American Muslims helped Biden win in 2020. Will they abandon him now?

Arab and Muslim communities say they’ll ‘punish’ Biden even if it means Democrats lose in November.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the state of Michigan by a much closer margin over then-incumbent President Donald Trump than the polls and pundits had predicted: just more than 150,000 votes.

Two partly overlapping sets of voters helped tip Biden over the line in Michigan and other vital swing states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: Muslim Americans and Arab Americans.

Now, four years later, as Biden and Trump head towards a rematch in November, the current Democratic Party incumbent faces the mounting prospects of a backlash from those very same voters, many of whom are seeking to bleed his re-election bid.

Growing outrage over Washington’s support for Israel in its unprecedented bombardment of Gaza is many prompting Arab-American and Muslim voters to declare that they intend to stay away from the polls. As the US continues military funding for Tel Aviv, the number of Palestinians killed in the war on Gaza has risen to nearly 30,000 since October 7, many of them children.

In Michigan, where early primaries begin this week, one-time Biden voters have promised to send his administration a strong message by sabotaging the elections, even as the president’s aides have scrambled to meet and mend broken ties with community leaders.