EXCLUSIVE — A Michigan leader in the effort to oppose President Joe Biden in Tuesday’s Democratic primary over his handling of the Israel–Hamas war is warning that members of her campaign can’t be won back in November, either.
The “Abandon Biden” campaign is about imploring Michigan voters to cast a ballot “for anybody but Biden, no matter who,” in the primary or general election, though its national committee will eventually endorse candidates, according to Samra’a Luqman, the organization’s Michigan co-chairwoman.
“We are attempting to oust Biden, and so you could vote for a third-party candidate, you could write in something, you could do [former President Donald] Trump,” Luqman told the Washington Examiner.
Four years ago, Luqman, a realtor and former Dearborn City Council candidate, wrote in Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on her 2020 general election ballot because Biden is “too much in the middle” for her.
“To hear myself saying, ‘I’m even willing to go to the other side or to accept that there may be a Republican president, no less Trump, in order to oust Biden,’ that’s a huge thing for me,” she said.
The Abandon Biden campaign can be contrasted with its Listen to Michigan counterpart, endorsed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and other groups organizing Democrats to mark themselves as “uncommitted” on Tuesday but that will nonetheless back Biden in the general election. Regardless, all of the efforts have been criticized by Democrats, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), as empowering Trump.
“I’m not going to be scared into voting for Biden, and I think it’s a real insult to Muslims in the United States to act as if we don’t know what living through a Trump presidency would mean,” Luqman said. “I’ve lived through four years of Trump, but there are over 30,000 men, women, and children, innocent lives in Palestine that have not lived through even four months of Joe Biden.”
As with the Hispanic population, Republicans have been able to capture some share of Michigan’s Arab and Muslim communities, even as they have historically sided with the Democrats. But Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Michigan chapter, said the protest vote does not “equal” voting for Trump.
“What it equals is many, many, many individuals most likely will vote for a third-party candidate or vote for their state representatives and other races,” Walid said. “However, I mean, there will be some people who vote for Trump because, in the last election, there were Muslims who voted for Trump, not a large percentage, but maybe about, I think, 15%.”
In a separate interview, the vice chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party’s Arab American Caucus, Sameh Elhady, who personally aligns more closely with the Listen to Michigan campaign than Walid, similarly underscored he is “not scared of Trump.”
“Let Trump come,” Elhady said. “If he does something wrong, we’re going to protest against him. We’re going to use the constitutional rights. We’re going to fight. So for us to be scared of Trump coming to the White House, that’s OK. Let him come.”
Michigan State University political science assistant professor Nura Sediqe, who has been researching and conducting fieldwork among Michigan’s Arab and Muslim populations, found that roughly two-thirds of respondents to her January survey would vote for a third-party candidate in the 2024 general election, whereas one-fifth would cast a ballot for the Democratic presidential nominee and another 10% would do the same for the Republican.
“You had about 60% saying that they had voted for Biden in 2020, and now, you only have 20% saying they’re going to do it this time. That’s a pretty drastic shift,” Sediqe said.
Per Luqman, the Abandon Biden campaign will measure its success post-Tuesday’s primary election by comparing how the president performed in Michigan’s Arab or Muslim majority voting precincts in 2020 and 2024.
“Our measure of success is going to see, like, these majority Muslim-held, Arab-dominated precincts, how much of that support has come down?” she said.
The Listen to Michigan campaign is aiming for 10,000 uncommitted votes, the number by which Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the state to Trump in 2016. By comparison, Biden won Michigan in 2020 by 154,000 votes. However, there are 100,000 Arab Americans in the city of Dearborn and 146,000 American Muslims who are registered to vote statewide.
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For Luqman, not only is Biden “in trouble,” but Democratic down-ballot candidates are as well. She argued the Abandon Biden campaign has become persuasive with Michigan’s independent voters, too.
“Endorsing Biden is no longer on the negotiation table. That has been the case since Oct. 31,” she said. “If, really, the Democrats wish to save what they have worked so hard to achieve, both in Michigan and in Congress, the majority in the Senate, any House reps, the state majority legislature in the state — in Michigan, if they want to save any of those things, then I’m sending a message that they better get Biden to call for a ceasefire and stop this immediately and save lives immediately, but as for Biden himself, he is no longer going to be somebody we endorse ever again.”
