Contrary to what one might assume from following "the news," Joe Biden's policies in the Middle East are turning off Arab American voters in droves, a new poll shows.
The Arab American Institute poll, which was linked to the nearly month-old Israel-Hamas war, found a seismic shift in the political leanings of Arab Americans with support for Biden plummeting from 59 percent in 2020 to just 17 percent for the 2024 election. The 42 percent shift parallels with Biden's approval among Arab Americans, which dropped from 74 percent in 2020 to 29 percent in 2023.
For the first time since the Arab American Institute started polling, Republicans are preferred over Democrats.
“This poll marks the first time in our 26 years of polling Arab American voters in which a majority did not claim to prefer the Democratic Party,” read the analysis of the poll conducted by John Zogby Strategies for the group headed by his brother, James Zogby.
“In 2008 and 2016, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two-to-one. In this poll, 32% of Arab Americans identified as Republican as opposed to just 23% who identified as Democrats. Independents continued a steady growth in party identification and overtook Democrats for the first time in October 2023,” according to the poll.
The Arab American Institute said that the survey's findings could hurt Democrats in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, which are home to large populations of Arab Americans.
The survey preceded the weekend protests in several cities over Biden’s pro-Israel policies and his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israeli forces have been preparing for a ground invasion to retaliate for the surprise Hamas attack inside Israel last month.
The poll "reinforces several other recent polls showing Biden losing to former President Donald Trump in 2024 in part because the president’s coalition of younger voters, minorities, and suburbanites have lost faith in him," Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard noted.
In his weekly report card, John Zogby graded Biden with a D-minus, citing his polling and that of others and wrote: “As I write this, over 9,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war, quadruple that number have been injured, and many more may never be counted. Let me not mince words: this is genocide and ethnic cleansing. Of course, Hamas started it all, but so too did a brutal occupation and a choking of the Gaza economy. If Israel has a 'right' to defend itself, when is enough too much?”
Zogby added that, politically, Biden “is on the path of losing support of younger voters, people of color, and moderate independents. Biden can gloat about another good economic week, but not so much if Americans are worried about WWIII.”
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