Arab Americans sour on Biden amid Gaza crisis, poll shows
President Joe Biden’s support among Arab Americans, who are crucial voters in battleground states, has fallen from a comfortable majority in 2020 to just 17%, a new poll shows, amid growing anger over Trump’s support Democratic President for Israel’s Attacks on Gaza.
Arab American support for Mr. Biden fell from 59% in 2020 even before the outbreak of violence in the Middle East to 35%, the poll commissioned by the Arab American Institute showed, but has since halved.
The poll, released Tuesday, marks the first time since its creation in 1997 that a majority of Arab Americans did not identify as Democrats — 32% now identify as Republicans and 31% as independents. Forty percent of respondents said they would vote for former President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee in 2024, an increase of 5 percentage points from 2020.
The poll is the latest evidence that Biden’s campaign for a second term is rapidly losing support from Muslims and Arab Americans over his staunch support for Israel. These voters have traditionally voted for Democratic candidates and are prominent in hotly contested states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which could decide the 2024 presidential election.
The poll was conducted by John Zogby Strategies among 500 Arab Americans, some of whom responded only online, with a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points.
A quarter of Arab Americans said they were unsure who they would support in 2024; 13.7% said they saw Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would support, and 3.8% support Cornel West.
Only 20% of Arab Americans would rate Mr. Biden’s job performance as “good,” the poll found, while 66% reported a negative view of the president overall.
Sixty-eight percent of Arab Americans believed that the United States should not send weapons and military equipment to Israel and believed that the U.S. should use its influence over Israel to call for a ceasefire, according to the report.
The majority are concerned about rising anti-Semitism (67%) and anti-Arab intolerance (78%), and 59% report experiencing discrimination, an increase of 6% since the last poll in April.
The poll found that 45% of Arab Americans were concerned about their personal safety due to the recent violence in Israel and Palestine.
Cases of anti-Muslim hatred have skyrocketed in the US and abroad since Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7. One of the most prominent anti-Arab attacks was the killing of six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume and the wounding of his mother in an attack that prosecutors say was motivated by Islamophobia.
The Associated Press reported that the Biden administration is preparing to announce it will develop a national strategy to combat Islamophobia. The White House announcement was originally scheduled to come last week, when Mr. Biden held a meeting with Muslim leaders, but was postponed, three people told the AP. Two of them said the delay was partly due to concerns among the Muslim American community that the administration lacked credibility on the issue, given its strong support for the Israeli military.
Rami Nashashibi, the founder of the Inner City Muslim Action Network in Chicago and a participant in last week’s meeting, told the AP that he believed such an effort would be “dead” among the Muslim community until the president and administration officials took action with force. performance. condemn members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, who have openly called for the extermination of Palestinians from Gaza until the government more aggressively calls out hate crimes against Muslims and Arab Americans.
He and other leaders also want Mr. Biden to apologize, or at least publicly clarify, his recent comments in which the president said he had “no confidence” in the number of Palestinian deaths from Israel’s retaliatory strikes, because the data come from the Hamas-led attacks. The Ministry of Health, the AP reported.
Mr. Nashashibi also said the White House strategy could fail at a time when many in the community feel that advocates for Palestinian self-determination are being unfairly lumped in with those who embrace anti-Semitism and support for extremists.
“This merger goes a long way toward creating an atmosphere where we can see even deadlier results and greater targeting,” he told the AP. Mr. Nashashibi added: “The White House does not have the credibility at this time to roll out an Islamophobia strategy without publicly addressing the points we explicitly raised with the President during our meeting.”
This story was reported by Reuters. Material from The Associated Press was used for this report.