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      Arab Americans slightly favor Trump over Harris, says new poll

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      Arab Americans are slightly more likely to vote for Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, according to a new poll, in a worrying sign for the Democratic nominee’s chances of carrying the battleground state of Michigan, which is home to a large Arab American population.The survey, conducted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit along with YouGov, shows 43% supporting Trump compared with 41% for Harris, and 4% backing the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.The figures are broadly in line with a previous poll carried out this month by the Arab American Institute. Together they suggest that Harris’s support in the community has been undermined by the Biden administration’s backing for Israel’s year-long war against Hamas in Gaza.The latest poll also shows Trump leading Harris by 39% to 33% on the question of which candidate would be most likely resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the candidates were tied at 38% apiece on who would be “better for the Middle East in general”.Support for Trump is particularly striking given that the same poll shows twice as many respondents – 46% to 23% – think anti-Arab racism and hate crimes are likely to increase under a Trump presidency compared with under Harris.The former president has repeatedly used the term “Palestinian” as an insult against his Democratic opponents, and derided them as insufficiently supportive of Israel.The findings are also surprising given that Trump’s presidency was characterised by a strong pro-Israel policy tilt. He was responsible for a historic decision to move the US embassy in the country from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the status of which is hotly disputed by Israelis and Palestinians.The perception of him as ardently pro-Israel is reflected in the poll, which shows 69% of respondents believe he is the most supportive of the country’s interests, compared with 60% for Harris.The vice-president – whose husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish – has trod a delicate course while attempting to claw back the support of Arab voters forfeited by Biden.She has repeatedly affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, while also voicing concern over the escalating casualties and worsening situation in Gaza. She greeted last week’s death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by saying it offered a chance to end the war.Trump has claimed that last October’s deadly attack by Hamas would not have happened on his watch. He appealed explicitly to Arab voters on Monday as Harris campaigned in Michigan with Liz Cheney, the former Republican member of Congress whose father, Dick Cheney, played a key role in the invasion of Iraq as George W Bush’s vice-president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf Harris were elected, Trump wrote on his Truth Social site, “the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to War, maybe even a Third World War”.The earlier Arab American Institute survey also showed Harris with 41% support, compared with 42% for Trump and 12% for third-party candidates.It concluded that while Harris had recovered some support ceded by Biden, she was still far behind the 59% of the Arab vote captured by the US president in his 2020 election win over Trump.Polls show Harris and Trump in a virtual deadlock in Michigan, which Trump narrowly won in 2016 but lost to Biden four years later. More

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      ‘Is it going to be safe?’: suspicions and fear dominate a crucial swing county in lead-up to US election

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      Vanessa Guerra is resigned to questions from Donald Trump’s supporters about the many ways in which American voters imagine next month’s presidential election might be rigged against him.But more recently the Saginaw county clerk, who is overseeing the ballot in a highly contested patch of central Michigan, has faced a new line of questioning at meetings called to reassure distrustful voters.“I did a presentation last week and, as usual, we had a lot of questions about the validity of election results. But now they’re also asking: Is it going to be safe to go to the polls on election day? Is something going to happen? That’s something new,” said Guerra.The most consequential US presidential election of recent times is also likely to be the most disputed, particularly if the results are as close as opinion polls suggest.Republican officials are gearing up to stall and overturn the count if it goes against Trump. Meanwhile, the former US president has warned of a bloodbath if he loses again next month, which voters have reason to take seriously in the wake of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol after he lost the last election.Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 vote was rigged against him – including at a rally in Saginaw earlier this month – and that Democrats are plotting to steal next month’s election, has left its mark.View image in fullscreenIn Michigan, a key swing state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016 and then lost to Joe Biden four years later, one in five people say they do not have confidence that votes will be counted accurately.Across the US, just 8% of Trump supporters say they have a great deal of confidence there will be a fair election and only 16% are very confident that their own vote will be counted accurately, according to YouGov. Kamala Harris’s supporters are much more trusting, with 72% having a great deal of confidence in the conduct of the election, although that still leaves large numbers of Democrats also questioning the process.Perhaps most disturbing of all, a majority of both Harris and Trump supporters expect mass protests against the result if their candidate wins. Michigan has ramped up security at election centres across the state after Trump voters attempted to storm a counting centre in Detroit in 2020 as the election swung away from him.Guerra, like county clerks in other jurisdictions, has sought to counter Trump’s claims by holding public sessions to explain the election counting process. She has also encouraged sceptics to become election inspectors, or poll workers, so they can reassure themselves and others that the process is fair.But concerns about safety are harder to address. Guerra, who was elected to be county clerk as a Democrat but makes clear the nonpartisan requirements of her office, picks her words carefully.“It worries me that he makes voters less at ease. So when I started hearing the concerns about ‘Can I go to the polls on election day?’, that’s when I realised that people were feeling alarmed,” she said.“We’re always concerned about security here, whether or not Donald Trump existed. Elections, they need to be secure, and we need to be transparent about what we do, regardless of who’s running for office. But the rhetoric that voters are hearing and digesting and then asking me about their safety, I’m seeing that more now, and that does concern me.”View image in fullscreenMichigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said her office receives threats “every day” over the election. She has twice been the target of swatting recently, in which false emergency calls sent armed police to her home.“Swatting is a form of political violence that is horrific, dangerous and intended to terrify its victims. But hear me clearly: I will not be intimidated,” she said at the time.In 2020, dozens of protesters, some armed, descended on Benson’s house to demand she overturn the election count in Michigan.Guerra said she has not been threatened as county clerk but she was the target of repeated intimidation when she was a member of the Michigan legislature in 2020, including when armed Trump supporters stormed the state capitol building over the coronavirus lockdown in what was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for January 6 in Washington.Guerra said that the rising atmosphere of intimidation has led to a marked increase in people requesting an absentee vote, some out of fear.“I have seen a lot more people asking me: Should I early vote or should I absentee? Is something going to happen on election day?” she said.View image in fullscreenMore than one-quarter of Saginaw county’s registered voters have already requested an absentee ballot. But postal voting is itself a focus of conspiracy theories after Trump repeatedly alleged it was used to rig the count four years ago because absentee ballots in Michigan and other states were counted only after in-person votes, causing delays in final results that shifted Biden’s way.Michigan has changed its election laws since 2020 in response to the allegations of rigging and threats, including to allow absentee ballots to be counted before election day.The former president has shifted away from opposition to postal voting more recently after he realised that discouraging his supporters from casting absentee ballots might mean they don’t vote at all. But in Saginaw, Republican officials continue to push doubts.Debra Ell, who led a takeover of Saginaw’s Republican party by Trump supporters, stands by a claim that fraudulent postal votes were used to steal the last election for Biden.“I was on the ground. We walked out of our office in 2020 at about 10 o’clock at night and [Trump] was 75% ahead in Saginaw county, and we were just on a cloud. There’s no way that that could change. I think they cheated,” she said.Ell does not blame local officials but said she has no more confidence in the electoral process this year.View image in fullscreen“Between the drop boxes and the mail-in voting, the system is corrupted. A lot of this is absentee voting. You can vote absentee for any reason, and there were a lot of people that got absentee ballots for dead people or people who don’t live here any more, stuff like that. They refuse to clean up their voter rolls,” she said.Andrea Paschall, a Republican who founded Latinos for Trump of Saginaw county, said she has no doubt the last election was rigged although she is uncertain if there was tampering in Saginaw.“I haven’t found proof for Saginaw county in particular, but I have seen proof that the election was stolen and read the documentations, and I’ve talked to the people who’ve conducted those studies,” she said.Paschall said she was not confident this year’s election would be clean.“I have very little faith. There are too many ways to cheat the system. We are trying to find those ways but the problem is, if everybody doesn’t agree that there’s a problem, then you can’t solve the problem,” she said.Guerra said there is no evidence for these or other claims that the casting and counting of ballots was manipulated. She said her office has met with local Republican officials, including Ell, to reassure sceptics that nothing untoward is going on in Saginaw county, where she works with 30 local clerks administering the election on the ground, many of them also Republicans.But Guerra recognised that there was only so much she could do and that probably the only way the election was going to remain undisputed was if there is a clear winner.“I would prefer a large margin between the two major candidates,” she said. More

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      Liz Cheney urges conservatives to back Kamala Harris over abortion

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      Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to support Kamala Harris for president.Cheney was speaking at the first of three joint events with Harris in the suburbs of three swing states aimed at prising moderate Republican voters away from party nominee Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be under consideration for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.At the first event in Malvern, a Philadelphia suburb, against a blue backdrop that said “a new way forward” and red one that said “country over party”, Cheney suggested that Republican-led states have overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” said Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney.“I think this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people come together to say: what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing, to get access to women’s medical records … that’s not sustainable for us as a country and it has to change.”Harris nodded repeatedly and applauded in response. The audience also clapped warmly.It was a striking attempt to build a permission structure for conservatives to back Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centrepiece of her campaign and vowed to restore the protections of Roe v Wade if authorised by Congress. Cheney, by contrast, has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that grades members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.Monday’s three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were being held in counties won by Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, had sought to neutralise abortion as an election issue by supporting states’ autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.Cheney has vocally opposed Trump since the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and was vice-chair of a congressional committee investigating the attack. Her recent endorsement of Harris fuelled speculation that she could play a part in a future Harris administration.

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      Earlier this month, appearing on the popular daytime talkshow The View, Harris said she would differ from Joe Biden by including a Republican in her cabinet. She was asked by radio host Howard Stern if that might be Cheney but avoided a direct answer. Appointing Cheney would carry considerable political risks given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war.Trump has frequently tried to paint Harris, who is from deep blue California, as a radical liberal but she struck a moderate tone during her appearance with Cheney, who lost her House seat after she co-chaired a congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack.She promised to “invite good ideas from wherever they come” and “cut red tape,” and she said “there should be a healthy two party system” in the country. “We need to be able to have these good intense debates about issues that are grounded in fact,” she said.“Imagine!” Cheney responded.“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe that’s an applause line?”View image in fullscreenVoters in Chester county, which includes Malvern, narrowly voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 but the county was won by Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in 2016 and Biden by 17 points in 2020.The discussion was chaired by Sarah Longwell, who runs the group Republican Voters Against Trump, and lasted 40 minutes including two questions from the audience.Harris said Trump “has been using the power of the presidency to demean and to divide us” and “people are exhausted with that”. The vice-president added: “People around the world are watching. And sometimes I do fret a bit about whether we as Americans truly understand how important we are to the world.”Cheney praised Harris, saying: “I’m a conservative. I know that the most conservative of all conservative principles is being faithful to the constitution. You have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump.”Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “totally erratic, completely unstable” Trump to run foreign policy. “Our adversaries know that they can play Donald Trump,” she said. “And we cannot afford to take that risk.”But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war. Many such voters are now wavering or abstaining because of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza.Trump weighed in on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.”More than a hundred former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where general George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the revolutionary war. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats. More

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      Kamala Harris questions Trump’s stamina: ‘Is he fit to do the job?’

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      Kamala Harris used a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Friday to seize on reports that Donald Trump had been canceling media interviews to question whether he has the stamina for a second presidency if voters choose him over her in November’s election.“If he can’t handle the rigors of the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?” the Democratic vice-president, 59, told rallygoers about the 78-year-old Trump.She said: “Trump is unfit for office.”Harris and her Republican opponent were in Michigan as the weekend began while trying to shore up support in a battleground state that could decide their 5 November race. Polling suggests Michigan as well as its fellow “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin remained in play for both candidates as the campaign’s waning days arrived.“This is the place that is going to decide the election, right here,” Democratic congresswoman Hillary Scholten told Friday’s audience as she opened the event.Among the crowd, some Harris supporters struck a hopeful tone. “It’s about time for a woman to lead,” said Jenifer Lake, who took her daughter Adeline Butts to the rally for a chance to “see history in the making”.Butts, who will be old enough to vote for the first time this election, described herself mostly concerned about the cost of living, tuition and housing affordability. And her fellow attender Bill Bray, who came to the rally from Adrian, Michigan, said he believed Harris would better promote economic opportunity for those situated like him than Trump would.Bray grew up “in a poor neighborhood” but said he is doing well thanks to benefits from his prior military service as well as his long career at Ford Motor Company. He said he wants other people to have a chance at that same trajectory.“Trump doesn’t understand equality,” said Bray, a veteran of the Vietnam war who also accused the former president of dodging the military draft that would have sent him to the same conflict.Bray also said he supports stronger federal gun control after seeing “what guns to do to people” and has no faith in Trump – who is widely supported by the firearms industry – taking that issue seriously.Other attenders said abortion access was at the top of their mind. Harris has campaigned on preserving abortion access while three of Trump’s appointees to the US supreme court helped eliminate federal abortion rights in 2022.“It’d be nice to have control of my body back, and then I’ll think about listening to the other side,” Kim Osborn said.Lauren Rockel said she would like to see Harris fight to reinstate the Roe v Wade protections that Trump’s supreme court appointees helped strip away.“There are people dying” as a result of abortion restrictions that have since gone into effect in many states, Rockel said. “It’s awful.”To them, Harris said it was “time to turn the page” on Trump.The Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, spoke before Harris took the stage. Four other Democratic state governors joined her.Her presence and that of the other governors “shows how important you are, Michigan,” Whitmer said. She told the crowd that they would be the ones to “take our country forward” if they helped send Harris to the White House.Michigan’s Democratic US senator Debbie Stabenow also spoke before Harris, alluding to how it got “scarier and scarier” the more she thought about the proposed policies of Trump’s supporters. The former president has sought to distance himself from the far-right Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 plan calls for the mass firings of civil servants and exalts the idea outlawing abortion altogether during a second Trump presidency.But he has struggled to effectively do that, with Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, having written the foreword for a book by the Heritage Foundation’s president. And, echoing Stabenow, many attenders said they were fearful and terrified of what a return to the Oval Office for Trump may produce.The Democratic nominee’s message resonated with Richard Bandstra, who described himself as a “former Republican”. Bandstra said he came to the rally to hear a message of hope – and, as he saw it, to fight for what he called the most important issue of the race: preserving American democracy. More

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      ‘The law is clear’: US states signal willingness to prosecute election crimes

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      Some US states are sending strong signals to county and local officials who might be tempted to intervene illegally in the 5 November election or refuse to certify results: fail to do your duty and risk criminal charges or hefty financial penalties.In at least five of the seven battleground states that could determine whether the next US president is Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump, top election and law enforcement officials have investigated, indicted and even jailed officials who tried to interfere with the vote or delay certification of results, a necessary but largely ceremonial step.County officials have also been warned that failing to certify results on time could force their local governments to foot the bill for unnecessary audits or recounts.The increased oversight of local election officials is aimed at preventing unfounded claims of fraud from slowing the certification of election results, which in turn could interfere with Congress’s certification of the presidential election results in a highly charged partisan atmosphere.Four years after Trump tried to overturn his 2020 defeat, officials in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as in solidly Democratic Colorado, said they have become far more adept at handling those who overstep their authority, even with Trump still repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that he will lose in November only through fraud.States that fail to certify results by certain deadlines could be left out of the state-by-state electoral college process that formally determines the winners of US presidential elections.“The law is clear and we won’t tolerate anyone not following it for any reason,” Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said in an interview. “There are times and places for challenging election results. The certification process is not one of them.”In this high-stakes election, the biggest of the swing states, Pennsylvania, has already overruled a county official, the Luzerne county manager, Romilda Crocamo, who tried to prevent the use in her district of drop boxes, where early voters can deposit their mail-in ballots.

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      The state attorney general, Michelle Henry, a former Republican appointed to her role last year by the state’s Democratic governor, said in an interview that her office would enforce election laws.“Should anyone not comply with the statutes, we will investigate that and there will be consequences … There’s both criminal and civil actions that could be taken to maintain the integrity of the process.”In Wisconsin, the criminal division of the state justice department is investigating Wausau’s mayor, Doug Diny, for removing a locked, empty drop box from outside city hall in September. Diny, a non-partisan conservative backed by Republicans, told reporters at the time that he did not feel the box was secure where the city clerk had placed it.The Wisconsin attorney general, Josh Kaul, a Democrat, also said his office would enforce election laws.“It’s our expectation that election officials will follow the law,” Kaul said in an interview. “But if we receive concerns that that won’t be the case, we’re prepared to act.”In Michigan’s Macomb county, where Republicans unsuccessfully sued to overturn the 2020 election results, three assistant clerks in the city of St Clair Shores face felony charges for allegedly allowing four residents to vote twice in the state’s 6 August congressional and state primary election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, filed charges punishable by up to five years in prison against all seven.“Despite common talking points by those who seek to instill doubt in our election process, double voting in Michigan is extremely rare,” Nessel said in a statement. “Nevertheless, the fact that four incidents occurred in a municipality of this size raised significant concerns.“Michigan election laws were tightened in the aftermath of the 2020 vote.Delta county canvass board members Bonnie Hakkola and LeeAnne Oman, both Republicans, voted against certification of a local recall election on 14 May, after seeing nearly identical voting margins in three different races.State authorities responded two days later, with a stern letter. The two individuals ultimately resigned. The results were certified.Meanwhile, two Republican officials from Arizona’s Cochise county face felony election interference charges, alleging they delayed the canvass of votes in the 2022 elections.And in Nevada, the secretary of state, attorney general and a district attorney intervened recently to swiftly resolve an impasse over a county’s certification of a primary election’s results.In Colorado, in one of the starkest examples, a Republican former Mesa county clerk, Tina Peters, was sentenced to nine years in prison this month, after being convicted of illegally tampering with voting machines in 2020. More

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      in Elections

      2 Men Accused of Killing 72-Year-Old While Posing as Utility Workers

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      Two men who said they were looking for a gas leak killed the man in his basement in suburban Detroit and bound his wife with duct tape before taking her watch and phone, prosecutors said.Two men posing as utility workers looking for a gas leak killed a man and bound his wife with duct tape after being admitted to their home in an upscale Detroit suburb on Friday, the authorities in Michigan said.One man, Carlos Jose Hernandez, 37, of Dearborn, Mich., was arrested after being stopped by the police in Shreveport, La., on Saturday, according to a news release from the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office. The other, whose name has not been released, was stopped and arrested in Plymouth Township, Mich., on Monday, according to a Facebook post from the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office.Killed in the attack was Hussein Murray, 72, a business owner. His wife, also 72, was briefly hospitalized and was later released, according to the sheriff’s office. The woman’s phone and watch were taken during the attack, according to Karen McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor.The authorities said that the two intruders, in search of valuables, had first tried to talk their way into the home in Rochester Hills, Mich., about 10 p.m. Thursday but that the couple had not admitted them. The men indicated that they would return in the morning and then did so, Ms. McDonald said.Footage of the Thursday night encounter released by the sheriff’s office from the couple’s Ring camera shows a man who the authorities said was Mr. Hernandez at the couple’s doorstep in a yellow vest and a mask and holding a clipboard. The other man, also in a yellow vest, stands facing away from the camera.In the video, the man the authorities identified as Mr. Hernandez says they are with DTE, an energy company based in Detroit, and turns his clipboard toward the camera to show a form with the DTE logo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘They will vote against Harris’: Arab Americans in Michigan desert Democrats over Gaza

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      That the Trump campaign would open an office in Hamtramck, a tiny city of around 28,000 people north of downtown Detroit, less than a month before the election, speaks to a particular curiosity of the 2024 presidential race.About 40% of Hamtramck’s residents are of Middle Eastern or north African descent, 60% are believed to be Muslim Americans, and the city has an all-Muslim city council.Last week, as Israel was expanding its war into Lebanon and continuing its daily bombardment of Gaza, scores of locals – many immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab- and Muslim-majority countries – lined Joseph Campau Avenue to attend the official opening of Trump’s office.“Peace in the Middle East will not happen under a Harris administration – she’s too weak,” said Barry Altman, a Republican party candidate who is running for a seat in Michigan’s house of representatives next month, and who was running the new Trump campaign office on a recent afternoon. “Trump is the only hope for peace.”Altman is not alone. Last month, Amer Ghalib, the Democratic mayor of Hamtramck, announced his endorsement of Donald Trump after meeting the former president at a rally in Flint, Michigan, where the pair spoke for about 20 minutes.In past elections, Arab Americans were a solidly Democratic voting bloc, especially in the years following 9/11 and given Trump’s overtly anti-Muslim rhetoric. But with Kamala Harris reportedly “underwater” in Michigan – now three points behind Trump among likely voters, having led the former president by five points as recently as last month, according to one recent poll – Muslim and Arab American communities across Michigan could play a major role in the outcome of the presidential election.View image in fullscreenAngry with the Biden administration – and, by extension, Kamala Harris – for its support for Israel, Arab Americans may be willing to overlook Trump’s history of closeness with Israel’s hard-right leaders. “If, and when, they say, when I’m president, the US will once again be stronger and closer [to Israel] than it ever was,” he said last week. “I will support Israel’s right to win its war.”Yet national polls show Arab Americans slightly favoring the former president; others are increasingly vocal in support of the Green party’s Jill Stein.While Hamtramck may not sway a national election all by itself, it offers a window into how many Muslim and Arab Americans feel about their political leaders, as Israel’s war on Gaza enters a second year and spreads into Lebanon.Hamtramck aside, Macomb and Oakland counties, north of downtown Detroit, are home to an estimated 140,000 people – around 45% of Michigan’s entire Arab American community, which numbers more than 300,000.Previous elections show that voting in these counties historically runs very close.In 2020, Trump won 53% of the Macomb county vote, a community that is home to an estimated 65,000-80,000 Arab Americans. Even within Macomb county, voters are divided: Trump won Sterling Heights, a city home to a large Iraqi Chaldean community, by 11%, while Biden won Warren, a neighboring city, by 14%.Next door in Oakland county, a largely suburban community that’s home to around 60,000 people who identify as Arab American, Biden won 56% of the vote four years ago.But over the past year, Biden and Harris have been repeatedly rebuked by Michigan’s Arab and Muslim communities. Earlier this year, a number of community leaders refused to meet with Democratic campaign officials rather than Biden administration representatives to discuss the war in Gaza. Weeks later, more than 100,000 people in Michigan voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries in a protest vote against Biden’s Gaza policy.View image in fullscreenDespite initial cautious optimism, Biden’s replacement by Harris at the top of the ticket hasn’t much changed this picture, especially as the Middle East has grown more volatile.“Harris made it very clear that she wanted to continue funding the state of Israel,” said Hassan Abdel Salam, the director of the Abandon Harris campaign, at a press conference in Dearborn on Wednesday to officially endorse Jill Stein for president.Harris has maintained her stance on Israel’s right to defend itself and has largely ignored the conditions laid out by the uncommitted movement, which declined to endorse her (but has forcefully come out against Trump). A poll by the Arab American Institute has Harris 18 points below Biden’s 2020 level of support among Arab Americans.“We know that we have 40,000 voters just in Dearborn. They are highly persuadable to our cause, and we believe fundamentally that if they come out to vote, they will vote against Harris,” said Abdel Salam.View image in fullscreen“The former president prevented our families, our friends, our colleagues from entering the country,” he continued, referring to Trump’s 2017 travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. “But the vice-president killed them.”Trump’s visit to Detroit on Thursday marks the 11th time the former president has come to the state. Harris, for her part, has campaigned here five times.Four years ago, Hamtramck voters overwhelmingly backed Biden, with the president winning 86% of the vote. One of them was Muhammad Hashim, who emigrated to the US from Bangladesh more than three decades ago and today runs a grocery store catering to the south Asian community in the heart of Hamtramck.But the Democrats won’t get his vote this time around.“Biden messed up the country, he’s really not good for the middle class. We’re struggling to survive and today we don’t get any help,” he says.He hopes that Trump, on the other hand, uses his business acumen to bring down the cost of the products he sells in his store, many of which are imported from overseas. “Trump is not perfect, but we have no choice,” he says.Hashim’s other major concern is Gaza, where more than 42,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks. “The No 1 reason [to not vote for Harris] is that she is supporting Israel 100%,” he said.Hamtramck is considered one of the most diverse cities in the country and is the first in the US to have an all-Muslim city council.Still, even as Hamtramck’s mayor has come out in favor of Trump, residents and other local leaders say that doesn’t necessarily represent the whole community. Several Hamtramck city leaders are attempting to mobilize support for Harris. In recent weeks, dozens of prominent Muslim leaders have endorsed Harris, as has Emgage Action, a Muslim voter-registration group. On 3 October, a group established to activate Arab American supporters for the Harris-Walz ticket nationwide was announced.“We are in a moment where our community is suffering and hurting in more ways than we can count. We have also seen four years under a Trump presidency and what that did to our community, and the risks that come with that,” said a spokesperson for Arab Americans for Harris-Walz. “We’re not saying that with a Harris administration there is no risk, but under a Trump administration, the risk is much higher. We believe [backing Harris] is a more favorable path forward for us here in the United States and in our home countries.”Meanwhile in Hamtramck, outside the new Trump campaign office, Altman, a pastor who says he was an independent until last year, invites high school students inside for a bottle of pop. He hands them Trump flyers and literature from his own campaign and tells them to share them with their parents. More

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      Gretchen Whitmer apologizes for feeding chip to podcaster after Catholic backlash

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      Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has apologized for feeding a Dorito chip to a social media influencer who dropped to her knees after Roman Catholic organizations accused the Democratic politician of insulting their religion by mocking the sacrament of communion.“I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” Whitmer said in a statement that her office provided to the Michigan television news station WJBK on Friday.She explained that the stunt in question – captured on video with popular TikTok content creator Liz Plank – was meant to promote legislation signed by president Joe Biden in 2022 that is colloquially known as the Chips Act and provided $280bn to research as well as manufacture semiconductors. But it was all “construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that”, Whitmer said.On the video, Plank genuflects before Whitmer, who then places a Dorito chip in the podcaster and influencer’s mouth. The governor caps the scene off by gazing at the camera while she wears a hat supporting fellow Democrat Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz in November’s presidential election.The Michigan Catholic Conference – which has clashed with Whitmer over her support of abortion rights – joined other church groups in condemning the governor’s video with Plank.A statement Friday from the conference’s chief executive officer, Paul Long, accused Whitmer and Plank of “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Eucharist”.Long’s statement alluded to how Catholics believe the wafers used for the sacrament of communion literally transform into the body of the crucified Jesus Christ, adding: “It is not just distasteful or ‘strange’; it is an all-too-familiar example of an elected official mocking religious persons and their practices.”Whitmer subsequently issued her apology and said she had taken time to speak with the Michigan Catholic Conference.People that WJBK described as “Democratic sources with knowledge of Whitmer’s participation in the video” also made it a point to tell the station that the video was part of a viral social media challenge that involved awkwardly feeding friends on camera.In his statement, Long added: “While dialogue on this issue with the governor’s office is appreciated, whether or not insulting Catholics and the Eucharist was the intent, it has had an offensive impact.”Whitmer has been Michigan’s governor since 2019. She had previously been considered a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination after Biden ruled out running for re-election and endorsed Harris to succeed him.But Whitmer ultimately ruled herself out, has been a prominent supporter of Harris and recently made headlines by calling Donald Trump “just deranged” after the Republican nominee boasted that women would no longer be thinking about abortion if voters gave him a second presidency on 5 November.Michigan stands among one of a handful of vital swing states that is expected to decide Harris’s race against Trump. Biden only won the state by 154,000 votes in 2020 after it had backed Trump in his electoral college victory four years earlier. More