Muslims, Arabs say key Bush vote may swing other way
Originally published in the Centre Daily
Posted on Tue, Jan. 20, 2004
Muslims, Arabs say key Bush vote may swing other way
BY DEBORAH HORAN
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - (KRT) - Four years ago, George W. Bush seemed a dream candidate to Shafic Budron. The Texas governor was a socially conservative, pro-business oilman whose campaign promises hinted he would fight racial profiling and laws that allowed prosecutors to use secret evidence in terrorism cases.
Today, Budron has few good things to say about Bush's performance as president. Yet the Burr Ridge man suggests Bush still has a shot - if a slim one - at persuading him to support the Republican ticket in the next election.
"I have not made up my mind," said Budron, a Lebanese-born real estate developer. "We are still some time from the 11th hour. Things could change."
Many Muslim voters like Budron say they remain undecided about the presidential race, even as they blast the Bush administration for what they say has been a dismal record on civil liberties and a lackluster push for Middle East peace. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, they say, measures such as the Patriot Act and special registration have trampled on their freedoms.
Nationally, as many as 30 percent of Arab-American Muslim voters have not made up their minds as to whom they will support for president, according to a poll released Friday by Zogby International, a New York-based polling organization. The poll was commissioned by the Arab American Institute, a bipartisan organization based in Washington, and has a margin of error of 4.5 percent.
Muslim and Arab leaders in Chicago and elsewhere say Bush will have to work a miracle to woo their undecided constituents into backing him to the extent they did in the 2000 elections. Then, Muslim organizations openly endorsed Bush, and Muslim and Arab swing voters trended Republican.
Now 83 percent of Arab-American Muslims rate Bush's overall performance "unfavorable," according to the Zogby poll, which did not survey non-Arab Muslims. Only 10 percent said they planned to vote for Bush.
He fared somewhat better when Arab Christians were factored into the poll results: 59 percent of all Arab-Americans gave Bush an "unfavorable" rating. Twenty-eight percent said they would vote for him, while 40 percent would vote for any Democrat.
"It is going to be extremely difficult for Muslims who are informed to support the administration again," said Kareem Irfan, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. "There is a strong concern about the direction in which the country is heading under his leadership."
Often socially conservative, entrepreneurial and in favor of small government, Arab-Americans - both Muslim and Christian - naturally migrate toward the Republican Party, community leaders say. But they also tend to back liberal immigration laws and progressive health-care policies, issues often associated with the Democrats.
As many as one-third of them, by some counts, are swing voters swayed by a candidate's stand on specific issues, particularly the Middle East. Most of the estimated 1.2 million Arab-American voters - roughly 75 percent - are Christian; only 25 percent are Muslim.
Predicting the politics of America's other Muslim populations, from Albanians to blacks, is much harder, pollsters say. Even the number of Muslims in America is in dispute: Estimates range from 2 million to 7 million.
What is known is that in 1996 they trended Democrat, in 2000 they trended Republican, and today they are angry.
And although they constitute a small part of the electorate, their numbers are concentrated in battleground states, including Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida and Illinois.
"These are major states where every vote counts," said Mohammed Nimer, research director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as CAIR.
Bush re-election team aides quietly acknowledge they "have some work to do" to capture Muslim and Arab-American votes. Republican supporters such as George Salem, an Arab-American in Michigan, say they hope to sway voters by reminding them that Bush appointed more Arab-Americans to office than any other president. He has given unprecedented access to Muslim and Arab-American leaders.
And, Salem believes, Bush will work hard during a second term toward a resolution to the Israeli-Arab conflict that is favorable to the Arabs. It's a hot-button issue: 71 percent of Arab-American Muslims said they considered a candidate's stand on the Middle East when casting a vote, reported the Zogby poll.
"Many will understand that a second-term Bush presidency could be better for the issues that they care about," Salem said.
Still, Muslim leaders in Chicago say Bush's early favorable ratings have been undermined by policies put in place after Sept. 11, 2001 - policies they say have unfairly targeted their communities and left them feeling vulnerable and afraid.
"The Patriot Act has angered everybody," said Bassam Jody, a past president of the Bridgeview Mosque Foundation. "The secret evidence. The special registration. It doesn't go with the democratic process."
The community's feelings of alienation were exacerbated when Bush appointed Daniel Pipes, a controversial academic they consider an Islam-basher, to the U.S. Institute of Peace. Relations were strained again when Bush failed to distance himself from remarks made by Lt. Gen. William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, that referred to Muslims as idol-worshipers.
"It looks like he's pretty much finished with a good chunk of the community," Nimer said. "For Muslims, he's got very little to offer."
Nimer and others say they expect most Muslim and Arab-Americans to back any Democratic candidate instead.
Among Democrats, Dennis Kucinich has become an early favorite. His efforts to halt the deportation of a Muslim family in Ohio impressed the community, Muslim leaders said. From the beginning, Kucinich opposed the war in Iraq. And the Ohio congressman has uttered all the right words about protecting civil rights.
Still, Howard Dean was the front-runner in the Zogby poll released Friday, favored by 36 percent of the Arab-American Democrats surveyed, both Christian and Muslim.
In Chicago, some undecided Muslim voters said in interviews that they viewed the war on terrorism as a concern that could hurt them regardless of which party was in power. They hoped to rely on the courts to protect their civil rights rather than the politicians. And they planned to weigh a variety of issues to determine which candidate to support, not just security and foreign policy.
But if they end up voting for Bush, they might just keep that fact to themselves.
"I voted for Bush last time," said Budron, a registered Republican who voted for Clinton in 1996 and then switched sides four years later.
"I don't declare that too loudly in the community these days."
Subscribe to this blog's feed