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Essay: How the Republican Party alienated the once reliable Muslim voting bloc
Nearly two decades later, the GOP has struggled to win over black, Latino and female voters as the nation's changing demographics have ensured Republicans can no longer count on white men alone to win the White House. But unlike those electoral groups, which have long protested the GOP's conservative positions on low-income and minority communities, Muslim voters were once a solid Republican voting bloc. Their turn away from the GOP in recent years amid growing anti-Muslim rhetoric after Sept. 11, 2001, suggests Republicans are poised to lose more minority voters in the future as the nation becomes more diverse.
After 9/11, American Muslims largely switched sides to the Democratic party, noting that Republican policies had made their lives more difficult than they were before the attacks. A 2011 Pew survey found that Muslim support had flipped in just over 10 years after 78 percent of Muslims backed Republicans in the 2000 election. By 2011, 70 percent of Muslims identified as Democrats, and 11 percent leaned toward Republicans. An informal exit poll conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2012 determined that 85 percent of Muslim voters in the election broke for President Barack Obama over his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
The shift comes amid growing suspicion toward Muslims among Republicans. A 2012 Arab American Institute poll found that 60 percent of Republican voters had a negative image of Muslim Americans. Many Republicans also see President Barack Obama as Muslim, compared with 29 percent for the American population as a whole. In separate polling, 51 percent of all Americans said Muslims want to remain a distinct culture from the rest of the country, and 47 percent said that American and Muslim worldviews are incompatible.
To be sure, Muslims aren't a make-or-break constituency in presidential or federal elections. Their numbers are increasing, however, at the same time that the number of Americans who identify as Christian, the largest religious group in the country, is seeing a sharp decline. Muslims represented 0.4 percent of the population in 2007, according to a Pew survey, and rose to 0.9 percent in 2014. The Christian population dropped from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent during that time.
While Muslim voters may be a small portion of the American population, they are concentrated in some of the states that could play a decisive role in 2016, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Those states can be decided by razor-thin margins. At that point, every constituency matters. Whether or not Republicans have pushed Muslim voters away to attract white conservative voters in the primary could have an impact on who gets the White House next.
Essay: How the Republican Party alienated the once reliable Muslim voting bloc
Almost before I knew that I was an American, and almost before I knew that I was a Muslim, I knew that I was a Republican. I knew this because my father told me so. My father finished his cardiology fellowship just weeks after I was born, and moved the family from Michigan, where we had relatives and a large Muslim community, to Wichita, Kan.
Kansas, then as now, was a Republican state, and those political sensibilities suited my dad just fine. These were the 1970s, when the income tax rate on the highest earners was 70 percent, a rate that people of all political persuasions would agree today can only be described as confiscatory. My dad had just left behind Syria, where the government had literally confiscated his familys wealth, and he would be damned if he was going to let the American government take more than two-thirds of his marginal income.
The Muslims who immigrated to America in the 1970s, like the ones who immigrate to America today, were not lazy. Lazy people dont leave their homeland 5,000 miles behind to move to a foreign country where they speak a foreign language. For these Muslims, the Republican message of self-reliance and entrepreneurship, the exaltation of small business owners, the emphasis on cutting taxes to encourage industriousness, was catnip. So too was the vilification of people sucking from the public teat and asking for handouts. There were no Muslim welfare queens, and Muslims joined the Republican stampede against them.
The immigrant Muslim community remained a reliable pillar of support for the Republican Party throughout the 1980s and 1990s, even as the party underwent a gradual but very significant change. Ronald Reagans platform when he ran for president in 1980 was largely an economic one; social issues were only an ancillary part of his message. Twenty years later, when George W. Bush ran for president, his platform revolved around social issues: his antiabortion and anti-gay marriage positions were front and center. His platform reflected the massive influence that Christian organizations had had on the Republican Party over the previous two decades, intertwining Christian religious beliefs with politics, and co-opting the Republican message on issues of great concern to devout Christians.
Believe it or not, Muslim support for the Republican Party did not waver in the face of its gradual Christianization. On the contrary, Muslims saw common ground with Christians on most social issues. While the topic of abortion is not nearly as cut-and-dried for Muslims as it is for many Christians, the Muslim community certainly agreed with the goal of limiting them as much as possible and more to the point, in limiting unwanted pregnancies in the first place by stigmatizing casual sexual encounters. Muslims shared with their Christian neighbors their belief in the sanctity of the nuclear family, and their belief that a household headed by a married mother and father was the best household in which to raise children.
By 2000, the Muslim community in America was several decades old, and had started to mature as a political entity. Muslim organizations almost unanimously endorsed George W. Bush. I voted for Bush that year. I would have voted for Bob Dole in 1996 if I werent so busy with medical school that I forgot to vote; I would have voted for Bush Sr. in 1992 if I werent still 17-years-old.
In the 2000 election, approximately 70 percent of Muslims in America voted for Bush; among non-African-American Muslims, the ratio was over 80 percent.
Four years later, Bushs share of the vote among Muslims was 4 percent.
It doesnt have to be this way. The Muslim community still shares many core values with Republicans, the same core issues that attracted most Muslims to the Republican Party in the first place. Muslims havent changed their views on limited government, or the superiority of the traditional nuclear family, or the importance of encouraging entrepreneurship. A Republican Party that focused on its core principles rather than on demonizing a minority as a way to score cheap political points would find support among the American Muslim community again.
