no longer felt isolated. And because there was actually a genocide happening, that was galvanizing their outrage and support in a way we hadn’t seen since maybe ‘82 with the Israeli invasion [of Lebanon].
In the poll we just finished, this is the first time where Gaza or Palestinian issues were in the top three. And among Democrats, it was the top issue. It crosses all the lines. It’s Lebanese, and Egyptians, and Palestinians. It’s also Muslims and Christians. It’s the recent immigrants and the ones born here. When you get numbers that high, it impacts the vote in a significant way. This poll showed that people who were historically Democratic voters were either not enthusiastic about voting at all, or some of them were going to vote for Trump. It was the first time we had actually Trump in the lead, 42 to 41.
What would those numbers typically look like for the Arab community?
Since [George W.] Bush, the second election, 2004, they’ve been 2-to-1 Democrat.
So to have that split down the middle is a really remarkable shift.
The other part of it is that 80 percent of Republicans said they were enthusiastic about voting. And only 63 percent of Democrats, which means they may not even turn out at all. And that was before Lebanon happened.
Michigan is such an important swing state, and given that a place like Dearborn has a large Palestinian and also Lebanese population, I just wanted to grapple with the —
There is a good-size Palestinian population there. There is, but the main population is Lebanese. And then there’s also Iraqi and Yemeni. But it was never a center for Palestinians, for example, in the way Chicago became one.
Thank you for the correction. I’m curious how this is likely to impact the 2024 election.
The Lebanese in Dearborn are mostly Shia from South Lebanon, because when Israel invaded in ‘78 and then in ‘82 intensified and expanded the area that they were occupying, two villages in south Lebanon emptied out to Dearborn. Today, the majority population in Dearborn is Arab American. The mayor’s Arab. The police police chief is Arab. The state rep. is Arab. The congresswoman is Rashida Tlaib. Many of the constituents are Lebanese who have deep attachments to Palestinians.
In this election, I think it [the expansion of Israel’s war into Lebanon] will either put an exclamation point on the outrage or depression — causing them either not to vote or to flip and vote elsewhere.
Is the Arab voter shift to Trump reversible?
That Trump vote — going to 42 percent — was an increase of 7 percent. But that 7 percent was soft. We asked the voters, if Harris were to demand a cease-fire, or if she were to say she would suspend arms aid unless Israel agreed to a cease-fire, her numbers went up from 42 to 62 percent.
She regained a significant number of Trump votes that were the people basically voting for him as a protest against Democrats. The reaction I’m getting, when I go around the country and talk to people, is they want to punish Democrats. That’s not a smart political move, but that’s what people are feeling. And I don’t have an argument to make because they haven’t given us arguments to make.
Who is “they,” I’m sorry?
The campaign. I keep telling them, if you want people to vote for you, you gotta give them a reason. They don’t seem to care enough about the Arab American vote to do something to get it.
Is it your sense that the Harris campaign feels that it can sort of maneuver around this issue, electorally — find different pockets of voters in Michigan to make up for lost Arab American votes?
Of course. The people Jesse Jackson used to call the ‘smart-ass white boys’ are back. As opposed to the ‘80s, they’re not all white, and they’re not all boys. But they’re the class who are smarter-than-God. They have it all figured out.
They’re going with Liz Cheney and “appealing to traditional Republican values.” If that’s where they’re going to pick up their votes, good luck. There aren’t a lot of Republican voters out there for her to win, because there is no longer a Republican Party. That’s the point, right? There’s the cult of Trump, and that cult of Trump is pretty much locked in place.
Attraction to Trump is often more a feeling of rejecting the system. If voters just have that Trumpy feeling, he can corral support, even if it doesn’t make any sense on the issues or demographics.
My doctoral work was in religion, and my postdoctoral work was in cults, and the social movements that emerge in response to social stress. And the economic, social, political, and cultural dislocation that has been experienced, in particular, by the white working class, but also a number of immigrant groups, including those that are non-white, has never been understood by Democrats. They keep thinking that the Obama coalition is what that they’ll win with. The problem with Gaza [is] it cuts deepest with that Obama coalition — young voters, Black, Latino, and Asian voters. And the Democrats haven’t figured that out.
Democrats are supposed to be reality-based. What hampers them seeing the threat you see?
You know how Ben Rhodes talks about “the blob” in foreign policy — the failed guys who keep coming back and advising to make the same mistakes. Well, there’s a political consultancy “blob” in politics, too. And they’re the guys who say, ‘You can’t do this,’ and, ‘Don’t say that,’ and advise you, ‘Be cautious.’ And they never lose an election — because they always make their money.
But they never get judged by the mistakes they make. The decision not to have a Palestinian speaker at the [Democratic] convention — which would have been a no-cost [move], they wouldn’t have lost five votes, but they would have picked up some [important support].
No one in the campaign can give us a reason why. I know why — because it took imagination, and the political consultants have no imagination. So they know what’s “too risky,” and “we’ve never done it before.” Yeah, I know they’ve never done it before, because the last person to mention Palestine at a Democratic Convention was me — in 1988!
If you looked at that convention this year, there were groups that nobody even knew existed. You know, left-handed steeplechasers. Demographics that people were like, Why is that person speaking!? But not a single Arab person spoke. They’ve been making this mistake now for years, but this is the first election where it actually is going to matter in terms of their ability to win a constituency.
And they’re not paying attention.
One thing I struggle to understand is that we’re now watching a Democratic administration backing an Israeli government led by Netanyahu, this corrupt Trumpian figure who is also a warmonger. Yet there seems to be no ability to separate the Netanyahu government from Israel writ large. How have Democrats been cornered into supporting this leader who — if they were a member of the American political spectrum — would stand on the opposite side of what Democrats say they care about?
I don’t get it. They hate Netanyahu. They want him out, but whatever he does, they’ll support. And this administration has made judgments along the way that have been perfectly baffling. The president went on television to announce a three-point peace plan. Netanyahu, within an hour and a half, did a tweet saying, that’s not the deal. And basically repudiated what the president said.
What did the White House do? It went to the U.N. with the same deal and said, ‘This is a deal that the Israelis have accepted’ — knowing it wasn’t true — and saying the burden is on Hamas to accept it. Hamas — they’re no angels. They’re also the bad guys in this equation. But we lied to the Security Council. We lied to the press. We lied to ourselves that it was a deal that Netanyahu accepted when we knew full square, that he never accepted it.
Franklin Foer has a piece about it in The Atlantic, in which it looks like Jake Sullivan is covering his butt saying, We really tried, and Netanyahu kept double crossing us, and backing away from deals we made. Well, at some point, if you’re the leader of the democracies, and somebody keeps lying to you, you tell them there are consequences to your behavior.
But we’ve never been willing to accept applying consequences to Israeli behavior. So we give him carte blanche to do whatever he wants to do, all the while knowing that he’s a liar and that he’s committing genocide.
To me, who’s been dealing with this issue for most of my life and has been a member of the DNC for 32 years, I just don’t understand the suspension of judgment, the suspension of morality, the suspension of of rational thought in allowing these things to persist and thinking that there are no consequences.
I do find it ironic that Democrats are — rightly — calling out the dehumanization of immigrants by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in Springfield, Ohio. But they are giving a pass to the dehumanization of people in Gaza and now southern Lebanon.
Harris, the vice president’s office, issued a statement after the assassination of [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah without a single mention, not even a mention, that there were civilians killed in that attack [in Beirut]. Six buildings that housed people got blown up. We still don’t have a body count. I don’t understand what’s going on in their heads, unless it’s just racism, just that these people don’t count.
Have you gotten outreach from the campaign this cycle?
They call me to go to a meeting. I’m like: Give me a reason why. I’d love to do it. I’m honored to get the invitation, but you have to give us a reason why.
I don’t need a resume builder. I’m concerned about this election because of my country, because of my family, my kids, my grandkids. The future of our country is at stake. I really want her to win. But I need her to help me. For me to go out and speak to an Arab community in Michigan about, ‘I need you to do this.’ I’m 78. I haven’t got that much left. But I’ve got 50 years of work, building trust with my community. I don’t need a photo op, shaking hands with the candidate. I need to feel confident, when I go to my community, that the message will be accepted.
Let’s talk plainly about the alternative: the idea that Trump is somehow going to make things better. What’s your view of Trump for the Arab American community?
It would be a nightmare. When I go around and speak, and people say, ‘It won’t make a difference,’ I say, ‘Talk to fathers in Springfield, Ohio, who are afraid to send their kids to school. The same thing that is now happening with other immigrants will just as likely happen to you.’
My colleague, Maya Berry, who testified a couple weeks ago before the Senate Judiciary Committee, was all over the airwaves for the totally disgraceful treatment she suffered at the hands of people like Josh Hawley [from Missouri] and Senator [John] Kennedy from Louisiana. Think about the attitude that Republicans have, the way that they continue to treat us, and the way that they’ve demonized Arab students on campuses and want to even deport the Arab students, as Trump has said.
I can make all the arguments against Trump and against the Republican Party. I just need a reason to argue for voting for Harris before I go out and do it. And I’ve been doing it, but it’s a heavy lift. That’s the problem.
Trump likes to talk about himself as if he were a pacifist or peace-maker on foreign policy. Do you have any indication that his relationship vis a vis Netanyahu would be any different?
No. A ‘pacifist’? Bullshit. He loves Bibi because Bibi is “winning,” and he would continue to support him winning. The groundwork for the nightmare we’re having now was laid during his term, and I have every reason to believe it would continue. This is not a good guy, and his policy will not be any better. It’ll be worse. But again, trying to make that case to people is a tough one, when on Joe Biden’s watch, who was supposed to be better, they’re seeing a genocide unfold.
We have just marked the Oct. 7 anniversary. What are your reflections on the convulsive year that we’ve seen in the aftermath?
History didn’t begin on Oct. 7, and it didn’t end that day either. The cries of those that were killed, taken hostage, of the families who’ve lost loved ones, cannot drown out the cries, the tears, the pain of the tens of thousands who’ve died since. Yet it will. It’s as if only one people suffer.
The story on Oct. 7 will be: ‘Jews suffered the worst tragedy since the Holocaust.’ I can hear the wailing, and it’s deserved. Everybody deserves the right to mourn their dead. But Palestinians have been suffering this kind of treatment for two, three generations now — with no sense at all that their lives matter. Or their pain and suffering matters.
It’s presented like a conflict between ‘the Israeli humanity’ and ‘the Palestine problem.’ And so how do we solve the ‘problem’ so that ‘humanity’ can live in peace? That’s how we frame it. One people are seen as people like us, and the other people are objectified and seen either as an amorphous blob, a body count, or as less human than the rest of us.
Is Democratic leadership open to that discussion?
I remember going and seeing somebody at the White House early on, like two weeks into this. And he went on about the trauma of the Jewish people and what happened and how it was unforgivable. And I said, ‘I agree with you. I understand that.’ I grew up with a mother who made me read the Diary of Anne Frank. I had an uncle who was in the infantry in World War II and went into the camps, and told me the stories about what it was like, what he saw. The first time I ever got a headline in a newspaper was The Washington Post in the 70s. And the headline was: “Arab Speaker Chides Community About Antisemitism.”
What I told him is that I grew up understanding this issue, and I do. I understand the trauma and what it evokes in terms of fear of pogroms and the Holocaust. I said: ‘And there’s another people in this conflict who also have fears and trauma, and what’s happening now is evoking for them, fears of the Nakba.’
Well, he shot back at me, “What you say sounds like smacks of ‘whataboutism,’” he said, and “Don’t come here with that. It makes me so upset.” I was startled that this guy is advising the president and without an ounce of compassion for Palestinians. I was urging that there be compassion for both people who have suffering and fears. American policy needs to understand both, not prioritize one human life over another.
Democrats are the ones who wrote in their platform about the equal worth of Palestinian and Israeli lives. Right? I didn’t write it. They wrote it. But when the body counts are 40-to-1, and we still don’t have equal compassion for both, then I’m stuck. I don’t know what to think, or how to operate in this realm.
Oct. 7 was a horrific tragedy and an act of terror that is inexcusable, and Hamas committed crimes. But my God, the crimes committed afterwards, and the crimes committed before, have to be weighed in the balance. And no one in this crowd is willing or able — they don’t have the perspective to do that.
“This crowd” being the Democratic White House, to be clear?
This White House, but also every one preceding. You know? I mean, pardon my French, but who the fuck cares about Palestinian lives? Who sees them as equal? That’s the tragedy in all of this.
They could so easily have put a Palestinian woman on the stage, who was a friend of the vice president’s from San Francisco, who lost members of her family, lots of them, in Gaza. They could have easily put her on stage at the convention. They didn’t even see it as something worth considering. How? Why? I just don’t get it.
They’re forgetting that they’re not only losing Arab votes, but they’re losing other people’s votes who also care about this issue. It’s insulting, obviously, and demeaning to my community. And so that’s very hurtful. It’s not a smart strategy. I don’t think it’s smart politics.
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