As President Joe Biden declared unwavering support for Israel in the days after Hamas’ terror attack in Israel, Ahmad Ramadan, a former Biden advisor now leading coalitions efforts for the Michigan Democratic Party, called the state party chair to raise the alarm about what he was hearing.
Michigan has one of the largest Muslim and Arab-American populations in the country, and they say their support for Biden was instrumental to putting him over the top in the critical swing state in 2020. But now, Ramadan and other Democratic leaders in the state were hearing nothing but frustration with Biden — and threats to not vote for him again.
In a series of more than a dozen roundtable discussions with Muslim community leaders in the two weeks since, Ramadan said the main takeaway is that “people are very disappointed.” They say they “will not forget what President Biden did and why he lied to them,” he added.
“President Biden won with historic numbers in 2020. And I was proud to represent that, but the last two weeks have really shifted things,” Ramadan said. “I’ve also been getting calls from people saying, ‘I have blood on my hands because I got people out to support him during that campaign.”
While Muslim Americans remain a small minority of the U.S. population, their numbers are growing rapidly, and both parties are increasingly vying for their support. Democrats have mostly succeeded so far, as former President Donald Trump and other Republicans turned them off with policies like a travel ban that affected predominantly Muslim countries (something Trump is promising to implement again if he is re-elected). .
Now, though, Muslim leaders are warning that Democrats risk losing their support too if Biden and the party do not do more to combat Islamophobia and address the pain many are feeling about the war in Gaza.
“Joe Biden has single-handedly alienated almost every Arab-American and Muslim American voter in Michigan,” said state Rep….
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