LONDON: Jill Stein, the Green Party US presidential candidate known for her vocal support for Palestinian rights, has emerged as the top choice among Arab American voters ahead of the November 5 US election, according to a recent poll.
Stein, running as a third-party candidate, won the support of more than 45 percent of Arab-Americans polled by the Arab-American Committee Against Discrimination, the largest Arab-American civil rights organization.
That puts Stein, a physician and environmentalist, ahead of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, who received 27.5 percent of the vote in the same poll.
The survey was conducted between July 27 and 28 as part of a partnership between ADC, Molitico for data insights and Community Pulse, which specializes in survey solutions.
According to Abed Ayoub, ADC's national executive director, the Arab-American demographic has increasingly gravitated toward Stein because of her advocacy of human rights in Palestine and her opposition to the Israeli military's actions in Gaza since October.
In a post on social media platform X, he said: “Green Party candidate Dr Jill Stein's strong poll results of 45.3 per cent, similar to the previous poll, show consistent public support, largely due to her clear stance on human rights in Palestine.”
Stein was the favorite among Arab voters after the last ADC opinion poll in May, where she led with 25 percent support. By comparison, President Joe Biden, who withdrew from the presidential race in July, and Republican nominee Donald Trump received 7 percent and 2 percent, respectively.
In 2022, 2.2 million people in the United States reported having Arab ancestry that year in the Arab Community Survey. The majority of Arab Americans are indigenous, and 85 percent of Arabs in the US are citizens.
While the community traces its roots to every Arab country, most Arab Americans have ancestral ties to Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. The four most populous states in Arab America are California, Florida, Minnesota, and Michigan.
Ayoub noted in his post that Biden's drop in popularity among Arab Americans was “due to the outgoing president's unwavering support for Israel's actions in Gaza.”
The Israeli military began bombing Gaza in retaliation for a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which the Palestinian militant group took more than 200 hostages.
The Palestinian death toll in Gaza has since exceeded 39,500, with at least 15,000 children dead and more than 12,000 injured, according to Gaza health authorities
Humanitarian organizations, human rights groups and governments around the world have repeatedly called for a ceasefire, but Israel has continued its military operations.
Stein has consistently criticized Biden and his administration for their unwavering support for Israel, warning in his Aug. 1 X message that the Israeli government was drawing the U.S. “into World War II.”
Following Mossad's alleged elimination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and a senior Hezbollah figure in Beirut last week, Stein criticized Biden and Harris for their “deafening silence” on Israel's “massive escalation to a wider war.”
In a July 31 post on X, Stein demanded that “the US immediately end aid to Israel, establish a ceasefire, and arrest the war criminal (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) before he kills us all.”
The assassination of Haniyeh on July 31 heightened fears of an all-out regional conflict. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed revenge, warning Israel that he had “paved the way for your cruel punishment”.
Netanyahu's government has not claimed responsibility or commented on Haniyeh's death. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the U.S. had “no knowledge of the assassination and no involvement in it.”
SOON THE FACTS
• Arab Americans live in all 50 states, but up to 95% live in metropolitan areas.
• New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC and Minneapolis are among the top 6 metropolitan areas.
• Almost 75% of all Arab Americans live in just 12 states: California, Michigan, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Minnesota, Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
• Nearly a quarter of Arab Americans are Muslim, while the rest are Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.
However, a day before Haniyeh's death, Israel claimed responsibility for killing Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah's top commander, in an airstrike on a building in southern Beirut. Hezbollah vowed a “final” response to Shukr's killing.
Whether or not the U.S. was involved in the escalation, Biden's Middle East policy has faced sharp criticism since October, with rights groups calling on the U.S. administration to end arms shipments to Israel.
In late April, Amnesty International reported that US weapons supplied to Israel “were used in serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, and in a manner inconsistent with US law and policy.”
In May, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his defense minister, and three Hamas leaders, including Haniyeh, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Chris Habibi, ADC's director of national government relations and advocacy, says the survey revealed two key insights. “First of all, President Biden is very unpopular among Arab Americans,” he told Arab News.
“Secondly, speaking out against genocide is a win-win position for our communities across the country.”
Habibi added that the poll results reflect “what we have been demanding for 10 months and 300 days of this genocide — an immediate, permanent ceasefire and an embargo on all weapons to Israel.”
Biden faced a major defeat in Michigan's Democratic primary in February when a majority of voters in Dearborn, a city with a large Arab and Muslim population, chose to vote “no commitment” rather than him.
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud publicly supported the “no” vote movement, citing Biden's policies on the Israel-Gaza conflict, USA Today reported.
In contrast, Stein actively courted the Arab American vote in Michigan and beyond.
In an interview with Arab News in June, Stein promised that if elected, she would end military support for Israel's “apartheid government” and seek real peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
“Arabs and Muslims were taken for granted in America. They are victims of racial profiling, Islamophobia and anti-Arab violence in this country,” she said.
“There is an absolute violation of our constitutional rights by the authorities to stop our dialogue. People are trying to fight this genocide that we are seeing live and in real time on our iPhones and computer screens.”
Stein emphasized that “it is against US law to send weapons to Israel, which violates humanitarian rights and interferes with the delivery of humanitarian aid.”
She added: “People who stand up for our legal and human values are being criminalized and charged with crimes.”
Despite Stein's growing popularity among Arab-American communities, other presidential candidates still have an opportunity to win more support from Arab and Muslim voters before November.
The ADC poll shows that in addition to the 27.5% of respondents who support Harris, 18% were undecided about their vote in November and 6% said they did not plan to vote.
“With nearly 1 in 4 voters either undecided or inclined to abstain, Harris or any other candidate has a lot of opportunity to earn more public support if the right positions are taken,” ADC's Ayub wrote on X.
