Anger over Vice President Kamala Harris’s stance on the war in Gaza likely spelled the end of her presidential hopes in Michigan.
The battleground state holds the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, many of whom expressed profound disillusionment with the Biden-Harris administration’s policy on the Middle Eastern conflict. Riding off their wave of fury against Harris’s refusal to commit to significant policy changes on the war in Gaza, President-elect Donald Trump found historic levels of support in Dearborn and other majority-Muslim areas across the state.
That support played a critical role in propelling Trump to victory in a state he lost by about 155,000 votes four years ago. Trump won Dearborn with 42% support during the 2024 presidential election, a significant increase from the 30% he garnered in 2020.
Harris carried only 36% of the vote, down from President Joe Biden’s 69% in 2020.
Trump also carried the neighboring Dearborn Heights, where 39% of the residents hail from the Middle East. The Dearborn area is the birthplace of the pro-Palestinian anti-war “Uncommitted” movement, which prominently caught the country’s attention during Michigan’s February Democratic primary. Voters cast over 100,000 protest “uncommitted” ballots against Biden at the time, escalating tensions between Democratic leadership and far-left factions of the party.
Trump’s gains over his 2020 performance with Arab Americans were the highest in the majority-Muslim city of Hamtramck. The former president received 42.7% of the vote with all ballots counted following the Nov. 5 election, which marked a staggering increase from the 13.4% he received in 2020.
The news comes as an apparent confirmation that Trump’s message of “peace” and “no new wars” has resonated with key leaders in Michigan’s pro-Palestinian community, many of whom have relatives who have been killed or are living in the Middle Eastern region that has been fraught with violence.
The Trump campaign portrayed Harris as a pro-war candidate during the 2024 presidential election cycle, pointing to her alliance with former Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, whom the former president and his allies have described as a “war hawk.”
Meanwhile, Trump has aligned himself with anti-war figures, including former Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While he has expressed steadfast support for Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Trump has also pledged that he would work to bring a swift end to the conflict and halt the suffering of the Palestinian people.
His rhetoric found a listening ear in Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib, a prominent pro-Palestinian activist who made headlines after endorsing Trump in October. Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi later followed in Ghalib’s footsteps, subsequently appearing at a recent Michigan rally with Trump.
WATCH: Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Michigan, the country's only Muslim majority city, joins President Trump at his last campaign rally in Grand Rapids and says that a survey among the Arab Americans in Metro Detroit area showed President Trump leading by 76%. pic.twitter.com/K9R3ugR3L1
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) November 5, 2024
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Even Dearborn’s Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who criticized Ghalib’s move to back Trump, pushed back against pressure to endorse Harris over fears that the former president would “threaten democracy.”
“When you have residents pouring in saying, ‘I have lost a family member, I have missed the burial that would provide some semblance of peace, and we couldn’t even find the body of my family member — we only found limbs that were cast because of the size of the explosion,’ how would you approach them and say, ‘While I understand this pain you’re feeling, you still should cast your vote for the quote-unquote lesser of two evils?’” he told Mother Jones.
