DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) — Faced with two choices she didn’t like, Suehaila Amen chose neither.
Instead, the longtime Democrat from the Arab-American stronghold of Dearborn, Michigan, supported a third-party candidate for president and contributed her vote to a remarkable turnaround that helped Donald Trump win back Michigan and the presidency.
In Dearborn, where nearly half of the 110,000 residents are of Arab descent, Vice President Kamala Harris received more than 2,500 fewer votes than Trump, who became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the city since former President George W. Bush in 2000. Harris also lost neighboring Dearborn Heights to Trump, who banned travel from several predominantly Muslim countries during his previous term as president.
Harris lost the presidential election in two metro Detroit cities with vast Arab-American populations after local Democrats warned for months about the Biden-Harris administration’s unwavering support for Israel in the Gaza war. Some said they supported Trump after he visited a few days before the election, mingling with customers and staff at a Lebanese restaurant and assuring people that he would find a way to end violence in the Middle East.
Others, including Amen, could not bring themselves to support the former president. She said many Arab Americans felt Harris got what she deserved but were not “cheering for Trump.”
“Whether it’s Trump himself or the people around him, it concerns me greatly,” Amen said. “But at the end of the day, when two evils are at work, what’s left?”
As it became clear overdue Tuesday and early Wednesday that Trump would not only win the presidency but also likely prevail in Dearborn, Dearborn City Council member Mustapha Hammoud described the mood in metro Detroit’s Arab-American communities as ” grim”. Still, the result was “not surprising at all,” he said.
The shift in Dearborn — where Trump received nearly 18,000 votes compared to Harris’ 15,000 — represents a stunning shift from four years ago, when Joe Biden won the city by a margin of nearly 3-1.
Nobody should be surprised
The results were no coincidence. For months, local leaders warned bluntly in phone calls and meetings with top Democratic officials that Arab American voters would turn against them if the administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war did not change.
The Biden-Harris administration has remained a staunch ally of Israel since the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took over 200 hostages. The war between Israel and Hamas has killed more than 43,000 people in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities. They do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
While Harris toned down her rhetoric on the war, she did not propose any specific policies toward Israel or the war in Gaza that differed from the administration’s position. And even if she had, it might not have made much of a difference in places like Dearborn.
“All she had to do was stop the war in Lebanon and Gaza and she would get everyone’s votes here,” Hammoud said.
More voters believed Trump could handle the situation in the Middle East better than Harris, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters across the country. About half of voters called Trump more suitable, compared with about a third who said Harris.
Among those who opposed more aid to Israel, 58% supported Harris in the presidential election; 39% supported Trump.
Even some Harris voters had their doubts. About three-quarters of Harris voters in Michigan said she was the better candidate to handle the situation. Few preferred Trump, but about two in 10 Harris voters said they were equal or neither was better.
Since there was no support for Harris in the Arab American community, Trump and his allies intervened.
A key portion of Michigan’s electorate — a state Trump won by nearly 11,000 votes in 2016 before losing it to Biden by nearly 154,000 votes in 2020 — spent months meeting with Trump allies who encouraged community leaders to support him .
Things started moving in September when Amer Ghalib, the Democratic Muslim mayor of the city of Hamtramck, endorsed Trump. Shortly afterwards, Trump visited a campaign office there.
That was a turning point, said Massad Boulos, who led Trump’s outreach to Arab Americans. Boulos’ son Michael is married to Trump’s daughter Tiffany.
“They very, very much appreciated the president’s visit and the respect they felt,” Massad Boulos said. “That was, so to speak, the first big success. After that, I started getting support from imams and Muslim leaders.”
An obvious shift towards Trump in the last week
While support for Harris had been dwindling for months – particularly after her campaign did not allow a pro-Palestinian speaker to take the stage at the Democratic National Convention in August – some voters say the final week of the campaign was crucial.
At an Oct. 30 rally in Michigan, former President Bill Clinton said Hamas was using civilians as shields and would “force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”
“Hamas didn’t care about a homeland for the Palestinians, they wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable,” he said. “Well I got news for them, they were there first, before their faith existed, they were there.”
The Harris campaign wanted Clinton to visit Dearborn to speak in the days after the rally, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly. The potential visit never materialized following the backlash to Clinton’s comments.
“That comment was the talk of the town. It hurt many who loved him, like me,” said Amin Hashmi, who was born in Pakistan and lives in a Detroit suburb. A self-described “die-hard Democrat,” Hashmi said voting for Trump was “a shocking move” after standing in the voting booth for 25 minutes.
On the Friday before the election, Trump visited The Great Commoner in Dearborn, a Lebanese restaurant. That was in keen contrast to Harris, who met with Democratic Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud — who did not support the race — but never came to Dearborn herself.
“He came to Dearborn. He spoke to residents. Even though some people say it’s not real, he still made the effort. He tried to work with them and at least listen to them,” said Samia Hamid, a Dearborn resident.
Amen said that at the polls in Dearborn on Tuesday, “people came out and said they were either going to vote for Third Party or for Trump.” When she asked what made them support Trump, “they said at least he came here and spoke to us, he recognized our community.”
Although Arab American support didn’t win him the White House, Trump made several promises that stuck with voters. Above all, they will be watching to see whether he keeps his promise to end the war.
They also hope his next term will be different from his first, when he issued the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. His rhetoric on the matter has been mixed – he even promised to extend the ban to Gaza refugees.
Osama Siblani, publisher of Dearborn-based Arab American News, said people would “hold him accountable.” Regardless, Siblani added, the community survived “the first four years” of Trump.
“We’ll survive the next four,” he said.
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Cappelletti reported from Detroit. Associated Press journalist Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report.
