An old adage suggests that foreign policy doesn’t decide elections.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” Clinton campaign strategist James Carville famously proclaimed in the lead-up to the 1992 elections.
But this year’s nail-biter presidential election could come down, in part, to war in the Middle East – and whether Vice President Kamala Harris can recapture support from the historically Democratic Arab-American community.
And according to activists in swing states, the Trump team is seizing on Arab Americans’ sour feelings about the Biden-Harris administration.
“For Democrats, outreach is pretty null towards the grassroots,” Samraa Luqman, a Dearborn-based Arab-American activist told Fox News Digital.
“The Republicans’ outreach has been like nothing I have ever seen,” said Luqman, who wrote in Bernie Sanders in 2020 and is now voting for former President Donald Trump.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a Univision town hall, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“The people that are surrounding the president have been in communication with grassroots organizers, local leaders, people like myself,” she went on. “I’m really not somebody on the national stage. . . . And yet, here I am with access” to those like Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, and Massad Boulos, father-in-law of Trump’s daughter, Tiffany.
Grenell, who may well find himself in a Cabinet-level job if Trump is elected, and Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman, have been leading the outreach to Arab American communities in swing states and “they’ve gotten progressives like myself on board to say that this is the right person for the job at this time, considering the alternative.”
For Luqman — who supports Medicare for all and student debt forgiveness – hers is a vote of protest more than an enthusiasm for Trump. “It’s really become an issue about genocide and how to…
