REUTERS
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — President-elect Donald Trump made unprecedented gains among Michigan’s Middle Eastern and Muslim population this year thanks to a months-long effort to woo voters disillusioned with the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policy.
The crown jewel of this endeavor might be Dearborn — America’s most Muslim city — where Trump won 43% of the vote against Vice President Kamala Harris’ 36%.
The city boasts the nation’s largest per capita Muslim population and North America’s biggest mosque. Last year Dearborn became the first Arab-American-majority city in the country, with more than half of residents claiming Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.
Just days before the election, Trump broke bread with local Arab-American leaders at a Lebanese café, making his final pitch to the community after calling for peace in Lebanon.
While Trump’s upset victory came as a surprise, Democrats’ troubles with Michigan’s Muslim voters have been a long time coming.
In February, more than 100,000 Democrats voted ”uncommitted” in Michigan’s presidential primary as a show of protest over President Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
The Abandon Biden movement transformed along with the Democratic presidential ticket, and eventually became the Abandon Harris movement, which endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein in early October.
In September, Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck — another Muslim-majority Michigan city — endorsed Trump, sounding even more alarm bells for Democrats’ dire straits with the defecting demographic.
Another blow came in November when Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud — both prominent Dearborn Democrats — withheld their endorsements of Harris in the presidential race.
While Democrats’ support among Michigan Muslims crumbled, the Republican’s campaign seized an opportunity to strike and persuade the traditionally Democratic voting bloc to take a chance on Trump.
Lebanese-born businessman Massad Boulos — who is Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law — led the get-out-the-vote charge alongside Michigan-born former Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell.
“A few months ago, we came together and had a discussion regarding the Arab-American and the Muslim-American group that has started shifting,” Boulos told The Post at an invite-only event for conservative Middle Eastern voters Oct. 15.
“We saw what happened in the primaries of Michigan, you had over 105,000 votes that were uncommitted,” said Boulos. “So Michigan being one of the key battleground swing states with a very large Arab-American and Muslim-American community, we decided to start here.”
As part of this push, Grenell worked to make connections with anti-Biden figures throughout heavily Arab southeastern Michigan.
“We eventually started working with some of the Abandon Biden team that then became Abandon Harris,” said Oubai Shahbandar, an Arab-American activist who worked on this effort.
Their pitch to Arab-American voters was that Trump’s would be an administration of peace and put a stop to the endless wars that would make life worse for their family members in the Middle East, Shahbandar told The Post.
With the election in the rearview mirror, their outreach paid off in spades. Trump won Michigan with 49.7% of the vote to Harris’ 48.3%. Even the 0.8% support Jill Stein received wouldn’t have been enough to save Harris’ hide in the crucial swing state.
Michigan’s Muslim and Arab-American voters may have made all the difference in Trump’s historic victory, in which he swept all seven swing states to earn 312 electoral votes. Those voters told The Post they weren’t surprised to see Trump win over their communities.
“We knew he would win it. There is no absolute way that she would’ve won. She lost us. She backstabbed us. And I really do think the Arab community stood up for what’s right. And we did what we had to do,” Ali Aljahmi, 19, whose family owns a restaurant in Dearborn, told The Post.
Aljahmi was also central to the Trump team’s outreach efforts, hosting multiple meet-and-greets with Trump-supporting UFC fighters at his restaurant where Grenell would promise peace in the Middle East under the next Trump administration.
Aljahmi believes Trump’s success in Dearborn — where Harris never made a campaign visit — will make his community more essential in future elections.
“Now we have a voice for ourselves,” said Aljahmi. “They know not to screw with us. I feel like if the Democrats won, they would’ve never focused on us.”
Mohamad Zreik, 55, a Lebanese-born day trader who has lived in Dearborn since the 1980s, agrees. He told The Post Trump’s promises of peace abroad were key to his victory in the predominantly Muslim city.
“The vice president failed, in my opinion, to present herself as a pro-peace candidate. People in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and in Michigan felt betrayed by the present Biden-Harris administration,” he said.
“So President Donald Trump-elect stepped in and did it effectively by actually visiting the Arab-American community. And he told the community, ‘I’m the person who will stop the wars.’ He vowed to restore peace if elected. Apparently the vast majority of the Arab-American community believed him, and that’s why they voted for him. So now the most important thing, in my opinion, is to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the war in Gaza and Lebanon.”
But Grenell’s efforts extended beyond Dearborn, and beyond just Muslim voters — he reached out to Arab American Christians as well. He forged connections with prominent Chaldeans, a Christian minority group with Iraqi ancestry who have a large presence in Michigan.
Grenell wasn’t the only one whipping votes among Arab Christians — he had help from Karim Dawi, a 42-year-old Iraqi-born activist who founded the Conservative American Middle Eastern PAC last month and began registering folks to vote outside a grocery store.
“The 90% don’t even need convincing,” Dawi said of the voters he helped register outside of Dream Market in Sterling Heights. Making the sign of the cross, he swore he was registering 30 to 40 people per day.
The Chaldean community took notice of Trump’s interest in them. Ranna Salem, 36, of Sterling Heights told The Post she saw a significant boost of support for Trump in her community this cycle, since the president-elect began reaching out to them.
“I think Chaldeans are overwhelmingly voting for Trump,” said Salem. “So rather than the question being between Democrat and Republican with the Chaldean community, I think the question is will they go out or vote or not? And there was a pretty large turnout this time.”
Trump has repeatedly mentioned the Chaldean community at his rallies and hired prominent Chaldean attorney Alina Habba on his campaign staff, which likely helped curry favor with the community.
Rita Soka, 43, a Chaldean attorney from Commerce Township, told The Post Chaldeans who voted for Trump hope he will bring peace to the Middle East.
“Stop the wars and stop funding the wars, that’s what we wanna see. First thing, because that in turn creates peace here amongst people. It’ll strengthen his credibility with the Arab community in Michigan,” she said. “No one wants to see this money going to war.”
In lean-blue Michigan, where Donald Trump won by around 80,000 votes, these Midde-Eastern and Muslim communities may have handed the election to the former president.