Former President Donald Trump, who proposed a ban on Muslim immigration and famously compared Latin American immigrants to snakes, could win a second term in the White House on the strength of gains among Arab, Muslim, and Hispanic voters.
This is rattling to the commentariat, who sees Trump as an irredeemable racist, but it ought to provide a lesson. The immigrant nonwhite population and their descendants do not hold the same sensitivities about race, equality, and immigration as do the liberal elites.
Also, the Democrats’ extreme stances in the culture war that may seem normal and inclusive to the average white liberal strike the more religious Hispanic, Muslim, and Arab voters as abominations.
Through the destabilizing effect of the Israel-Hamas war, and suddenly, Vice President Kamala Harris is at risk of losing the presidential election because of Hispanic, Arab, and Muslim voters in a handful of swing states either sitting out the election or defecting to the GOP.
Hispanics for Trump
Hispanic voters have voted overwhelmingly Democratic for decades, and this bloc has been key to Democrats’ presidential victories and has padded the party’s congressional delegation.
Then-President Barack Obama got 71% of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won 66% in 2016.
In the 2018 midterm elections, according to data from Pew, Democrats hit a record of 72% of Hispanics. That massive Democratic percentage fell to 61% in 2020 and 60% in 2022.
How will Hispanics vote in 2024?
If you believe the latest poll from USA Today and Suffolk University, Trump leads Harris by double digits among Hispanic voters, 49% to 38%. The poll sampled only 117 Hispanics, so the margin of error here is very large — plus or minus 9 points.
Most earlier polls showed Harris with significant leads among Hispanic voters, but much smaller than the victories Obama enjoyed. A New York Times-Siena College poll in early October showed Harris leading Trump 52% to 40%. Those Suffolk numbers could represent a late Trump surge or polling error — or both.
A poll from Univision found Trump trailing among most Hispanic sub-demographics but basically tied among Hispanics over 65 and those of Cuban background.
In Arizona, about 1 in 4 voters is Hispanic. Harris led Trump 49% to 41% among Arizona Hispanics in a recent New York Times poll, which is far worse than then-candidate Joe Biden’s 61% to 37% victory among this electorate in 2020 if exit polls are correct.
In Nevada, about 1 in 6 voters was Hispanic in 2020, and Biden won by a similar 61% to 35% margin, according to exit polls.
Biden won Nevada by 33,500 votes in 2020. If he had won Hispanics by only 12 percentage points, the New York Times’s poll’s margin for Harris, the state would have been a tie.
And in Arizona, it’s far starker: Trump would have easily won the state had he lost Hispanics by only 12 points. Likewise, Trump lost Georgia in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes, while Hispanic voters provided him with a margin of around 87,000 votes. If the New York Times poll bears on the Georgia electorate, that margin would drop by half, and Trump would win.
If Trump carried his 2020 states, plus Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, he would have 252 Electoral College votes. This means he would win if he could carry one more state — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Michigan.
Muslims for Trump
In Michigan, the key demographic could be a different minority demographic: Arab and Muslim voters.
Muslims are only 1% of the U.S. electorate, but as many as 150,000 of those voters are in Michigan. Biden carried the Muslim vote by a 2-to-1 margin or more, according to most estimates. The counting here is pretty imprecise, and different groups present very different estimates, but Biden’s Muslim margin in Michigan was at least 40,000 and maybe more than 100,000. His statewide margin was 154,000.
So, no plausible Muslim switch would be sufficient to swing Michigan into Trump’s column, but combined with swings in the centrist white vote, either suburbanites or working-class white voters, a Muslim swing could tip Michigan.
Earlier this fall, Amer Ghalib, the Yemeni-born Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, endorsed Trump. Polls and reporting suggest many Muslim and Arab voters who backed Biden in 2020 will stay home in 2024 or back third-party candidate Jill Stein. A few, like Ghalib, will defect to the GOP.
Trump is tied with Harris among Arab voters, a demographic that overlaps largely, though not entirely, with the Muslim vote. Two recent surveys put Trump and Harris between 40% and 45% and within the margin of error among Arab voters, as Semafor recently reported.
Why is this happening?
If the legacy media stories were correct, Republicans would be bleeding Hispanic votes under Trump rather than gaining them. Trump famously lumped racists and other violent criminals. He has campaigned on mass deportation and never shied from talking about drug cartels and gangs when speaking of immigrants.
In 2016, Trump pleased his crowd by reciting a poem, The Snake, in which the venomous, treacherous snake clearly stood in for immigrants.
He attacked one judge for being of Mexican descent and uses none of the care and nuance in discussing race and ethnicity that college-educated voters have adopted. That is, by the elite, upper-middle-class definition of the word, Trump is racist.
But most Hispanics in the United States are not college educated and apparently do not share the racial sensitivities of our media and academic classes. Everyone agrees racism is bad, but not everyone agrees on what counts as racism.
For the working class, and most Hispanics are in the working class, off-color jokes, stereotypes, and insults may not count as racism. Under Trump, the economy was spectacular, particularly for the working class. We were near full employment, and inflation was low — some ugly language and cringy taco bowl tweets don’t matter as much as those things.
On the Muslim and Arab front, the main problem is the Biden administration’s support of Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah. Trump is seen as more likely, 39% to 33%, to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he is no less pro-Israel than Biden. Trump is arguably more so.
Surely, part of the Muslim and Arab movement away from Democrats has to do with the culture wars.
Democrats have embraced an agenda of gender identity and aggressive sexual liberation in schools, and many Muslim and Arab populations are unhappy. In Maryland, for instance, Montgomery County Public Schools has moved the books about homosexuality and gender identity out of sex-ed curricula and into literature classes to prevent religious parents from opting out. The backlash has come from Muslim and Ethiopian Christian parents.
In Hamtramck, the state Democratic establishment drove the local Yemeni political leadership into Republican arms. After the city council voted against flying a Pride flag, a rainbow flag with a triangle touting gender ideology as well, from city-owned flagpoles, state Democrats came down hard on the city government. Attorney General Dana Nessel came and protested outside of city hall and accused the Yemeni Muslims of “hatred, intolerance, and bigotry.”
The Yemeni Muslims had taken over the city government in part because of the city’s earlier insistence on flying a Pride flag at city hall. “The imams deliver a lot of votes,” one local official explained. “They were upset about the flag.”
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The same culture-war extremism and intolerance could also be pushing Hispanic voters, who are more religious than white voters, away from the Democrats.
We won’t know until the votes are counted, but it’s possible Harris could lose to Trump because she lost so many Hispanic, Muslim, and Arab voters.