The Muslim American vote matters and it can no longer be taken for granted | US Election 2024

As the United States presidential election approaches, the race to attract voters has intensified. Among the different constituencies the Democrats and Republicans are battling over, there is one that stands out: the Muslim community.

Although Muslims constitute roughly 1 percent of the American population, they are an important voting bloc because they are concentrated in swing states, which are often narrowly won in elections.

In this election cycle, the Muslim community seems more united than ever over a single political issue: the war in Gaza.  Any candidate hoping to win over large segments of Muslim voters would have to address community demands for an end to the bloodshed in Palestine.

This is according to a new study published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) in partnership with Emgage and Change Research. It is based on a survey conducted in late June and early July focused on how Muslims in three swing states – Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan – intend to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

What we found is that President Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza has turned Muslims, who in 2020 were some of his biggest supporters, into his sharpest detractors.

In 2020, about 65 percent of Muslim voters in these states showed up to cast their ballots for Biden. This support was vital to his electoral victory because he won key swing states by small margins. He won Georgia by just 12,000 votes, a state where more than 61,000 Muslims voted, and Pennsylvania by 81,000 votes, where 125,000 Muslims voted.

By contrast, in our survey, conducted before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, only 12 percent of respondents said they would vote for him, marking a dramatic drop in support not seen among any other group studied. While this impacts the presidential race, it has also manifested in a broader disillusionment with the establishment of the Democratic Party.

The war on Gaza has unified Muslim voters in a way that no other issue has in recent memory. According to the 2020 American Muslim Poll conducted by ISPU, healthcare (19 percent), the economy (14 percent) and social justice (13 percent) were the top voting issues for Muslim voters.

Compare that with 2024: Across the partisan spectrum, the top priority of Muslim voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan is the war in Gaza (61 percent), followed by keeping the US out of foreign wars (22 percent).

Reduction of military aid to Israel also garnered the support of the vast majority of Muslim voters in our study, who, regardless of partisan sentiments, all overwhelmingly see this policy as a reason to vote for a candidate. While a war overseas may seem far from the daily concerns of American Muslim voters, many see the US role – providing unconditional aid and diplomatic cover to Israel – as complicity in the continued oppression of Palestinians.

The importance of the war in Gaza for Muslim voters was made clear months before we conducted our survey. The Muslim community played a leading role in the Uncommitted National Movement, which urged Democratic voters to vote “uncommitted” in presidential primaries in their states. The initiative managed to get more than 700,000 Democrats to do so, making clear their demand for a change in the Biden administration’s tone and policy on Israel and Palestine.

This dramatic Muslim migration away from Biden is not a wholesale leap to the other side of the aisle, however. Muslim support for Trump inched up from 18 percent in 2020 to 22 percent in 2024 in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Overwhelmingly, former Muslim supporters of Biden are moving to third parties or are still undecided. Our study found that nearly a third of Muslim voters will either vote a third-party candidate (27 percent) or write in a candidate (3 percent). About 17 percent of Muslims said they have yet to decide on a candidate compared with 6 percent of the general public.

This means there is still room and time for candidates to win over this vital constituency. And it seems they are trying.

Not only has Biden pulled out of the race, but Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has signalled she is distancing herself from his unflinching support for Israel’s war on Gaza. In July, the vice president did not attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, said she will not be silent about the suffering in Gaza and made clear her support for a ceasefire.

In August, she picked as her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who is widely regarded as more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than short-listed Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. This year, Walz praised uncommitted voters in Minnesota, calling them “civically engaged” and saying, “This issue is a humanitarian crisis. They have every right to be heard.”

And while Muslims were cautiously optimistic at best, the Harris campaign’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the Democratic National Convention last week has soured this hope.

Third-party candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West have both been vocal in their support for the people of Gaza. West chose Melina Abdullah, a Black Muslim woman as his running mate. Stein chose Muslim activist and academic Rudolph “Butch” Ware.

Even Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign is reaching out to Arab American voters – a surprise given the anti-Muslim rhetoric he used when campaigning in 2016. People associated with his campaign have been trying to woo Arab voters in swing states. Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany, married the son of a Lebanese American businessman, Massad Boulous, who has been trying to persuade Arabs in Michigan to vote for the former president due to the current administration’s failed policy in Gaza.

The Muslim community’s mobilisation on Palestine has come at a heavy cost for many. The Council on American Islamic Relations reported an unprecedented spike in incidents of bias: a 56 percent increase in reports of Islamophobia in 2023. Anti-Palestinian racism has also skyrocketed, a worrying trend reflected in the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont who were wearing the keffiyeh scarf. Thousands – many of them Muslim students – were arrested at campus protests, and many were threatened with expulsion or faced criminal charges for their pro-Palestinian activism at colleges and universities across the US.

And yet even with the consequences of taking a public stance on Palestine, Muslim voters appear to be undeterred this time around. Solidarity with the people of Gaza has emerged as the single most important issue for American Muslim voters, a group no candidate can afford to ignore.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.