Following up on a very successful meeting in Chicago of national Muslim leaders a month ago, the Arab American Institute’s annual leadership conference will begin tomorrow in Dearborn, Michigan.
By all indications, the conference will further demonstrate that Arab Americans’ influence in American politics will reach unprecedented heights in next year’s election.
As the Detroit News mentioned in September, it wasn’t long ago when “candidates for the presidency sometimes made a point of returning contributions from Arab Americans and rejecting their endorsements,” because some “thought it unwise, politically, to associate with them.”
Those days appear to be over. Starting at tomorrow’s conference, eight of the nine Democratic presidential candidates (all the Dems except Al Sharpton) will be addressing the conference, speaking to attendees, and engaging in Arab American outreach.
It seems obvious that, as a practical matter, it would be foolish to ignore the “Muslim vote.” As the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services recently noted, about 70 percent of the nation’s Arab population lives in just eight states, seven of which are key electoral prizes — California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
As recently as the 2000 election, it appeared that Bush and the Republicans were making a concerted effort to win over Arab American political support. Less than a month before Election Day 2000, for example, the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council Political Action Committee announced its Bush endorsement, citing, in part, his “outreach to the Muslim community.” At the time, this was the first organized Muslim endorsement of a presidential candidate in U.S. history.
This was actually a relationship that had been cultivated over many years. As The New Republic explained two years ago, GOP consultant Grover Norquist (who recently compared the Estate Tax to the Holocaust) has made it one of his “lesser-known projects over the last few years” to bring American Muslims into the Republican Party.
Those efforts may have been made in vain. At this point, it seems unlikely that Arab-American voters will be encouraged to vote Republican next year. In fact, a poll released in September by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) showed that Muslim-American voters will probably be voting for anyone but Bush in 2004.
The CAIR poll showed only two percent of respondents said they were prepared to support Bush in 2004. When asked to name the political party that best represents the interests of the Muslim-American community, more respondents named the Democratic Party (27 percent) and Green party (25 percent) than the Republican Party (3 percent).
The same poll asked which of the Democratic presidential candidates they’d likely support. Howard Dean enjoyed a big lead with 26 percent, though at the time, Wesley Clark — who led of international forces in Bosnia and Kosovo in missions that protected Muslims — wasn’t part of the poll.