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#ElectionResults2020 - Muslim and Arab Voters May Have Secured Biden’s Michigan Win

By Rowaida Abdelaziz

Biden beat Trump by roughly 150,000 votes in Michigan, where Hillary Clinton lost by just 11,000 votes in 2016.

Arab and Muslim communities likely substantially contributed to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan, according to local activists and organizers.

Emgage Action, a Muslim civic advocacy organization that endorsed Biden, said that approximately 81,000 Muslim Americans cast early and absentee votes in the state. (The exact number of votes cast by Muslim Americans in Michigan is not yet known.) Biden beat President Donald Trump by roughly 150,000 votes in Michigan, where Hillary Clinton lost by just 11,000 votes in 2016.

Muslim American groups and activists focused on rallying voters before Election Day — setting up phone banks and virtual town halls aimed at maximizing turnout, especially in battleground states. Those efforts, they said, paid off and Michigan is an example of that.

“Where would the Democrats be without those 81,000 Muslims?” said Nada Al-Hanooti, executive director of Emgage’s Michigan chapter. She said her organization had been working every day since August to register a record number of Muslims as part of their nationwide Million Muslim Votes campaign, and added that Biden’s victory in Michigan could not have happened without the Muslim and Arab vote.

“Muslims showed up for Biden today and we’re going to expect him to show up for us come January,” she said.

Although it is difficult to say for sure, the Arab and Muslim vote in the state appears to have had a significant impact. More than 270,000 Muslim Americans live in Michigan, making up nearly 2.75% of the state’s population. More than one-third of residents in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, identify as Arab-American or Muslim or both. Biden defeated Trump in Wayne County, which includes Detroit and Dearborn and is the most populous county in the state.

Nationwide, Muslim American voters turned out in huge numbers this election, which is in line with patterns across all demographics. Preliminary projections from The Washington Post predict that turnout in 2020 was the highest percentage it’s been since 1900, and the highest number of voters ever.

Emgage estimates that over 800,000 Muslim Americans voted nationally, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, puts that number at roughly 1 million. According to its own survey, CAIR estimates that 69% of Muslim voters backed Biden. (An NPR poll conducted in the days leading up to and on Election Day found that 64% of Muslim Americans voted for Biden and 35% of voted for Trump.)

In 2016, Muslim and Arab voters were credited with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)’s primary win over Clinton. And while Biden wasn’t the first choice for many Arab and Muslim residents in the Dearborn area, many strongly opposed Trump due to his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. “Just based on all the efforts, I think we really hit the message home that this election is unlike any other election, and it’s a critical matter of life and death to get out the vote this time and I think the community responded really well,” said Sarah Alaoui, a Ph.D. candidate at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a volunteer with Arab Americans for Biden, a grassroots coalition working to elect Biden. Alaoui believes that Arab Americans’ huge turnout can be attributed to the Biden campaign’s direct engagement with the community; that it spoke to voters in Arabic; and that it reached out to both Arab Muslims and Christians, which showed that it was able to identify and speak to the diversity of the Arab community.

Organizers also said endorsements from Sanders and Wayne County’s own Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) helped galvanized Arab and Muslim voters in the state as well. The results mirror early polling and initial exit polling that suggested that high turnout from Arab and Muslim segments of the state assisted Biden’s win.

Despite their small numbers overall ― Muslims make up just 1% of the U.S. population ― there are significant concentrations of Muslim Americans in key presidential swing states, including Michigan.

Michigan is not only home to a populous and diverse Muslim community, it also has one of the largest mosques in North America, whose congregation can trace its history back 100 years. The state is also the birthplace of the Nation of Islam, a Black political and religious movement founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930.

Youssef Chouhoud, an assistant professor of political science at Christoper Newport University in Virigina, said both Democrats and Republicans often overlooked Muslim and Arab voters due to their comparatively small population size and historic lack of civic engagement nationwide.

But that’s changing. Although it is difficult to nail down exact numbers, he is confident that a larger trend is at play.

“These numbers are very inexact but what is indisputable is that there has been a much larger turnout in the Arab American community and in the Muslim American community this year than we’ve seen in any previous presidential cycle,” said Chouhoud. “I only see that growing.”

Nationwide, more than 66% of Muslims identify as Democrats, according to a 2018 Pew Research poll. Chouhoud said that it is crucial for Democrats to seize this opportunity to invest in Arab and Muslim voters. “It is to the benefit of the Democratic Party to nurture that support and not simply take it for granted. Michigan is going to remain a pivotal state in presidential contests moving forward. So if the Democratic Party is wise, they will nurture their support and not simply ignore it,” add Chouhoud.

The work is also far from over for activists; Al-Hanooti said her job isn’t done. Getting out the vote was just the first step to ensure that Arabs and Muslims’ concerns are addressed outside of campaign season. “Regardless, we know we won right now and we feel good, but we’re still rolling up our sleeves and getting to work,” she said. “No one person is going to save the world. So we still have so much work to do.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/muslim-voters-michigan-biden-trump-2020_n_5fa41369c5b6f1e97fe77a1f

#ElectionResults2020 - Let the Votes Be Counted Please, don’t listen to the president.

Count all the votes.

This shouldn’t be a remotely controversial proposition in a representative democracy. A complete and accurate count is the only way to determine the will of the people who cast ballots.

During even typical election years, the process can take days. It takes longer in the highest-turnout election in generations — and that’s before factoring in a pandemic that has driven tens of millions of Americans to vote by mail and has made it far harder to carry out even basic tasks, like vote counting, that involve many people being in enclosed spaces for extended periods.

A president who cared about upholding American democracy would do all he could to drive this point home with the public. He would set the example by reassuring the people that the nation’s time-honored electoral system is working as it always has — state by state, county by county, precinct by precinct.

President Trump, as usual, is doing the opposite. As growing vote totals in several key battleground states favored Joe Biden, Mr. Trump began casting doubt on the veracity of the counts.

Shortly after midnight, the president said falsely on Twitter that the election was being stolen.

A few hours later, in a rambling, middle-of-the-night speech from the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump accused “a very sad group of people” of trying to “disenfranchise” those who had voted for him. He threatened to force the election into the Supreme Court. “We want all voting to stop,” he said. “We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. OK?”

“This is a fraud on the American public,” Mr. Trump continued. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”

The speech was one of the lowest, most disgraceful moments in an administration filled to the brim with strong competition. It was also self-contradicting. In the same breath that he cast suspicion on counts in states that appeared to be turning against him, he welcomed more counting in states where his totals looked like they were growing.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump was at it again, compounding the damage with rageful, misleading tweets.

“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the ‘pollsters’ got it completely & historically wrong!” he wrote in a tweet that Twitter flagged, along with several others he has sent, for containing “misleading” content.

Mr. Trump is right that the polls were off — by a lot, in some key states. But none of this is “very strange.” Neither candidate won the election on Tuesday night. That determination won’t be made by the candidates’ wishes or the media projections. It will be made by the voters and the workers who count their ballots. States aren’t even required to certify their count until Dec. 8. In the meantime, there are no “surprise ballot dumps” that make votes “magically disappear.” It’s normal for vote totals to change, especially in the hours and days after polls close. When one or the other candidate pulls ahead, it’s not “flipping” the result, because there is no result yet to flip.

The irony is that the count could have proceeded more quickly in several battleground states, like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, had Republican lawmakers there followed their counterparts in many other states and allowed for mail ballots to be opened and processed before Election Day. But despite repeated pleas for them to do so, they refused. Now Mr. Trump and his Republican allies are using that refusal to claim that votes are being counted too late. It’s as though they defunded the Fire Department and then got mad when their house burned down.

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign announced it would seek a recount in Wisconsin, where Joe Biden leads by a little more than 20,000 votes, or less than 1 percent. That is Mr. Trump’s right, although he will have to pay $3 million out of pocket for it, and statewide recounts only change the margin, on average, by fewer than 300 votes. If anyone has reason to be upset, it is the hundreds of thousands of voters around the country whose mail-in ballots were never delivered to election offices. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington ordered the Postal Service to search 12 postal processing facilities in 15 states for any remaining undelivered ballots, which were generally cast overwhelmingly in favor of Democratic candidates. The Postal Service ignored the order, saying it would continue on its own inspection schedule.

It is understandable that Americans want to know quickly and clearly the outcome of the presidential election. But that doesn’t change the fact that it takes time to count 150 million votes. Across the country, election workers and administrators are committed to doing their job and are working long hours to ensure that every ballot is counted.

No matter how much the nation has come to expect this sort of behavior from Mr. Trump, he always manages to exceed expectations. That doesn’t make it better. To the contrary, it is extremely dangerous. Mr. Trump has for years fanned the flames of rage among his supporters and flooded American society with disinformation.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump tweeted, “They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!”

Yes, Mr. President. That’s what happens when you count the ballots. It’s up to the rest of us, and especially you, to stay calm and let the electoral process play out as it does every four years. In the end, both parties will have won some and lost some. That’s not fraud. It’s democracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/opinion/vote-count-election-2020.html