The Impact of Muslims on the US General Elections: FL, MI, OH, and VA

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As the election data near, the American media has suddenly woken up to a new reality–the Muslim vote.

Mr. Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, may find it risky to ignore this constituency. There are sizable Muslim populations in closely fought states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia. NY Times

All of a sudden, as if on cue the spigot has been turned on. There is a discussion of the Muslim vote on Fox, on CNN, in the NY times, in the USA today, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other major US dailies. This story was published by the NY Times

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The ARDA has collected some data on the Muslim vote, but it greatly reduces the impact of the Muslim vote and posts numbers of Muslims less than their actual strength

There is a case to be made that says that the Muslim vote allowed President Bush to win the 2000 election. Mr. Bush was one of the first American Presidential candidates that started speaking against anti-Arab discrimination from the Texas Governor’s office. Mr. Gore on the other hand refused to meet with Muslim delegates and totally ignored the Muslim voter. Mr. Gore’s ultra conservative pro-war running mate also did not help his situation.

In 2004, Mr. Kerry made the same mistake and Ms. Hillary Clinton actually had the audacity to return about $50,000 given to her by the Muslims. This infuriated the Muslims. After the Iraq war, many Muslims decided to sit out the 2004 elections becuase Mr. Kerry did not reach out to the Muslims.

In 2008 the Muslim vote cannot be taken for granted. Neither McCain nor Obama have a right to the vote. It will all depend on how much the candidates pander to the Muslim Americans. The republican primaries started out all wrong. Bigots like Guilini harped against the Muslims in general and in code words. The Democrats took a cue and started the same rhetoric.

After the demise of all Neocon bigots in the Republican camp and the ”presumptive nomination” of Obama the focus of Muslims is on both of the contenders. For McCain Muslims are invisible. Obama has been refuting his Muslim heritage instead of celebrating his diversified background. 

Muslim Americans wonder if Barack Obama will over compensate for his Kenyan families Muslim background, ignore Muslim issues to avoid the charge of pandering. All Americans are asking the same question. Can Obama use his diverse background to build a better world?

A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim, by the way,” Mr. Ellison said.

Mr. Ellison, a first-term congressman, remains arguably the senator’s most important Muslim supporter. He has attended Obama rallies in Minnesota and appears on the campaign’s Web site. But Mr. Ellison said he was also forced to cancel plans to campaign for Mr. Obama in North Carolina after an emissary for the senator told him the state was “too conservative.” Mr. Ellison said he blamed Mr. Obama’s aides – not the candidate himself – for his campaign’s standoffishness.

Despite the complications of wooing Muslim voters, Mr. Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, may find it risky to ignore this constituency. There are sizable Muslim populations in closely fought states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia.

In those states and others, American Muslims have experienced a political awakening in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. Before the attacks, Muslim political leadership in the United States was dominated by well-heeled South Asian and Arab immigrants, whose communities account for a majority of the nation’s Muslims. (Another 20 percent are estimated to be African-American.) The number of American Muslims remains in dispute as the Census Bureau does not collect data on religious orientation; most estimates range from 2.35 million to 6 million.

A coalition of immigrant Muslim groups endorsed George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign, only to find themselves ignored by Bush administration officials as their communities were rocked by the carrying out of the USA Patriot Act, the detention and deportation of Muslim immigrants and other security measures after Sept. 11.

As a result, Muslim organizations began mobilizing supporters across the country to register to vote and run for local offices, and political action committees started tracking registered Muslim voters. The character of Muslim political organizations also began to change.

“We moved away from political leadership primarily by doctors, lawyers and elite professionals to real savvy grass-roots operatives,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a political group in Washington. “We went back to the base.”

In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for 53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the election, according to data collected by the committee.

The committee’s president, Mukit Hossain, said Muslims in Virginia were drawn to Mr. Obama because of his support for civil liberties and his more diplomatic approach to the Middle East. Mr. Hossain and others said his multicultural image also appealed to immigrant voters.

“This is the son of an immigrant; this is someone with a funny name,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, who is a Christian who has campaigned for Mr. Obama at mosques and Arab churches. “There is this excitement that if he can win, they can win, too.”

Yet some Muslim and Arab-American political organizers worry that the campaign’s reluctance to reach out to voters in those communities will eventually turn them off. “If they think that they are voting for a campaign that is trying to distance itself from them, my big fear is that Muslims will sit it out,” Mr. Hossain said.

Throughout the primaries, Muslim groups often failed to persuade Mr. Obama’s campaign to at least send a surrogate to speak to voters at their events, said Ms. Ghori, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Before the Virginia primary in February, some of the nation’s leading Muslim organizations nearly canceled an event at a mosque in Sterling because they could not arrange for representatives from any of the major presidential campaigns to attend. At the last minute, they succeeded in wooing surrogates from the Clinton and Obama campaigns by telling each that the other was planning to attend, Mr. Bray said. (No one from the McCain campaign showed up.)
Frustrations with Mr. Obama deepened the day after he claimed the nomination when he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel. (Mr. Obama later clarified his statement, saying Jerusalem’s status would need to be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians.)

Osama Siblani, the editor and publisher of the weekly Arab American News in Dearborn, said Mr. Obama had “pandered” to the Israeli lobby, while neglecting to meet formally with Arab-American and Muslim leaders. “They’re trying to take the votes without the liabilities,” said Mr. Siblani, who is also president of the Arab American Political Action Committee.

Some Muslim supporters of Mr. Obama seem to ricochet between dejection and optimism. Minha Husaini, a public health consultant in her 30s who is working for the Obama campaign in Philadelphia, lights up like a swooning teenager when she talks about his promise for change.

“He gives me hope,” Ms. Husaini said in an interview last month, shortly before she joined the campaign on a fellowship. But she sighed when the conversation turned to his denials of being Muslim, “as if it’s something bad,” she said.

For Ms. Ghori and other Muslims, Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach is not surprising in a political climate they feel is marred by frequent attacks on their faith.

Among the incidents they cite are a statement by Mr. McCain, in a 2007 interview with Beliefnet.com, that he would prefer a Christian president to a Muslim one; a comment by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton that Mr. Obama was not Muslim “as far as I know”; and a remark by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to The Associated Press in March that an Obama victory would be celebrated by terrorists, who would see him as a “savior.”

“All you have to say is Barack Hussein Obama,” said Arsalan Iftikhar, a human rights lawyer and contributing editor at Islamica Magazine. “You don’t even have to say ‘Muslim.’ ”

As a consequence, many Muslims have kept their support for Mr. Obama quiet. Any visible show of allegiance could be used by his opponents to incite fear, further the false rumors about his faith and “bin-Laden him,” Mr. Bray said.

“The joke within the national Muslim organizations,” Ms. Ghori said, “is that we should endorse the person we don’t want to win.” NY TImes

It is inaccurate to call Barack Obama a Muslim. Is it a slur?

The Obama campaign suggests it is. A new campaign Web site designed to air and rebut potentially damaging Internet rumors reads in one part: “Smear: Barack Obama is a Muslim… Truth: Sen. Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim and is a committed Christian.”

Associated Press

Barack Obama greets supporters at a rally in Michigan, a battleground state with a large Muslim population.

The characterization highlights a tricky balance the campaign is trying to strike: to tamp down false rumors — intended by some to link the Democratic presidential candidate to radical Islam — without offending Muslims and harming his image of inclusiveness.

Muslim-Americans have made up one of Sen. Obama’s most loyal bases of support since he announced his candidacy last year. But lately some Muslims, concentrated in several battleground states, say they are having second thoughts over his campaign’s ardent defense of his religious background.

“If he were a Muslim, so what? That insinuates that if he were a Muslim, he’s automatically a jihadist. That’s incredibly insulting to people of the Muslim faith and Arabs who are Christian,” says Tony Kutayli, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and a Christian.

The issue flared up at a rally in Detroit last Monday, when two Muslim women in hijab, or traditional clothing, were asked to move when they sat behind the podium, where their headscarves would have appeared in photographs and on television with the candidate.

The campaign apologized to the women and noted that they were asked to move by volunteers, not campaign staffers. “This is of course not the policy of the campaign. It is offensive and counter to Obama’s commitment to bring Americans together,” said spokesman Bill Burton.

As for the “Fight the Smears” Web site, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor says it was designed to “dispel any and all misinformation,” and the Muslim rumor is misinformation. The “smear,” he wrote in an email, is that “most of these attacks allege that he is a radical Muslim who attended a madrassa.”

The handling of Islam in American politics, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, has become a delicate issue. Politicians from President Bush on down have wrestled with how to attack radical Islam without seeming anti-Islam.

Sen. Obama, who says he has always been a Christian, has been grappling with the accusations for more than a year, when Internet rumors began to emerge that he was educated in a radical madrassa in Indonesia and that he took the oath of office with his hand on the Quran instead of the Bible.

“The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out, what better way than to start at the highest level, through the president of the United States — one of their own!!!” reads one email chain, evoking the communist plot to take over the presidency in the 1962 movie, “The Manchurian Candidate.”

A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll conducted in March shows the rumors have only stuck with a small portion of mostly conservative, noncollege-educated voters: 79% of respondents said they had heard the rumor that Sen. Obama is a Muslim, but only one in 10 said they believe it. A separate poll from the Pew Forum last September showed the liability of the perception. In the survey, 45% of respondents said they would have reservations about voting for a presidential candidate who is Muslim, compared with 25% for a Mormon candidate and 11% for a Jewish candidate.

John McCain has had his own struggles addressing Islam. In April, the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign replaced Ali Jawad, a prominent Arab-American businessman, from his Michigan finance committee because of unsubstantiated claims that Mr. Jawad is an “agent” of Hezbollah. The move cost the Republican support in Dearborn, an area both candidates will fight hard to capture in November.

According to the latest Census data, there are 2.3 million Muslims in the U.S. Two-thirds are foreign-born; about 20% of U.S.-born Muslims are African-American. According to the Arab-American Institute, there are about 3.5 million Arab-Americans living in the U.S. About three-quarters are Christian and a quarter Muslim. Voter turnout among Arab-Americans is up to 30% higher than that of the general population, and they are concentrated in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, states seen as among the most competitive this fall.

So far, Sen. Obama has enjoyed the support of both Christian and Muslim Arab-Americans who are partly drawn to what they perceive as a more diplomatic approach to the Middle East and his diverse background. Sen. Obama’s father was a nonpracticing Muslim from Kenya, and for a brief period of his childhood the senator lived in Indonesia, a Muslim country.

But recently some Muslim voters interviewed in swing states say they have noticed the disparity between his outreach to them and to other religions. The Obama campaign has embarked on a national effort to win support from devout Christian voters and make known the candidate’s Christian faith. He visited a Boca Raton, Fla., synagogue, and he made a pro-Israel group his first stop after claiming enough delegates to secure the nomination earlier this month.

An Obama aide says that the campaign currently doesn’t have any effort targeting Muslims and that campaign officials are relying on the Arab-American outreach efforts at the Democratic National Committee.

“The majority of our faith outreach, by and large, with some exceptions, is not faith specific. It is holistic,” Mr. Vietor says.

Ginan Rauf, 46 years old, a secular Muslim and teacher in Franklin Lakes, N.J., is rethinking her support for the Democratic candidate. She volunteered to make calls on his behalf ahead of the March 4 Texas primary. Now she says she isn’t sure she will vote for him.

“We’re so hardened to Islamic-phobia, but a lot of us were surprised and hurt” by how Sen. Obama has responded to the Muslim rumors, Ms. Rauf says.

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, one of two Muslim members of Congress and an Obama backer, says he would like to see the campaign more directly address the Muslim community. “I know his campaign is a little worried about how that could be twisted,” Mr. Ellison says. “But I think you have to be careful not to start letting your detractors dictate who you talk to. Then you’re not the captain of your own ship anymore.” Write to Amy Chozick at amy.chozick@wsj.com