the voters in the America’s largest city with a majority Arab population swung decisively toward Donald Trump on Tuesday, in a sharp rebuke of the Biden administration’s policies in the Middle East.

Trump won 43 percent of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan, to Kamala Harris’ 36 percent. Jill Stein won 15 percent of the vote in the city, where the Green Party had won less than 1 percent in 2020.

Trump’s margin of victory in Dearborn represents a massive shift from the 2020 election, when Joe Biden won 69 percent to Trump’s 30.

The huge swing toward Trump will not be decisive in a race in which he achieved an Electoral College victory without the help of Michigan, the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans. The state had not yet been called as of Wednesday morning. Still, it was a telling sign of how completely the administration has lost Arab Americans to the war.

The down-ballot results suggest the move was motivated largely by anger toward the Biden administration rather than dissatisfaction with Democratic policies in general.

“She opposed her party’s leadership because she refused to ignore the needs of her constituents, which in this case meant opposing genocide.”

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a progressive Palestinian American, won 62 percent of the vote in Dearborn, compared to 30 percent for Republican candidate James Hooper. She was easily re-elected for a fourth term.

To observers, the contrast between Tlaib’s strong performance and Harris’s weakness is striking.

“Working-class voters across this country no longer see the Democratic Party as a party that fights for their interests,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, “and they saw Rashida Tlaib as someone who does it for the same reason as her. “He opposed his party’s leadership because he refused to ignore the needs of his constituents, which in this case meant opposing genocide.”

“This is what it looks like to put democracy back at the center of the Democratic Party,” Andrabi said. “Anything else is a betrayal to ordinary people and they feel it.”

Why the twist?

Some Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan had switched to Trump because of his conservative values ​​and his alignment with the culture war. A nationwide ad campaign attacked Harris for her support of trans people, often using misinformation, and the tactic was successful. The issue had helped Trump arab and muslim stripping voters away from the democrats.

Tlaib, however, took progressive stances on the issue and openly supported trans rights.

“Although there were social problems, the focus was very much on the Middle East and the war.”

So what made Harris perform so poorly compared to Tlaib? One lightning rod stands out: Tlaib, a Palestinian American, has been one of the staunchest critics in Congress of Israel’s war on Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon.

A prominent Lebanese-American civic leader in Dearborn, Abed Hammoud, said he saw no contradiction in Trump and Tlaib – a social progressive – winning the city because the election was a clear referendum on Israel’s attack on Gaza.

“Although there were social problems, the focus was hugely on the Middle East and the war,” he said.

He unofficial results for the Dearborn track with The Intercept reports on Arab and Muslim Michigan residents during early voting. Many said they were lifelong Democrats who turned to Trump out of a sense of dismay over the war in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon.

Trump has promised to let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza and has supported inflammatory pro-Israel policies such as recognizing jerusalem like your capital. Still, some voters said they wanted to give it a chance after more than a year of devastating war in Gaza, and in light of Harris’s refusal to break with Biden on the issue.

In a statement, Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the huge vote swing in Trump’s favor could be attributed to Harris’ failure to take a stronger position on Gaza.

“Instead of listening to the clear majority of Americans who support both a ceasefire and an arms suspension to Israel, Vice President Harris only adopted a slightly more sympathetic tone toward the Palestinians, maintaining the substance of President Biden’s disastrous stance. ”Awad said. “This led to an unprecedented shift in support from Muslim, Arab and other communities that traditionally vote for Democratic presidents.”

“Something very difficult to do”

Trump campaigned aggressively for the Arab and Muslim vote in Michigan, making several visits in the final weeks of the race to Hamtramck, which has an all-Muslim city council, and to Dearborn. Trump presented himself as the peace candidate and Awad asked him to keep his promise.

“The president-elect must fulfill his campaign promise to seek peace abroad, including by ending the war in Gaza. However, this must be a real peace based on justice, freedom and a state for the Palestinian people,” Awad said.

Dearborn was a center of the national movement “Not Compromised”what I was looking for pressure the administration to change their policies towards Israel. Harris rejected the Uncommitted campaign to have a Palestinian-American speaker head to the Democratic National Convention in August.

David Dulio, a professor at Oakland University in Michigan, said that given such activism in the area, Trump’s superior performance was not entirely surprising.

“We’ve known this has been a possibility for months, since the presidential primary, when Uncommitted gets 100,000 votes statewide,” Dulio said. “We knew this was a point of contention in these three Arab American communities. “We knew that many people in those communities were and are not happy with the current administration’s policy regarding Israel and the war in Gaza.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Uncommitted movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh said that among the people who voted for Trump were members of his own family.

“The people who voted for Trump are my cousins, my friends, people who were given the very difficult task of enduring a lot of pain and at the same time trying to do something politically smart,” Alawieh said. “It’s a very difficult thing to do.”

Alawieh said he hoped the “gamble” of voting for Trump in an attempt to end the war would pay off, but he hoped members of his movement would organize in the streets to put pressure on politicians from both major parties.

“It’s going to be a difficult road,” he said. “And for many of us, our activism, our organizing, could even be criminalized. And that is a very bleak outlook, but we have to move forward.”