WASHINGTON: Increasingly disillusioned with more than five years of the “global war on terror”, Arab- and Muslim-American voters are poised to vote heavily Democratic in the Nov 7 mid-term elections, according to two polls released this week.
Strong majorities of Arab-American voters in four key states — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida — intend to vote for the Democratic candidates for senator, according to a survey released on Wednesday by the Arab American Institute (AAI).
The same poll, conducted by Zogby International (ZI), found that a whopping 76 per cent of Arab Americans disapprove of the performance of President George W. Bush, who received a 46 per cent plurality of the Arab-American vote when he was first elected to office six years ago.
Asked which party they would prefer to control Congress, 57 per cent of Arab Americans chose Democrats, while only 26 per cent said they favoured Republican control. That was a considerably larger gap than the general voting public which, according to a CNN poll released on Tuesday, favours a Democratic Congress by a 57-40 per cent margin.
Another survey of Muslim-American voters released here by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Tuesday also found widespread disillusionment with Bush, for whom a majority of Muslim Americans voted in 2000, particularly regarding the war on terror and foreign policy.
That poll, conducted by Genesis Research Associates in August, found that only 17 per cent of Muslim-American voters consider themselves Republican now, while a plurality of 42 per cent said they were Democrats and 28 per cent said they did not belong to either party.
The same survey, in which Muslims were identified from voting records by common names prevalent among Muslims and thus did not include converts who did not change their legal names, also found widespread disapproval of the US policies toward the Islamic world.
Seven in 10 respondents agreed with the statement, “A just resolution to the Palestinian cause would improve America’s standing in the Muslim world;” two-thirds said they were in favour of “working toward normalisation of relations with Iran”; and 55 percent agreed with the assertion that “The war on terror has become a war on Islam.”
Some 70 per cent of Muslim voters said they disagreed (46 per cent “strongly disagreed”) with the proposition that “The war in Iraq has been worthwhile for America,” while only 12 per cent said they believed that it was. By contrast, only 39 per cent of the US general public currently believes that the US military action in Iraq was the “right thing”, according to the most recent Newsweek poll published this week.
While overlapping, the CAIR and AAI poll represent different constituencies. About two-thirds of the roughly 3.5 million Arab Americans living here are Christian — mostly either Roman Catholic or Orthodox — rather than Muslim.
Similarly, only about 40 per cent of Muslim Americans or their ancestors hail from the Arab world. Nearly one in three is of Asian ancestry, another six per cent is African, and five per cent Iranian. Of the roughly five million Muslim Americans, about one million are registered to vote, according to Mohamed Nimer, who conducted the CAIR survey.
That impression, of course, turned out to be unfounded as Bush, more than any other modern president, has aligned his Middle East policies behind those of the Israeli government. And while publicly, Bush still opposes ethnic profiling, reports of hate crimes and harassment of suspected Arab- and Muslim-Americans have risen sharply since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
While the Arab-American population is disproportionately concentrated in a relatively few states, notably California and New York, AAI and Zogby have focused their polling over
the past six years on the four “battleground” states, both because of the residence there of a significant numbers of Arab-American voters and because the electorates of all four are divided roughly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
All four are also holding elections for both governor and senator this year, and the poll found that the Democratic candidates for each are strongly favoured among Arab Americans. Incumbent Democratic Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, for example, holds a 67-22 per cent lead among Arab-American voters; in Ohio, Democrat Ted Strickland is favoured by a 60-21 per cent margin in the gubernatorial race; and Michigan’s incumbent Jennifer Granholm is favoured by a 61-29 per cent margin.
The races for Senate are even more lop-sided. In three of the four races, the Democratic candidates, including the Pennsylvania contest in which the Republican incumbent Rick Santorum has been a strong booster of Bush’s war on terrorism and was one of the first national politicians to use the word “Islamofascism”, lead by a two-to-one margin. Even in Michigan, where Republicans are running an Arab American, Michael Bouchard, Arab American voters prefer the Democratic incumbent, Debbie Stabenow, by a 54-31 per cent margin.
According to the poll, Arab Americans consider corruption to be the single most important issue in deciding how they vote, followed closely by the war in Iraq, civil liberties, Palestine, and Lebanon. By a margin of more than two to one, respondents said they believed Democrats would do a better job than Republicans on each issue.
The CAIR survey, which interviewed 1,000 randomly chosen registered Muslim voters, was the first of its kind and more general in scope, even if necessarily incomplete due to the absence of Muslim voters with traditionally non-Islamic names — including, for example, Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democratic legislator, who is given a good chance of becoming the first Muslim elected to the US Congress in the Nov 7 elections. About 60 per cent of respondents were men, and 80 per cent of respondents were concentrated in 12 states, led by California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and Texas.
Compared to the general US population, it found that Muslim voters were much younger, significantly more educated — 62 per cent had at least a bachelor degree, or twice the national average — and more Democratic in party identification.
Like Arab Americans, Muslim-American voters considered domestic issues, rather than foreign policy, to be most important.—Dawn/ The IPS News Service
