Arab American and Muslim voters helped Biden win in 2020. This year, they could sink Harris

Walid Fidama and Abdulhakem Alsadah have been friends for more than a quarter century. They joke about knowing each other's children since before they were born. They're both longtime members of the National Association of Yemeni Americans, socially and politically active in their home state of Michigan. 

For months, Fidama didn't tell Alsadah about his voting plan in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. When Fidama agreed to sit for an interview at the association's office in Dearborn, Mich., an intrigued Alsadah listened from a rolling office chair in the back of the room.

Fidama, a genial man with eight daughters, confirmed he won't be voting for a Democratic president this November for the first time since he got his American citizenship in 1994. The party, he says, needs to understand votes from even the most party loyal are not guaranteed — and they've lost his ballot this year over the crisis in the Middle East.

"We are Democrats, but the Democrats are not following what humanity needs and for what the people need around the world," he said.

"If they keep not listening to the right things, which we need and what the people need, they are gonna get hurt."

From his corner seat, Alsadah nodded.

Four years ago, Arab American and Muslim voters helped deliver President Joe Biden to the White House by rallying behind him in Michigan, one of seven critical swing states with power to sway the outcome of the election.

This year, many of those same voters are leaving the Democratic Party behind because they feel betrayed, forgotten and angry over the Biden administration's handling of the Middle East conflict and the U.S.'s ongoing allyship with Israel.

With this year's race for Michigan likely to be decided by a thin margin, voter sentiment there could have an outsize impact on determining who becomes the next U.S. president.

"I cannot emphasize my [disgust] with the current administration and their lack of leadership, their lack of empathy toward the Palestinian people, their lack of empathy toward the Lebanese people," said Alsadah, 62, chair of the Yemeni American Democratic Caucus, who declined to specify how he'll be voting. 

Most of the roughly two dozen voters in Michigan who spoke with CBC News this month said they'd be voting for a third-party candidate, or not at all. Only a handful emphatically said they'd be backing Harris.

The discontent is palpable in Dearborn, the first Arab-American majority city in the United States. In the city, 15 kilometres west of Detroit, it's not hard to find people with deeply personal and painful connections to losses in the Middle East over the past year.

"I'm so enraged, it's no longer hurt. It's rage. I want the Democrats to lose by any means necessary — and that means voting for Trump," said Dearborn-based political activist Samraa Luqman, who was once "so far left" she wrote in Bernie Sanders' name in 2020.

The mother of Yemeni-Palestinian children, Luqman said her decision to vote for Trump is rooted in a strategy to keep Harris out of office.