Sitting in her office in downtown Dearborn, Soujoud Hamade explains why she won’t be voting for the Democratic Party in two weeks’ time.
Just five years ago, she could not have imagined herself in this position. When Gretchen Whitmer was campaigning to become governor of Michigan, Hamade worked as her lead policy fellow.
She retains an admiration for Whitmer but her faith in the party has become completely eroded over the past year as she watched Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and the shocking reported death toll of more than 40,000, continue with the support of the political party she believed represented her.
And she reckons her disappointment – lasting and profound – is shared by many people she knows in the local Arab-American community.
“Here even the lifelong Democrats are so upset with the party. I don’t know a single person that is voting for Kamala [Harris] who is Arab American. They are voting uncommitted, Jill Stein or [Donald] Trump. Even friends of mine who work for the Democratic Party have told me they won’t vote. They are that upset,” she says.
It’s not a position she takes with any sense of joy or satisfaction. Hamade is well versed in the precariousness of the Democratic hold in Michigan and offers a bleak assessment of the potential outcome for her former party on November 5th. She intends to vote for Green candidate, Jill Stein.
And Hamade carries influence. She is a founding partner of the law firm that bears her initials and she was named, in 2021, on the Arab America Foundation’s national list of “30 Under 30″ accomplished young Arab Americans.
After voting for Trump in 2016, Michigan narrowly backed Joe Biden four years ago. This time if enough Arab Americans defect from their traditional Democratic vote it could tip Michigan back towards the Republican Party. About 70 per cent of that demographic voted for Biden. A mass desertion of the Arab American vote could prove decisive.
![Soujoud Hamade: 'I don’t know a single person that is voting for Kamala [Harris] who is Arab American.'](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/RRUFBOFDZ5EFDIZDLBMIHKDJGE.jpg?auth=5b405dcd7a51c9653bf1680507b7776ca9b504836e26fd258e435df54e224a6a&width=400&height=599)
“I think it will be difficult to win this state,” Hamade says, sombrely.
“I foresee Trump winning. I don’t think this is a good thing. We don’t like Trump. I am not trying to punish the Democrats. What I am trying to do is advise our community to have better foresight. We need to move the needle forward and break the duopoly. On the flip side, this is going to force the Democrats to listen to us if they want us to come back.
“You know, Joe Biden had the audacity to get up and say after Israel attacks burned people alive with IVs in their arms that in 30 days if Israel doesn’t stop we will issue an arms embargo. Every Arab American knows that 30 days means after the election. You think we are stupid enough to believe this garbage?”
There is a slow-burning anger behind Hamade’s disaffection. The daughter of Lebanese and Greek parents, Detroit is her native city and she was educated at Michigan State University. Her mother, she says, grew up in Lebanon and still suffers from the effects of her formative experiences there.
Hamade and her three sisters spent summers in Doha, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where they still have family. At this time of year, the sights and sounds of international news television crews are common in downtown Michigan.
Hamade is perplexed at how there often seems to be more of an international focus on the importance of the Arab-American vote to Michigan Democrats than there is domestically. Harris has declined the opportunity to decisively break from Biden’s endless tolerance for Binyamin Netanyahu’s regime’s actions.
“I would argue that we don’t feel a sense of betrayal. We don’t feel she was ever on our side. But we were going to vote for the Democrats originally because we believed that the Democratic Party was going to be party towards people of colour. But what we have seen over the past decade is that that is not the case any more. It is unfortunate but true.
“It is almost like this duopoly we have in this country [is] serving the same interests, the same military industrial complex, the same corporate interests and they don’t care about individuals any more. They just paint each party in a different light to appease different parts of the country. But . . . I was a lifelong Democrat.”
In an interview with the New York Times in early October, Imam Hassan al-Qazwini, founder of the Dearborn Heights’ Islamic Institute of America, echoed Hamade’s sentiment in saying nobody he knows will vote for the Democrats this year. Michigan has more than 300,000 residents who identify as Middle Eastern or North African in ethnicity and in a series of interviews with the New York Times involving almost two dozen people from that demographic, just two confirmed they would vote for Harris.
In the Yemeni enclave of Hamtramck, the endorsement last month of Donald Trump by city mayor Amer Ghalib was a further blow to Democratic campaign strategists in the state. It’s a concerning turn for the party and prompted Michigander and devout Democrat Michael Moore to address the issue. The filmmaker writes regular political columns on Substack and last week issued what he called “My Plea to Kamala”.
Praising what he described as her “stunning candidacy”, he admitted his summer optimism had been replaced by localised anxiety.
“Those of us from Michigan have serious concerns about you possibly losing Michigan – and we just can’t let that happen. We fear you may not have the whole picture that we see here on the ground,” he wrote before describing the depth of the grief among Arab and Muslim Americans in the state who have either lost family and friends or are terrified for loved ones in Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon.
Although Harris has repeatedly called for a ceasefire in Gaza, her campaign speeches have offered little detail as to how this might be achieved if she takes office, and Moore made a plea for a more pronounced and convincing message to the local Arab-American community. But when Biden won what was a routine Michigan primary in February, advance warning was offered by the “Uncommitted” vote of 101,623. It is unlikely that that figure has diminished in the months since.
For Detroiters like Soujoud Hamade, the possible outcome means that November will feel like a double defeat.
“I have noticed a lot of people want to paint a narrative here that because we are not voting for Kamala that we are going to be the reason that Trump wins,” she says.
“You see this conscientious effort to make the Arabs look bad and blame us for the possibility of Trump winning, which is really upsetting.”
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