US
Muslims could be a critical voting
bloc By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With Barack Obama and Mitt
Romney virtually tied with Election Day less than
two weeks away, Muslim voters could play an
unexpected critical role in deciding the outcome
November 6.
A poll of 500 registered
Muslim voters released here Wednesday found that
more than two-thirds (68%) currently plan to vote
for Obama and only 7% for Romney. But a
surprisingly large 25% said they were still
undecided between the two main party candidates.
And tens of thousands of those undecided
voters are disproportionately concentrated in
three "swing" states - Ohio, Virginia and Florida
- where the candidates are focusing their
campaigns in the last two weeks.
"The
Muslim vote could be decisive in several
battleground states," said Naeem Baig, chairman of
the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and
Elections (AMT), which co-sponsored the survey and
whose political arm is expected to formally
endorse candidates before the election.
The poll, which was conducted during the
first two weeks of October, also found large
majorities of respondents who said that the US
should support rebels in Syria (68%) and that
Washington was right to intervene with NATO in
last year's revolt against the Gaddafi regime in
Libya (76%).
Respondents were roughly
evenly divided on whether the US has provided
sufficient support to the uprisings in the Middle
East, known as the Arab Spring.
Precisely
how many Muslim citizens there are in the United
States - and hence how many Muslim voters - has
been a matter of considerable debate. The US
Census is forbidden to ask residents their
religious affiliation.
The Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), another
co-sponsor of the survey and an 18-year-old
grassroots organization that has become one of the
country's most active national Muslim groups,
estimates a total US Muslim population at between
six and seven million, or about the same as the
total number of US Jews.
The Pew Research
Center, on the other hand, last year estimated the
total number of Muslim Americans at 2.75 million,
of whom about one million were children and hence
ineligible to vote. It found that more than 60% of
US Muslims are immigrants, and, of those, more
than 70% are citizens.
Most native-born
Muslims are African Americans, who, together with
Arabs, Iranians, and South Asian comprise roughly
80% of the total US Muslim population.
CAIR estimates the total number of
registered Muslim voters at at least one million.
Ohio, according to CAIR's estimates has around
50,000 registered Muslim voters; Virginia, around
60,000; and Florida, between 70,000 and 80,000.
Historically, Muslim Americans have been
split in their voting behavior, but in the 2000
election 72% voted for George W Bush primarily
because his campaign met at length with Muslim
organizations and, during a key debate with
then-Vice President Al Gore, the former president
spoke out against the use of secret evidence in
deportation hearings and racial profiling. Four
national Muslim organizations eventually endorsed
his candidacy.
But, disillusioned with his
administration's harsh response to 9/11, including
the detention of hundreds of Muslim men, the
passage of the so-called Patriot Act, as well as
the war in Iraq, US Muslims abandoned Bush.
In the 2004 election, 93% of Muslims voted
for the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry;
another 5% for third-party candidate Ralph Nader,
and only 1% for Bush, according to surveys
conducted at the time.
The Democratic
shift continued in 2008 when nearly 90% of Muslim
voters cast their ballots for Obama and only 2%
for his Republican rival, Senator John McCain.
Whether that level of support will be
retained for Obama, however, is unclear, according
to CAIR's executive director, Nihad Awad, who said
Muslims were in some respects disappointed by
Obama's inability or failure to fully follow
through on some of his campaign pledges to amend
or rescind the more onerous provisions of the
Patriot Act and close the Guantanamo detention
facility in Cuba.
Like the general public,
he noted, Muslims have also been disappointed by
the president's performance on the economy and
reducing unemployment.
In addition, noted
Oussama Jammal, who chairs a public affairs
committee of the the Muslim American Society
(MAS), noted that Obama's greater use of drones to
strike suspected Al-Qaeda and other Islamist
militants in Pakistan "is not selling well in the
(Muslim) South Asian community".
Revelations regarding "unprecedented
surveillance" of mosques and the use of agents
provocateurs by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) have also hurt Muslim
confidence in Obama, according to Baig.
The 500-person sample on which the poll
was based was drawn from a data base of nearly
500,000 Muslim American voters that was, in turn,
developed by matching state voter-registration
records with a list of some 45,000 traditionally
Muslim first and last names prevalent in a variety
of the world's Muslim-majority ethnic groups.
Respondents included 314 men and 186 women
across the country. Twenty-six percent of
respondents were born in the US; while 71% were
not. (Three% declined to answer the question.)
Ninety-three percent said they had lived in the US
10 years or more.
Of the total sample, 43%
said they were of South or Southeast Asian
ancestry; 21%, Arab; 8%, European; and 6% from
Iran and Africa each, an indication that African
American Muslims, who are estimated to comprise
about 30 of all Muslim Americans, may have been
under-represented.
Half of respondents
said they attend a mosque at least once a month.
The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus
5%.
In addition to its findings about
presidential preferences, the poll found that 91%
of respondents intend to vote in this year's
election. In the last presidential election in
2008, only about 57% of eligible voters cast
ballots.
It also found that the percentage
of those who considered themselves closer to the
Democratic Party grew from 42% in 2006 to 66%
today, while affiliation with the Republican Party
remained roughly the same at between 8 and 9%
since 2008. Fifty-one percent of respondents said
they considered the Republican Party, several of
whose presidential candidates during the primary
campaign made blatant Islamophobic remarks,
hostile to Muslims.
Asked how important
they considered 16 current foreign and domestic
issues education, jobs and the economy, health
policy, and civil rights were called "very
important" by four out of five respondents.
Seventy-one percent said they considered
"terrorism and national security" in the same
category, while two-thirds of respondents named
the "possibility of war with Iran".
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign
policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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