As 2024 kicks off two big headlines crowd around us. The election of November 5th and the controversial situation taking place in the Middle East. This raises the question of how these will translate into who will be seated in the Oval Office come next year.
The race, which looks to be between current President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will be very close. After the October 7 terror attacks on Israel conducted by Hamas (which took the lives of over 1400 Israeli civilians with 250 others being taken hostage) national polls by the Pew Research Group moved from indicating a Biden lead to showing him at 44% compared to Trump’s 45%. These numbers, alongside NYT polls depicting that 57% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas War, as well as the divide in the Democratic party on whether the Israeli government is going too far with their response, indicate that this situation will have a deciding factor in the 2024 election.
This claim is especially true in our home state of Michigan. With over 3% of our population being of Arab descent, Michigan by far houses the largest population of Arab-Americans than any other state. In fact, as NPR reported, that if it wasn’t for their 70% Democratic vote in 2020, Biden would have lost the state. And truth be told, this seems to be what’s to come with new polls showing that 83% of Michiganders from Arab descent will not be voting for Biden in the upcoming election.
In fact, recently we have seen Trump perpetuate this weakness in Biden’s campaign through a political strategy he used in 2016 and 2020 among Black-Americans, called obstructionism. This is where instead of trying to gain votes, a candidate attempts to make their opponent lose votes by painting them as undesirable, leading to a reduced or redirected turount from their typical voter base to a 3rd party candidate, like in this year’s case: JFK Jr, Jill Stein, and Cornel West.
Knowing that it would be nearly impossible to get Arab-Americans (who are predominantly Muslim) on his side, especially with his harsh stance against immigration and the installation of his so-called Muslim Ban during his presidency in 2017 (which he promises to re-install), Trump is now using obstructionism on Biden’s campaign, by staying largely quiet on the Israel-Palestine issue, depicting Biden to have an extreme stance on this topic, which his base is already largely divided on. And in reality, the stats show that this strategy is working, with recent Michigan-wide polls by NYT showing that Trump is 2% ahead of Biden, while 18% of voters are either undecided or will be voting for a 3rd party candidate.
Yet still, the hope for a second Biden term remains. He can still come out on top by convincing the moderate base that he is fit for office and most importantly that a 2nd Trump presidency would be a true threat to American Democracy (which against a man facing 4 different indictments, including a charge to overthrow the government shouldn’t be very hard). From there Biden would still need to get convince the more radical left, which ironically seems to favor Hamas, that the Israeli effort his administration supports is not one against the Palestinian people, but rather an Iranian-backed jihadist terror group that publicly executes any opposition, Semites, homosexuals, and disobeyers of Shira law (aka. Hamas) and that if Hamas was to put down their weapons, there would be no war, while if Israel was to do so, there would be no Israel, or any safe haven for Jews in the Middle East for that matter.
But no matter who you are voting for remember, with our electoral system, a vote for the 3rd party is a vote for nobody. Also, remember to get registered to vote and show up at the polls this November, for our country and its democracy’s future lies on this decisive election and every voice counts!
