They vote for him to spite him in Trump
Most Muslim voters do not care about Biden
Muslim participants organize a gathering in support of Biden at the Islamic Educational Center in Iowa.
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Nusseibeh Mubarak is not a fan of the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, but she does her best to urge every other Muslim voter to vote for him.
Mubarak is not alone in expressing these sentiments, as a recent poll conducted by the Council on American Islamic Relations showed that only 18% of Muslim voters support Donald Trump, while 71% of them stated that they support Biden, but this disparity does not guarantee that Muslims will vote for Biden. In large numbers, the former vice president will not benefit from his opponent's waning popularity, unless he can convince Muslim voters, some of whom feel dissatisfied with joining the Biden campaign.
The importance of sharing
While American Muslims make up only about 1 percent of the population of the United States, this category of society represents a great weight in several swing states, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and of course Michigan, where Trump won a smaller percentage. Concerning issues of concern to the Muslim community, there is no real comparison between the two main candidates. Trump has routinely used Islamophobia rhetoric and defended his decision to ban Muslims, which bans immigrants and refugees from some Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, and supports a set of federal policies, Including comprehensive surveillance programs that disproportionately harm Muslim Americans.
Mubarak, who leads the voter mobilization team at MoveOn.org, believes that lest Trump get a second term this means, at least in part, a mobilization of Muslim voters into key swing areas.
This requires a two-step process: reminding American Muslims of the dangers of Trump's second term and giving them a good reason to go to the polls. This second factor, she says, is an essential part of her mission between now and November 3. She says Biden, in turn, was not provoked. Notably most Muslim voters, but he failed to persuade them to stand behind him, and pledged to cancel the Muslim ban on his first day in office, and this indicates that the Biden administration "will support Muslim Americans to serve at all levels", and publish political agendas aimed at helping Muslim American communities And Arab-American, while such electoral promises are not enough, as Mubarak says, she urges Muslims to vote for Biden "because it is the first time that we really sit at the table."
Significant increase in Muslim participation
Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in the rate of Muslim political participation, which was partly in response to President Trump's anti-Islam rhetoric and policies, according to experts in Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Virginia, which was an arena for the electoral battle, as the percentage of Muslims voting in the renewal elections jumped The half-years for 2014 to 2018 are 25 percent, from 130,000 votes to more than 285,000, according to Emoji, an American Muslim civic engagement group.
Efforts to reach out to Muslim voters are also on the rise. In 2015, for example, the "Georgia Muslim Voters Project" was established, which was considered "in response to Islamophobia discourse emanating from the presidential race at the time," along with relatively low turnout among Muslim Americans As the organization’s executive director, Omar Rubani, says.
A society that "deserves access to"
Historically, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have made a lot of efforts to reach the Muslim community because it is so small. “The political campaigns have never seen this (Muslim) community worth its time,” says Christopher Newport University's assistant professor of political science, Youssef Chahoud. The latter is starting to turn this trend.
One reason is demographics. While a large number of Muslim Americans immigrated after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which removed barriers to immigration from Asia, Africa, and other regions outside Europe, their children are often born in America, those who are close to voting have experience. Quite different from America, and many of them only know the post-9/11 world. "They are adults now, and they knew nothing but the attacks on their society," said Abdel Ayoub, director of the Arab American Committee to Combat Discrimination, a civil rights organization.
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