Poll of Muslim-American Voters Presidential Preferences Released
Report and photo by Phil Pasquini
Washington: Only days before one of the most pivotal presidential elections in US history takes place, CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) released its national poll, “Final CAIR 2024 Election Poll of American Muslim Voters,” which was conducted on October 30-31. The results illustrate how this important bloc of voters will be pivotal in deciding the winner in Tuesday’s election.
According to CAIR, the ongoing genocide in Gaza is the top issue affecting American-Muslim voters’ choices in the presidential race with most voters having already decided who they support.
CAIR, for its part during a morning news conference in introducing the results, urged all voters regardless of their choices to get out and vote in the election to make their voices heard.
In introducing the results of the one-question national poll, CAIR Director of Government Affairs Robert S. McCaw indicated that according to Molitico, the independent third-party research group whom they engaged in conducting the poll, there are 376,667 registered American-Muslim voters in the six key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The poll included 1,449 verified registered voters from across the country, with 42.3% for Dr Jill Stein, 41% for Kamala Harris, and 9.8% for Donald Trump while 5.4% of voters polled said they would not be voting and 0.9% remain undecided. The results allow for a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points with a confidence interval of 95%.
The same one-question poll conducted in September resulted with Harris at 29.40%, Stein 29.10%, and Trump 11.20% while 16.50% of voters were undecided and 8.80% said they would not be voting at all.
While the results of the October poll show that Harris has lost some support, there are others who are urging all American-Muslim voters to support her.
During a morning national television interview today, Palestinian refugee, Maher Nawaf Arekat, founder and President of the Palestinian Community Center of Arizona along with other Democrats and leaders in the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Progressive communities in Arizona, spoke of their joint statement issued on October 24 calling on all voters to take “The first step — and our best choice in this horrible situation — is Harris.” The statement concludes with “… Voting for Harris is not a personal endorsement of her or of the policy decisions of the administration in which she served. It’s an assessment of the best possible option to continue fighting for an end to the genocide, a free Palestine, and all else that we hold dear.”
While expressing their collective frustration with Harris’ stance, saying that while she has not yet “…met our movement’s demand that she break with Biden on the issue” they are hoping that in the end “she will come around,” in part due to recent comments and statements wherein she expressed empathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people pledging to do “everything in her power” as president in ending the war in Gaza, and to achieve “a future of security and dignity for all people in the region.”
In addressing those inclined to vote for a third-party candidate in protest to the status quo, they warned that “In our electoral system, no third-party candidate can win this election.”
(Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Countercurrents, and Nuze.ink. He is the author of Domes, Arches and Minarets: A History of Islamic-Inspired Buildings in America.)
