Arab American precincts in Wayne County rejected Kamala Harris

In the November 2020 election, Joe Biden received 82% of the vote in the eastern part of Dearborn. In that same area, Vice President Kamala Harris received only 23%.
The nearly 60-percentage point drop in four years was in an area where an estimated three-fourths of the residents are of Arab descent, mostly Muslim. Harris won the western part of the city, where residents generally have higher incomes and are more likely to be white, with 46% of the vote and Trump receiving 41.6%. In 2020, Biden won west Dearborn with 60.6%, 16,057 votes.
A Free Press analysis of individual precincts based on results provided Friday by Dearborn’s city clerk reveal how much Harris lost support among areas with high concentrations of Arab American residents. In Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Hamtramck and Melvindale, which have the highest percentage of residents of Middle Eastern ancestry in Wayne County, there were significant decreases in support for the Democratic nominee for president compared to 2020. Individual precinct results, which were not released until late last week, offer a more complete picture than the general citywide results available earlier. Arab American and Muslim voters interviewed by the Free Press mainly blamed the Biden administration’s handling of foreign policy in the Middle East, but also sometimes cited economic and social issues.
“They’re sending a message that they’re tired of the Democrat agenda,” Hassan Aoun, of Dearborn, who voted for Trump, said outside Salina Intermediate School on election day last week.
The Salina school, which sits near the Ford Rouge complex, is the voting site of two precincts for an area in Dearborn known as the south end, where more than 90% of its residents are estimated to be Arab American Muslim, a majority of them of Yemeni descent. A look at its results over the decades show that the Arab American community is not wedded to any particular party.
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In November 2000, George W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president, garnered 72% of the vote in the south end; in the March 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders got 67% of the vote in the same area; four years later in the March 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Sanders did even better, getting 91%. Then in the November 2020 general election, Biden got 88% in the south end.
But in last week’s election, Harris got only 13% of the vote in the south end, a 75-point drop from Biden, while Trump got 55% and Jill Stein 31%. Several Yemeni American groups and clerics had endorsed Trump, expressing frustration with the Democratic Party in Michigan.
The south end is part of the eastern half of Dearborn, an area that includes all of the precincts east of the Southfield Freeway, according to the city’s election precinct map.
Biden received 82% of the vote in the eastern half of Dearborn. Trump got only 18% in eastern Dearborn in 2020, but that increased to 45.2% in this month’s election while Stein came in second at 30%, followed by Harris at 22.8%.
Trump won most of the precincts in east Dearborn except for a couple with senior citizen housing centers where most of the residents are not of Arab descent, and a precinct near the city hall building. Harris support in some of the east Dearborn precincts was between 13% to 17%.
Eastern Dearborn election results, November 2024
Eastern Dearborn election results, November 2020
“I don’t think it’s a surprise to our community” that Harris lost east Dearborn, said Abed Ayoub, a Dearborn native who’s the national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights group. “It was about the genocide in Gaza, no question.”
Over the past year, Democrats and Harris campaign officials “have ignored our concerns, ignored our voices,” Ayoub said. “We told them exactly what was going to happen and it happened.”
In west Dearborn in this month’s election, Harris got 46%, Trump got 41.6% and Stein 11%. In contrast, Biden received 61.6% in November 2020, and Trump got 37.7%. Across all of Dearborn in this month’s election, Trump got 43%, 17,796 votes; Harris got 36.7%, 15,189 votes; Stein got 18.6%, 7,697 votes.
Voter turnout in Dearborn decreased from 63.55%, 44,997 votes, in 2020 to 54.72%, 42,923 votes, in 2024, partly due to frustration with the two main parties.
The increase in support for the Republican nominee came after a few weeks of intense outreach by the Trump campaign and Republican leaders to Arab American and Muslim communities in Wayne County. Trump visited Hamtramck in October and Dearborn on Nov. 1, the Friday before Election Day. Over the weekend before Election Day, Richard Grenell, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, and some mixed martial arts fighters hosted a MMA watch party at Sheeba restaurant in Dearborn, whose owner’s son said he endorsed Trump. That same weekend, Grenell visited Aladdin Sweets & Cafe, a Bangladeshi American restaurant, to campaign with Muslims. Yemeni-American leaders gifted Grenell a traditional Yemeni dagger, jambiya, placing it around his waist at a gathering recently to show their appreciation.
Trump and his campaign pushed a message that they would bring peace to the Middle East, which seemed to resonate with many Arab American voters, though others are skeptical Trump will end U.S. support for Israel’s attacks in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen.
The backlash against Biden could be seen in the February presidential primary, when Biden got only 4% of the vote in Dearborn’s south end while “Uncommitted” got 91%. In the same area, Biden got 88% of the vote in 2020.
A retired professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has studied Arab American communities for decades, Ron Stockton, said the Trump campaign may have pushed anti-war messaging in the final weeks to gain votes.
“When Trump visited Dearborn, he was told that if he didn’t call for an end to the war, he would not get the votes he hoped to get,” Stockton said. “He said the words he was told to say, but one has to wonder what will come next. Will he do anything that will benefit the Palestinians as a people? Or will he listen to David Friedman, his former ambassador to Israel, whose new book advocates Israeli annexation of the West Bank.”
Stockton said he wonders if the shift of Arab Americans to Trump “will be a permanent shift or just a one-election move. Over the past 25 years Arab Americans have shifted back and forth but many like Trump, for various reasons, and he has been successful at winning blocs of votes within the Hispanic and African-American community. If he is successful, and this shift becomes permanent, it will restructure the American party system.”
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said the day after the election in a post on X that “votes are never promised to any party or candidate, especially from a community directly impacted by a genocide.”
A look at precincts in other cities show a similar pattern to the results in Dearborn, where 55% of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent, the highest percentage among all cities in the United States.
In Dearborn Heights, where the population is 39% Middle Eastern, Trump won in precincts in the northern part of the city with higher percentages of Arab Americans, according to Wayne County election results. For example, in precinct No. 2, which includes the Islamic House of Wisdom, a mosque, Trump won with 343 votes, followed by Jill Stein with 271 votes and Harris at 228 votes.
Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi, a Muslim immigrant from Lebanon, had endorsed Trump and appeared on stage with him at rallies in Novi and Grand Rapids.
But Harris won in precincts 20-22 in the southern part of Dearborn Heights, which has a smaller percentage of Arab Americans. Trump, though, still performed well in those precincts. For example, in precinct 20 in the southwestern part of the city, Harris got 351 votes, Trump got 290 and Stein only 22.
Overall, Trump was the highest vote getter in Dearborn Heights, garnering 44% while Harris got 38% and Stein got 15%.
In Hamtramck, Trump won in two precincts in the southern part of the city, where Yemeni Americans are the largest ethnic group, according to Wayne County election results. Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib, an immigrant from Yemen, endorsed Trump and spoke at his rallies in Hamtramck and Grand Rapids. But Trump lost to Harris in four of the five other precincts in the city. Hamtramck City Councilman Mohammed Hassan, an immigrant from Bangladesh, had endorsed Harris and campaigned for her, mobilizing Bangladeshi Americans, who are greater in numbers in the northern part of the city.
In November 2020, Biden won Hamtramck, winning with 85.4% of the vote over Trump, who only got 13.4%. But in this month’s election, Harris only got 46.2%, a 39-point drop from Biden four years ago. Trump got 42.7% and Jill Stein was at 9%, according to results from the city clerk.
Trump also came close to winning Melvindale, a working-class suburb of Detroit with a growing immigrant population where 30% of the city is of Arab descent, many of them Yemeni, according to census data. In addition to the sizable Arab American population, 23% of the city is Latino. In November 2020, Biden defeated Trump by 63.6% to 34.4% in Melvindale. Four years later, support for the Democratic nominee decreased 15 points, with Harris winning the city 48.6% to 46.5% over Trump. Stein got 3.4%.
Contact Niraj Warikoo:[email protected] or X @nwarikoo