Can Biden Win Back Arab American Voters?
Washington Watch
November 6, 2023
Dr. James J. Zogby ©
President
Arab American Institute
I’ve been organizing Arab Americans for almost a half century. For the past three decades, working with my brother, John Zogby, we've polled the community’s views on a range of political topics. I’ve learned to value polling because it opens a window and allows you to hear and understand what people are saying and what their views may portend for the future.
We knew Arab Americans would be impacted by the devastation and loss of life resulting from the ongoing deadly violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Because we had no idea to what extent the community would respond, we commissioned a poll to get a closer look at how the community is reacting to the conflict, the impact it is having on their lives, how they feel about the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict, and what their reactions might mean for the 2024 elections. The results, which we released this week, were more striking than we could have imagined.
What we learned was that there has been a dramatic decline in Arab American support for President Joseph Biden and that his handling of Israel’s continued devastation of Gaza is the reason for this shift in attitudes.
When asked how they would vote in the 2024 elections, only 17% say they would cast a ballot for Biden, in marked contrast to the 59% who voted for him in 2020. The president’s approval rating among Arab Americans also plummeted from 74% in 2020 to 29% in this year's poll.
To find the reason behind this precipitous drop in support, we need to look no further than the two-thirds of Arab Americans who say they have a negative view of the president’s handling of the current violence in Palestine and Israel and a similar two-thirds who believe the U.S. should call for a ceasefire to end the hostilities.
The overall impact of the negative views toward the president and his policies not only shows up in a substantial drop in expected voter support in 2024, but also has a dramatic impact on party preference. This poll marks the first time in our 26 years of polling Arab American voters in which a majority do not claim to prefer the Democratic Party. In 2008 and 2016 Arab American Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one. In this year’s poll, 32% of Arab Americans identify as Republican as opposed to just 23% who identify as Democrats. There has been a steady growth in the percentage of those who identify as Independents—at the expense of the Democratic Party.
The poll also demonstrates that Arab Americans worry about the domestic fallout from the war and the heated rhetoric that has accompanied its repercussions at home. Eight in 10 Arab Americans are concerned that the current violence will provoke anti-Arab bigotry, while two-thirds are similarly concerned with the prospect of antisemitism. There are also high levels of concern with publicly expressing views in support of Palestinian rights and fear for their personal safety or acts of discrimination. And six in 10 Arab Americans report experiencing discrimination, an increase of 6% since April of this year. It is noteworthy that this concern is most prominent among Arab American Muslims (70%) and Arab Americans ages 18-34 (74%) who report facing discrimination. One-half of all Arab Americans feel concerned about facing discrimination at school, work, and in their local community due to the recent violence in Palestine and Israel.
Finally, it is significant to note that both the high levels of support for Palestinian rights and high negatives for the president’s policies are views shared by almost all of the demographic groups covered in the poll—by age, gender, education level, religion, and immigrant vs. native born.
This is significant because in our nearly three decades of polling, there have only been two other moments where policy issues have resulted in such a dramatic shift in Arab American views—and neither of them produced such a change over such a short period of time. The first was during the Bush years when over a period of four years Arab Americans moved decisively against the president’s policies in Iraq and his repressive domestic agenda of violating civil liberties and his party’s negative stereotyping of Arab Americans and American Muslims. The second was in 2016 when Arab Americans recoiled in the face of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric against Muslims. In the case of President Biden, while Arab American attitudes toward his job performance declined on a par with the rest of American voters, the precipitous drop over a few weeks time in support for his reelection and even his party has been unprecedented.
Arab Americans may not be as numerous as some other constituencies, but their hundreds of thousands of voters in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were actively courted by the 2020 Biden campaign. For him to win them back in 2024 will be an uphill climb.