Former President Donald Trump’s allies are reportedly working to make inroads with Arab American activists and donors as polling shows he is crushing President Joe Biden with Arab American and Muslim voters in crucial swing states.
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin reported Monday that “Arab-American donors and activists from around the country plan to convene in Oakland Hills, Mich., for a private dinner initiated by” Trump’s former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell. Among those in attendance will be Michael Boulos, who is married to Tiffany Trump, and his father, Dr. Massad Boulos.
Insider notes that the elder Boulos is the CEO of SCOA Nigeria PLC. The New York Times previously reported he also leads a vehicle assembly and distribution company in Nigeria called Boulos Enterprises. Michael was born in Lebanon and grew up in Nigeria.
Rogan points out that the dinner comes on the heels of a Times poll showing that Muslim and Arab Americans have fled Biden for Trump in critical swing states.
The polling average between six battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin–found Trump at a whopping 57 percent with Muslim and Arab American voters, while Biden scored less than half of that at 25 percent.
“In a New York Times-Siena College poll released last week, Donald Trump led Biden 57-25 among Arab and Muslim voters in 5 key battleground states.
Those who said they voted in 2020 reported they had supported Biden 56-35 at the time.” https://t.co/zPM7HdFWnA
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) May 20, 2024
“Those who say they voted in the 2020 election reported backing Mr. Biden by a similar but opposite margin, 56-35,” Times Chief Political Analyst Nate Cohn reported on May 13. The poll was conducted April 28-May 9 and sampled 4,097 registered voters.
As Rogan reported, several of the dinner attendees already support Trump, while others expressed a potential openness to backing him.
One expected attendee, Syrian-American activist Sam Assad Hanna, is undertaking a grassroots effort to turn out the vote for Trump in some swing states.
“What we are seeing now in Gaza and across the region has set it backwards by decades. Everyone is thinking, how can we change this? What can we do?” he told Rogan. “That’s why people, including me, are now being more active in support of bringing Trump back to office.”
According to the Post, Michigan-based Dr. Yahya Basha, who is still undecided, helped organize the dinner.
“It’s too early to say Trump is the one. That’s the reason we are hosting an event for his representative, to see how he views the community and what kinds of things he will do,” Basha told Rogan. “With [the Biden] administration, I was hopeful for a better policy, but unfortunately the delivery was lacking.”
The meeting and Trump’s apparent inroads with Muslim and Arab American voters come as Biden’s reelection odds are being greatly imperiled by frustrations within these communities and other voting blocs on the left, like young voters and progressives, over his handling of the Israel and Hamas war and its effects in Gaza. These frustrations are not dissipating despite apparent efforts from Biden to appeal to these voters after coming out in support of Israel in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attacks in October.
There is no more apparent evidence than the persistence of the uncommitted movement, which has seen more than half a million Democrat primary voters protest Biden’s handling of the war with “uncommitted” or “uninstructed” votes in Democrat primaries in critical battleground and deep-blue states.
The movement began at the site of the reported meeting later Tuesday with the “Listen to Michigan” campaign. Listen to Michigan sought to garner 10,000 uncommitted votes in the February 27 primary to demand a ceasefire and protest Biden’s handling of the war. It smashed its goal, with more than 100,000 Michiganders picking the “uncommitted” option.
For reference, the margin between Trump and Biden in Michigan in 2020 was 154,188, and the campaign’s website notes that the threat being made to Biden is that these voters will sit out the general election.
“These primaries are an early litmus test for how much Biden’s stance on Gaza could hurt his reelection bid; the threat to Biden’s reelection isn’t that anti-war Democrats will vote for Trump, it’s that they won’t vote at all,” Listen to Michigan’s website states.
Losing 100,000 votes in a state Trump won in 2016 would be very risky for Biden, especially as polling currently indicates he narrowly trails Trump in a three-way race in Michigan with Robert F. Kennedy. The 538 polling average as of Tuesday showed Trump with 41.4 percent, Biden at 40.3 percent, and Kennedy Jr. at 8.7 percent.
The movement spread to other Rust Belt states, like Minnesota and Wisconsin, in the following weeks. On Super Tuesday, 45,914 Minnesotans, or nearly 1 in 5 Democrat primary voters, rejected Biden with the uncommitted option, and 48,812 Wisconsinites followed suit with “uninstructed” votes on April 2. Biden won Wisconsin in 2020 by just 20,682 votes, less than half of the uninstructed turnout, and Trump came within 1.5 points of winning Minnesota in 2016.
Days after the Wisconsin primary, Biden demanded a ceasefire while speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone, but the move did not quell the protest votes. The anti-Biden movement continued in the Pennsylvania primary on April 23 with a coalition called Uncomitted PA, which sought to get 40,000 protest votes in a write-in campaign. While the breakdown is not available for the write-in vote, over 60,000 voters cast write-in ballots, and Uncommitted PA claims it surpassed its goal. Biden won Pennsylvania by just 81,660 votes in 2020.
The next day, April 24, Biden signed legislation to send “$26 billion in aid for Israel and about $1 billion in humanitarian relief for Palestinians in Gaza,” as the Associated Press noted. He has since threatened to pause weapons in the package if Israel’s military moves into Rafah.
However, the threat to withhold aid was followed by another uncommitted embarrassment in deep-blue Maryland on May 14. As of Tuesday, the New York Times election results showed the uncommitted option collected 57,901 votes, but only 87 percent of the vote was reported.
Biden is running out of time to fix his problem with six months to the election, especially as a Trump surrogate is meeting with Arab American activists in a key swing state on top of the grim Arab American and Muslim poll numbers for him.
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