With two weeks to go before the election, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is making a final push to win back Arab and Muslim voters.
The campaign has launched Facebook ads targeting Muslims, created WhatsApp channels and distributed fact sheets with Ms. Harris’s most forceful statements on the war in Gaza. And in private meetings in living rooms and basements across the country, including in the battleground states of Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, campaign workers are trying to reach voters who say they may stay home, vote third party or even vote for former President Donald J. Trump because of the Biden administration’s policies in the Middle East.
The message from the campaign is simple: Ms. Harris has expressed sympathy for Palestinians and called on Israel to respect international laws, while Mr. Trump wants to reinstate a travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries and has used “Palestinian” as an insult.
Although reliable polls of these groups are challenging to come by, interviews with voters suggest that Ms. Harris is struggling to win over Arab and Muslim voters — a deeply worrying sign for her campaign at this point in the race.
Nowhere is the task more urgent than in Michigan, home to more than 300,000 residents with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. President Biden won the state by nearly 155,000 votes in 2020.
Hussein Dabajeh, a Lebanese American resident of Dearborn, Mich., said he had voted primarily for Democrats in the past, including for Mr. Biden in 2020. But this year, he cannot bring himself to vote for the Democratic ticket.
A political consultant who protested Mr. Trump’s travel ban in 2017, Mr. Dabajeh was not swayed by arguments that Ms. Harris would be a better option than the former president.
“Would you rather your family be banned from entering this country, or would you rather your family be killed by an Israeli airstrike?” said Mr. Dabajeh, 37, who lost family in the recent violence in Lebanon.
On Election Day, Mr. Dabajeh said, he plans to show up to polls urging voters to not vote for Ms. Harris. He said he would write in “No Genocide” instead of voting for either candidate.
In the months since she became the Democratic nominee, Ms. Harris has focused on rebuilding the coalition that helped propel Mr. Biden to the White House in 2020. Although Arab Americans have tended to vote Democratic in recent years, the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s assault in Gaza and now Lebanon has upended those patterns.
Ms. Harris has not strayed from Mr. Biden on policy, but she has taken a stronger tone on the suffering of Palestinians. She also appointed two prominent Muslim Americans to lead the outreach effort to Arab and Muslim voters: Nasrina Bargzie, a former civil rights lawyer who served in the White House as Ms. Harris’s deputy counsel, and Brenda Abdelall, a former Biden appointee in the Department of Homeland Security who taught a course called “Islamophobia and the Law” at the University of Michigan Law School.
“There are many people in the Arab American and Muslim communities who are still learning about Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, two people who have worked for decades shoulder to shoulder with these communities,” Ms. Bargzie, the director of the campaign’s Muslim and Arab American outreach, said in a statement. “We are working to ensure these communities know that they are seen, valued and heard in this campaign.”
Ms. Bargzie and Ms. Abdelall hold regular meetings, usually hosted by a local resident, in states with significant Arab and Muslim populations, hoping to sway disillusioned voters. The task is made more difficult, some attendees say, because the campaign is trying to attract voters without promising major policy change.
Sumaiya Ahmed Sheikh, a 33-year-old who hosted a campaign event at her home near Detroit in September, said she would vote for Ms. Harris despite her own reservations.
“It’s not like a loud and proud vote,” said Ms. Ahmed Sheikh, who leads an immigrant advocacy organization. “It’s merely like we have no option, and this is the best option for us to continue our work.”
She said that her mother would not vote for Ms. Harris and that her younger sister was undecided.
During another meeting on Oct. 9, Dr. Jamal Hammoud, a Palestinian American endocrinologist who lives near Flint, said he asked why the government was spending billions of dollars to support Israel when his patients in Michigan could not afford their prescriptions.
Dr. Hammoud, 67, who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, said Ms. Bargzie and Ms. Abdelall agreed with him that Americans should be taken care of but did not discuss the weapons policy toward Israel.
“I was very upset, of course, with what’s going on, because I see daily burning, killing and genocide,” he said. “And I was hoping that talking to Harris’s people will basically make things easier.”
Dr. Hammoud left the meeting “feeling better” and was swayed when he heard, among other things, that the Biden administration had more than 100 Muslim American appointees and that the Harris campaign had pledged to continue that representation if she won.
“I’m saying it loud: We will, we should do that, because our strategy should be that there’s hope that Harris will be more accommodative for Muslims,” he said.
Then he did exactly what the Harris campaign hoped — he began talking the vice president up to his friends and family. The result? He was “bombarded” with opposition in his WhatsApp groups.
One of the people he has tried to persuade to vote for Ms. Harris is his younger brother, Mohammed, a 59-year-old mechanical engineer who lives near him in the suburbs of Flint.
It didn’t work.
“Logically, we could actually vote for Harris, given all the facts,” Mohammed Hammoud said. “But morally — I cannot do that. I cannot get myself to that.”
Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, said he had found it difficult to talk about politics at all with the people in his city, some of whom were holding funerals for loved ones who died in Lebanon. He estimates that 60 percent of Dearborn residents are of Arab descent, of which 45 percent are Lebanese.
“How do you now tell them: Well, regardless of how you feel, regardless of which administration this happened, will you come out on Nov. 5 and cast your vote toward Vice President Harris? How does somebody have that conversation?” the mayor said.
He does not plan to endorse a candidate.
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