Connect with us

Economics

War is not the only reason some Muslims are ditching Democrats

Published

on

AS PRESS conferences go, the one held at the Arab American Chamber of Commerce building in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, on October 27th, was uncomfortable. On one side of a boardroom table, opposite a crowd of cameras and microphones, sat around a dozen men and women who are influential in Arab-American circles. Taking turns to speak, each of them explained how they were directly affected by war in the Middle East; how they felt disappointed and betrayed by President Joe Biden; and how despite it all, they would still be voting for Kamala Harris.

“I’ve heard people in my community say they want to punish Democrats for this war,” said James Zogby, the second speaker and the founder of the Arab American Institute. “They’re not going to punish Democrats. They’re going to punish immigrants. They’re going to punish innocent people.” He finished with a plea: “Don’t punish the country, the world, your children, your grandchildren, because you’re angry.”

As they spoke, a small crowd holding up Palestinian flags was gathering outside, suggesting that they would be doing exactly that: “There are traitors inside,” went the chant. “Endorsing our genocide.” Later they called the attendees “Zionist collaborators”. According to Jenin Yaseen, one of the protesters, the only difference between Ms Harris and Donald Trump is the speed at which each would accept the murder of all Palestinians. Both are appalling, she said, but she thought Mr Trump was at least honest in his contempt for the Palestinian cause.

Michigan is among the closest of swing states, with polls suggesting Ms Harris has the slenderest of leads: our model puts her just 0.4 percentage points ahead. And according to the census bureau, 310,000 people claim Middle Eastern or North African origins in the state, or about 3% of the total. Winning over Arab voters could deliver Mr Trump the election. On October 26th, at a rally in Novi, a suburb of Detroit, the former president appeared on stage with 21 Muslim and Arab leaders (all men), after being endorsed by the mayors of Dearborn Heights, a heavily Arab suburb next to Dearborn proper, and of Hamtramck, an enclave of Detroit with a fully Muslim city council. Mr Trump, one imam declared, will deliver “peace”.

This seems rather implausible. According to Lindsay Graham, a Republican senator, Mr Trump recently told Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, that he has “awe” for Israeli military operations and backs more of them. The former president has also called for Mr Netanyahu to “finish the job”. But that may not stop some Arab-Americans in Michigan from voting for him.

Rania Batrice, a Palestinian-American Democratic operative who worked for Bernie Sanders in 2016, and who is reluctantly backing Ms Harris, says that those supporting Mr Trump know his promises of peace are “a big fat lie”. But she worries they don’t care, because they are simply too angry with Mr Biden and Ms Harris. Many were initially warmer towards her, but are disappointed the vice-president has not broken rhetorically with Mr Biden since becoming the nominee.

There is some reason to think that a few Muslims would be drifting to Mr Trump even without the war, and that the bloodshed in Gaza and Lebanon simply provides an excuse. On a call organised by the Trump campaign on October 21st, Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, barely mentioned the war in Gaza at all. An imam present suggested that if Ms Harris wins, “the boys will turn to girls, and the girls will turn to a boy.” Melissa Gilchrist, a resident of Hamtramck, says that she thinks Mr Ghalib’s endorsement of Mr Trump is more about local politics. A year ago, she was at the front of a protest against Mr Ghalib after he removed the city’s gay-rights rainbow flag from outside City Hall. The mayor and his clique “are much more conservative on social things than the Democratic Party”, she says. Endorsing Mr Trump is a jab at his critics locally.

A poll conducted for the Arab American Institute earlier this month found Arab-Americans divided equally between the two candidates. Muslim and Arab voters may also just stay away from the polls, or else turn out for a third-party candidate. A campaign encouraging them to do just that, called “Abandon Harris”, has endorsed Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. Hassan Abdel Salam, its founder, says that his hope is that Ms Harris loses the election by a narrow margin in Michigan, and then that Democrats react by insisting their next candidate should adopt a more forceful approach to Israel. “We want to be written in history, for our great great grandchildren, we want to be remembered forever,” he says. It is a thought. 

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Economics

How we will cover a second Trump presidency

Published

on

This is the introduction to The Economist this week, a free weekly newsletter that includes a note from our editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes.

Sign up for The Economist this week

The world has just witnessed a historic turn. Donald Trump’s election as America’s 47th president was not a fluke: his victory was decisive. By securing more than 70m votes, he has won the popular vote for the first time in three attempts. The Republican Party now runs the Senate and is likely, within days, to secure control of the House. Add that the Supreme Court will be firmly entrenched with MAGA values for a generation. All this constitutes a stunning comeback and provides a powerful mandate for Mr Trump; in our cover leader we call him the most consequential American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Our weekly edition considers what a second Trump presidency means. If Mr Trump has wrecked the old order, what will take its place? Will the return of Trumponomics spark a global trade war? How will Mr Trump handle the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East? His sweeping victory could set the tone for fellow nationalist populists such as Marine Le Pen, who hopes to secure France’s presidency in 2027. Mr Trump was too easily dismissed as an aberration in his first term. Not now. He has defined a new political era, for America and the world.

Subscribers can now sign up to participate in our live digital event on Friday November 8th, where our editors will discuss the election’s aftermath and what comes next. I also recommend the US in brief, our daily newsletter devoted to the most important matters in American politics.

Wherever you live, Mr Trump’s presidency will affect you. Over the next four years, we will report on and analyse the effects of the second Trump presidency on policy, business, economics and more—in America and around the world.

I invite you to be a part of this. If you already subscribe to The Economist, thank you.

Continue Reading

Economics

Opinion polls underestimated Donald Trump again

Published

on

FOR THE third presidential election in a row Donald Trump has stumped America’s pollsters. As results came in on election night it became clear that polls had again underestimated enthusiasm for Mr Trump in many states. In Iowa, days before the election a well-regarded poll by Ann Selzer had caused a stir by showing Kamala Harris ahead by three percentage points. In the end, Mr Trump won the state by 13 points.

Overall, the polling miss was far smaller. Polls accurately captured a close contest in the national popular vote and correctly forecast tight races in each of the battleground states. National polls erred by less than they did in 2020, and state polls improved on their dismal performances in 2020 and 2016. Yet this will be little comfort to pollsters who have been grappling with Mr Trump’s elusive supporters for years.

The Economist’s nationwide polling average found Kamala Harris leading by 1.5 percentage points, overestimating her advantage by around three points (many votes have yet to be counted), compared with an average error of 2.7 points in past cycles. State polling averages from FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, had an average error of 3.0, smaller than the average of 4.2 points since 1976.

Chart: The Economist

But in contrast to 2016, when pollsters’ misses were concentrated in certain states, those in this cycle were nearly uniform across state and national polls. In the seven key states, polling averages underestimated Mr Trump’s margin by between 1.5 and 3.5 points (see chart). Pollsters may claim that their surveys captured the “story” of the election. But the awkward question remains: why did they underestimate Mr Trump for the third cycle in a row?

In past election cycles, pollsters have tweaked survey “weights” to make their samples of voters more representative. Although polls aim to sample the population randomly, in practice they often systematically miss certain groups. Weights are used to increase the influence of under-represented respondents. This has been especially true in recent years as response rates have plummeted.

After the 2016 election, when surveys systematically missed voters without college degrees and therefore underestimated support for Mr Trump, pollsters began accounting for respondents’ education levels. And after 2020, in an effort to ensure that Republican voters were represented, more pollsters began weighting their samples by respondents’ party registration and self-reported voting history. This caused the range of poll outcomes to narrow (weighting reduces the variance of survey results), with many pollsters finding similar results in key states and nationwide.

If there is a lesson from this year’s election, it could be that there is a limit to what weighting can solve. Although pollsters may artificially make a sample “representative” on the surface, if they do not address the root causes of differential response rates, they will not solve the underlying problem. They also introduce many subjective decisions, which can be worth almost eight points of margin in any given poll.

A pollster which gets those decisions right appears to be prophetic. But with limited transparency before the election, it is hard to know which set of assumptions each has made, and whether they are the correct ones. To their credit, the pollsters get together to conduct comprehensive post-election reviews. This year’s may be revealing. Still, without a breakthrough technology that can boost the representativeness of survey samples, weighting alone is unlikely to solve pollsters’ difficulty in getting a reliable read on what Trump voters are thinking.

Continue Reading

Economics

Donald Trump also won a reprieve from justice

Published

on

IT WAS A high-stakes election for all Americans, most of all Donald Trump. Had he lost, there was a fair chance that he would have gone to prison. He faces four separate sets of criminal charges, each with a prospect of jail time. Instead, once back in the White House, Mr Trump will be able to quash his two federal indictments and the two state cases against him are all but certain to be frozen.

That Mr Trump has managed to largely evade legal accountability is partly a result of his stalling for time, in anticipation of this very outcome. His strategy was aided by the Supreme Court, a third of whose justices he appointed. And yet his supporters see a justice system that is pliable and easily weaponised. To some in MAGA world, Mr Trump’s threats to train it against his political enemies now sound eminently reasonable.

The first post-election piece of business in Mr Trump’s trials will come in the hush-money case in Manhattan, where, barring further delay, he is due to be sentenced on November 26th. In May he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a payment to a porn star. Each charge carries a maximum of four years in prison. Yet there is hardly any chance of the judge imposing jail time—constitutional scholars agree that a sitting president cannot be locked up. In any event Mr Trump’s lawyers will probably ask to postpone sentencing until after his term in office ends.

Next come the two federal cases brought by Jack Smith, a special counsel in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Mr Trump stands accused of refusing to return classified documents upon leaving the White House and of attempting to overturn his defeat after the 2020 election. He denies wrongdoing in both. DOJ policy says that a president cannot be prosecuted while in office. Extinguishing these cases is simple: Mr Trump can fire Mr Smith and direct DOJ lawyers to drop them. He can do this even before his attorney-general is confirmed, notes Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor.

In Georgia, meanwhile, Mr Trump faces charges in state court over his meddling in the 2020 election. The case is on hold while an appeals court weighs whether the prosecutor who brought the charges should be removed for alleged impropriety. If it ever gets going again, it will not include Mr Trump so long as he is the sitting president. But his 14 remaining co-defendants could still stand trial.

Then there is the civil litigation against Mr Trump for his role in the January 6th riot. Several Capitol police officers have sued him, alleging that he instigated the attack; courts are in the middle of sorting out whether his conduct is immune from civil liability. If they say it is not immune, precedent suggests that civil suits against a sitting president can proceed.

Soon enough attention will turn from Mr Trump’s legal jeopardy to that of his opponents, whom he has vowed to target. At a MAGA victory party attended by your correspondent, shortly before the conga line started, several of his supporters suggested that Joe Biden ought to drop the federal prosecutions against Mr Trump as a show of goodwill. Then one gleefully added that she would love to see their man “take the Bidens down”.

Continue Reading

Trending