Politico reports:

Arab American leaders for months warned Vice President Kamala Harris that she needed to separate herself from President Joe Biden’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza — or face an electoral backlash from this influential community in a key battleground.

But those pleas went largely ignored.

Instead, Harris made strategic errors that deeply insulted Arab American voters reeling from intense grief as the death toll in the Middle East climbed. She refused to host a Palestinian American onstage at the Democratic National Convention. She curtly shut down protesters at campaign rallies who criticized her solidarity with Biden over the conflict. She dispatched pro-Israel surrogates to Michigan.

Now, many Arab American residents in Dearborn “feel like they’ve been redeemed,” said Michael Sareini, Dearborn city council president. “They wanted to send a message and they did.”

“This stance on endless wars and killing of innocent women and children has got to end,” he said.

In the initial days after the election, as Democrats despaired over the results, Dearborn residents felt unsurprised by President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding win, according to interviews with nearly a dozen Arab American leaders in this densely populated Muslim city just outside Detroit. Adding to their sense that they were right, their protest vote was not limited solely to Arab Americans, who make up a fraction of the U.S. population. Their furor toward the Biden administration over Gaza spilled out onto college campuses across the nation and among progressives of all ages, amounting to the most significant anti-war protest in a generation.

“While we dealt with that grief, we became much more politically mature,” said Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American activist.

Unofficial results show Trump received the most votes in Dearborn, with 42 percent, while Harris earned 36 percent — a 33 percentage point drop from when Biden won Dearborn in 2020. Green party candidate Jill Stein collected 18 percent.

Zoom into Arab American neighborhoods and you’ll find an even more dramatic crumbling for the vice president. Trump showed up big throughout the Eastern and Southern parts of Dearborn, where a high concentration of the community lives. In one of those precincts, Harris earned only 13 percent while Trump got 51 percent.

Multiple Dearborn leaders said that Trump’s social conservatism and isolationist “America First” foreign policy made Arabs more comfortable with backing a Republican after the community fled from the GOP in the aftermath of 9/11. And, for a population that often feels targeted by the justice system, many identified with Trump’s legal woes.

But those leaders emphasized that the dramatic move toward Trump does not mark a permanent realignment with the Republican party for this demographic historically part of the Democratic base but rather an explicit rejection of Biden and Harris. The top of the ticket was the exception: Democrats won Dearborn at every other level of the ballot, from U.S. Rep. Rashida Talib down to state lawmakers and school board members. [Continue reading…]