Jill Stein won’t be president of the United States. This much Arab American voters are sure.
Only 5% of voters across the nation say they’re voting for a third-party candidate this year. Even a straw poll on an Arab American website found that just 23% of the 1,177 people polled will vote for any third-party candidate in 2024.
But prominent leaders in the Arab American community want to deliver on earlier promises to embrace Stein over Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, even if it means Donald Trump wins.
The reason, many told NOTUS, is simple: They want to punish Democrats for not ending the war in Gaza.
Hudhayfah Ahmad, a media representative for the Abandon Harris Campaign, was blunt. “We want to break our community out of the mindset of the lesser evil,” he told NOTUS.
“We believe that voting is a tool, one of many tools in our toolbox that must be utilized morally, ethically and consciously,” he said.
Ahmad added that he understands campaigning against Harris could effectively hand Trump — who pushed a Muslim ban and appears even more pro-Israel and bellicose in Gaza than Harris — a win in Michigan, where the two candidates are currently deadlocked.
But the sacrifice, he said, is worth it.
“We are showing that we, as a minority community who will be directly affected by Donald Trump’s policies, are not going to waver with regard to our morals,” he said. “We are going to vote for something much bigger than ourselves. And, by extension, we hope that other minority communities look at us and say, ‘If they have a red line, then we can also have a red line.’”
For Abed Hammoud, a longtime Democrat and founder of the Arab American PAC, embracing Stein is a flex of his community’s political power. His PAC hasn’t endorsed Stein but is actively campaigning against Harris and encouraging voters not to turn to Trump.
“If Harris loses this election because of Michigan, and it’s clear the margins were so tight, it means our community made her lose,” he told NOTUS. “Our political power will more than double in an instant because people realize, in the future, don’t mess with these people.”
As recently as last month, Harris seemed like she was making progress rebuilding the coalition of Arab American voters that fractured under Biden.
She secured an endorsement from Emgage Action, one of the nation’s largest Muslim American voter mobilization groups. Muslim Women for Harris — which had disbanded after Democratic National Convention leaders refused stage time to a Palestinian speaker — reorganized in September and reversed its decision, doubling down on its support for Harris. Harris also ramped up engagement with Muslim and Arab American leaders in Michigan and even met with some privately in early October.
But when Israel struck Lebanon around that same time, leaders in the Arab American community concluded the U.S. wasn’t backing down from supporting Israel’s war efforts. And Harris’ consistent messaging with the White House, leaders said, was evidence voters had to actively embrace other alternatives.
“Lebanon didn’t help,” Warren David, president of the Arab America Foundation, told NOTUS. “It made the community more upset with the administration.”
Hanna Hanania, a board member of the American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine, told NOTUS the lack of change in language from Harris’ campaign ultimately led to some Arab American voters deciding they couldn’t get behind her.
“When she starts talking about, ‘If she’s elected president, she’s not going to change anything that President Biden has done,’ that’s also not the right message,” he said.
For others, the DNC was the moment many in the community decided to switch gears and back Stein.
“We were excluded. Our voices were excluded,” Hatem Natshah, who leads a grassroots movement in Texas, told NOTUS. “That absolutely made a difference for someone like me.”
Of course, progressives who are worried about Harris’ messaging on the war in Gaza aren’t in complete agreement about the political strategy. Former Rep. Andy Levin supported the Michigan “uncommitted” protest vote in March, hoping it would animate the Biden administration to adopt a firmer posture toward Israel. Now, he’s urging voters to support Harris, reasoning that a Trump victory poses a greater threat to Palestinians than a Harris administration.
A vote for Stein, he told NOTUS, is counterproductive.
“Obviously, voting for Trump helps Trump,” Levin said. “But voting for Stein helps Trump, and staying home if you would otherwise vote for Harris, helps Trump.”
Levin sees a vote for Harris as a politically pragmatic move. Even though he said Harris has not done enough to tell voters “how things might be different in her administration,” he fears with less than two weeks until Election Day, the pursuit of the perfect will get in the way of progress.
“The things that we’ve made progress on, we need a Kamala Harris there, not a Donald Trump,” he said. “So the point is, spend the 15 seconds filling out the oval for Harris. And it’s not because you know you love her. It’s because politics shouldn’t be about the individual; it should be about what’s the strategy for what you believe in to get it done.”
Although the pressure campaign to persuade Biden and Harris to change their stance on the war lasted well after the DNC, efforts to court Stein began in May.
Senan Shaq, an organizer from Chicago and now a Stein surrogate, told NOTUS that Arab Americans in his community had begun feeling hopeless about Biden’s ability to end the war in Gaza. So, he helped organize a nationwide Zoom call with over 30 Arab American organizations to “talk politics.”
Soon after, he contacted Stein’s campaign to offer his community’s support and began hosting fundraisers for her and other anti-war Democrats down ballot.
It wasn’t so much that Stein said pro-Palestinian things over and above other third-party candidates like Cornel West. It was that she had ballot access.
“I love Cornel West, but this is my thing,” Natshah, the organizer from Texas, said. “Cornel West is running as an independent. He’s not on a lot of states’ ballots.”
Of course, Stein has embraced her role as a candidate pushing not just for a cease-fire but also for “an end to Israel occupation and apartheid” as well as “accountability for war crimes.”
Her positions are exactly what these Arab American voters have been hoping Democrats would adopt, and Stein has used the opening to attract supporters, urging voters to “abandon pro-genocide candidates.”
But Stein also made an effort to court these voters on a personal level.
Shaq became a key liaison between Stein’s campaign and Palestinian American communities across the country, and he was crucial in orchestrating intimate settings where Stein could interact with voters.
Over the past couple of months, Stein has become a regular at Arab American community gatherings. She has even attended some weddings and private dinner parties with Arab Americans.
Shaq also hosted Stein in his home during one of her campaign stops and described her as “sincere.”
“It was a success how we managed to integrate the Green Party with the Muslim and Arab communities,” he said.
The Abandon Harris Campaign, which endorsed Stein soon after Israel struck Lebanon, has also been actively campaigning for Stein. It specifically targets popular community centers to distribute flyers and its volunteers have been knocking on doors in Dearborn, Michigan. The group has additionally invited Stein to speak during its meetings.
“We’re operating in the circles Muslim and Arab Americans congregate and exist,” Ahmad said.
Stein’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
But Stein isn’t the only choice for Arab Americans, given the anti-Harris sentiment. Some Arab American voters think the toughest punch they can deliver is to vote for Trump. In the recent Arab American Institute poll, Trump and Harris are deadlocked when it comes to support from Arab American voters. (In 2020, Biden had almost two-thirds of the Arab American vote.)
These days, much of the split comes down to a belief among some voters that Trump could actually play the role as a peacemaker in Gaza better than Harris.
“He doesn’t like the image that he’s a warmonger because he always tells people about how ‘we solve problems,’” one lawmaker from Dearborn told NOTUS. “Trump knows that there’s money to be made by making deals on peace. That’s what the perception is on the street.”
Bishara Bahbah, who leads a GOP outreach effort to Arab American voters, is firmly behind Trump. But he admires many of Stein’s positions on the war in Gaza. He said he would vote for Stein if she were “a mainstream candidate.”
“I don’t have any issue with the positions of Jill Stein,” he told NOTUS. But he said he sees the race as a binary choice between Trump and Harris.
“I am not going to more or less dilute my voice by voting for her unlike some Arab Americans,” he said.
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Riley Rogerson, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.