There was a lot of buzz about the Muslim vote in 2024.
Photo: Adam James Dewey/Anadolu/Getty Images
There was a lot of buzz during the presidential campaign about the possibility that Joe Biden’s unflinching support for Israel in its war with Gaza might cost him and other Democrats dearly among Arab and Muslim voters. As it happens, Biden wasn’t on the ballot, but Kamala Harris didn’t exactly distance herself from the administration’s foreign policy. Now there is new data showing that she lost a significant portion of Muslim voters to Donald Trump — at the exact time the president is presiding over the same sort of destruction in Gaza that harmed his predecessor politically.
The Cooperative Election Study recently made available its data for the 2024 election, and America’s leading demographer of political trends by religious affiliation, Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University, has taken a fresh look at the Muslim vote. Harris hung on to 61 percent of the Muslim vote and Trump won 33 percent, a sharp departure from the 91 percent to 9 percent Biden win among these voters in 2020, according to CES data. (Only 6 percent of Muslims voted for third-party candidates like Jill Stein.) Trump did better than Republicans have done since he scandalized Muslims with his original travel-ban proposal in 2015.
To be clear, Burge sees real Trump gains among Muslims in 2024 — not just a slightly higher share of a vote, reduced by anger over the choices. Indeed, CES suggests Muslim turnout went up sharply in 2024. But the other trend he finds is interesting: The Trump surge in 2024 was significantly higher among voters who attend mosques weekly, which may suggest that culture issues might have been a factor alongside unhappiness with Biden-Harris support for Israel.
It seems likely that Trump’s doubled-down position on Gaza and his close relationship with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu will come across as a betrayal of his new Muslim voters now that he’s more closely identified with a war that many, perhaps most, Muslim Americans view as criminal and even genocidal — to say nothing of Trump’s renewed hostility to immigrants.
But Burge does think Muslims are slowly trending toward the GOP, much like other previously pro-Democratic voting groups:
At least three quarters of Muslims aligned with the Democrats in 2008, 2012, and 2016. But that shifted in a real and meaningful way in both 2020 and 2024. When Trump ran against Biden, the share of Muslims who said that they were Republicans rose to 20% — up 8 points since 2016. Then, that same thing happened again. 27% of Muslims were Republicans in 2024 and just half were Democrats.
When comparing those results to 2008, the Democrats have lost thirty points among Muslims while the GOP has picked nearly 20 points. The share of Muslims who are independent more than doubled to 22%.
At the moment, the most prominent Muslim American politicians are almost all outspokenly progressive Democrats: congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan as well as New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. If there is indeed a slow trend among this country’s Muslims toward the GOP, it should at some point start showing up downballot. Or perhaps it will turn out to be a Biden- or Trump-shaped mirage.
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