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  • Americans head to polls with historic election on a knife edge | US elections 2024

    Election day has arrived in America, with tens of millions of voters set to head to the polls on Tuesday in one of the closest and most consequential contests in modern US history.

    The Democrat Kamala Harris and her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, appear locked in a knife-edge contest with hardly any daylight between the pair in national opinion polls that have barely budged in weeks.

    In the seven crucial swing states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – the picture was the same. Recent polling has been unable to discern a clear pattern or advantage for either Harris or Trump in this electoral battleground, though most experts agree that whoever wins the Rust belt state of Pennsylvania is likely to have a clear advantage.

    “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump, 78, said at a rally in Reading, in the state’s southeast corner, during a frenetic final day of campaigning in the state. Later, in Pittsburgh, he framed the election as a choice between “a golden age of America” if he returns to the White House or “four more years of misery, failure and disaster” under Harris.

    Harris, 60, spent all of Monday in Pennsylvania and finished in Philadelphia, where she was joined by singer Lady Gaga and TV personality Oprah Winfrey, who warned of the threat that Trump poses to democracy. “We don’t get to sit this one out,” Winfrey said. “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

    It is the swing states that will decide the election, because under the complex American political system, the result is decided not by the national popular vote but an electoral college in which each state’s number of electors is weighed roughly by the size of its population. Each candidate needs 270 votes in the electoral college to clinch victory, and the battleground is formed of those states where polls indicate a state could go either way.

    More than 78m early ballots have been cast but the result may not be quickly known. With polling so tight, full results in the crucial swing states are unlikely to be available on Tuesday night and may not even emerge on Wednesday, leaving the US and the wider world on tenterhooks as to who may emerge as America’s next president.

    The election brings to an end a remarkable and in many ways unprecedented election campaign that has deeply divided American society and upped the stress levels of many of its citizens amid warnings of civil unrest, especially in a scenario where Harris wins and Trump contests the result.

    Harris has consistently centered her campaign on the autocratic threat that Trump represents. In her final big signature event, Harris staged a rally of 75,000 supporters on the Ellipse in Washington – the spot where Trump helped encourage his supporters to attack the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

    “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities on what I will get done for the American people,” Harris told the crowd.

    Harris’ campaign has tried to represent a page turning on the Trump era and threat of his return to the White House. She has acknowledged that calling Trump a fascist is a fair reflection of his political beliefs and the intentions of his movement, while insisting that she represents a choice that will serve all sides of America’s deeply fractured political landscape.

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    Trump, meanwhile, has run a campaign fueled by a sense of deep grievance, both personal, at his legal travails, and the perception among many of his supporters of an ailing America that is under threat from the Democrats. That sense of victimhood has been fueled by lies and conspiracy theories that have baselessly painted Biden and Harris as far-left figures who have wrecked the American economy with high inflation and an obsession with identity politics.

    Trump has also put immigration and border security at the heart of his campaign pitch, painting a picture of America as overrun with crime caused by illegal immigration that has often veered into outright racism and fear-mongering. He has referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” with “bad genes” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

    The huge divisions between the two campaigns and the language used by candidates – especially Trump and his allies – have led to widespread fears of violence or unrest as voting day plays out and especially as the count goes on. In the run-up to election day, ballot drop boxes used for early voting were destroyed in several US states.

    At the same time, however, it was Trump himself who was the subject of two assassination attempts during the campaign. At a rally in Pennsylvania, an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear and at a golf course in Florida, a gunman lay in wait for an ambush, only to be foiled by an eagle-eyed Secret Service agent before he could open fire. Neither shooter seemed coherently politically motivated or definitively aligned with one side or another.

  • As Trump, Harris woo Arab Americans, Michigan mayor readies to up pressure | US Election 2024 News

    As Trump, Harris woo Arab Americans, Michigan mayor readies to up pressure | US Election 2024 News

    Dearborn, Michigan – Abdullah Hammoud was pacing across his office, having an animated phone conversation about former President Bill Clinton’s claim that Hamas “forces” Israel to kill Palestinian civilians.

    By the time the mayor of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn sat down for an interview, he had shaken off the anger – at least on the surface.

    Hammoud, 34, appeared clear-eyed about the future of the city known as the capital of Arab America and the way forward for its bereaved community amid Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon.

    “There’s a blanket of grief that has just covered this community, and people are just trying to manage, obviously, amidst the entirety of the presidential election with the backdrop of a genocide, the war in Lebanon, the bombing in Yemen and so on,” Hammoud told Al Jazeera.

    Hammoud, one of the most prominent Arab American elected officials in the United States who served in the State Legislature as a Democrat, has not endorsed any of the candidates, urging residents to “vote their conscience” instead.

    In a close race, the tens of thousands of Arab voters in Dearborn – a city of 110,000 people – and across Michigan may prove crucial for the outcome of the election in the state and possibly the country.

    That’s not lost on the candidates: on Friday, Trump is expected to visit Dearborn, and Harris has met Hammoud previously during the campaign, but not in Dearborn.

    Hammoud stressed the need to come out and vote for the community to make its voice heard.

    “In this moment in time, what is more important than anything else is standing firm in our values and our principles and standing firm on the side of one another in the city,” he said.

    But for Hammoud, the struggle to end Israel’s killing machine in Gaza and Lebanon – the ancestral home of thousands of Dearborn residents, including the mayor himself – does not end when the polls close on November 5 and a new president is elected.

    “Whoever assumes that office, we’re prepared to hold their feet to the fire and hold them to account,” he said. “Everybody’s promising a ceasefire, but nobody’s saying how they’re going to deliver it.”

    ‘Pressure will be turned up’

    Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has said she would push for ending the war and her Republican rival Donald Trump has promised “peace” in the Middle East.

    But both the vice president and former president are staunch in their support for Israel.

    Hammoud noted that the two candidates have not articulated how they would deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has pledged repeatedly to continue the carnage until “total victory”.

    “But the pressure will be turned up from our end. And we’ll be leaning on the broader antiwar coalition that has been built – our union labour leaders, who have all stepped forward and called for not only a ceasefire, but also an arms embargo against Israel,” the mayor said.

    “Heck, even at this point, I’ll be leaning on young Republicans who favour an arms embargo.”

    For Hammoud, change is possible regardless of the outcome of the election. “The policy is there. Americans, by the millions, support this,” he said.

    “And what you’re not going to see is 50 million, 100 million Americans move on their values and principles. I think it’s feasible for us to believe that millions of Americans can move a single person in the White House on this issue.”

    Dressed in a blue blazer over a white shirt, Hammoud hit out at both major candidates over their stance on the Middle East as well as their approach to the Arab community in Michigan.

    In his office hung a map of Lebanon over a Yemeni dagger, a firefighter’s helmet, an American football with the Detroit Lions logo, the city’s seal – featuring an old car owing to the city’s manufacturing history as the hometown of industrial pioneer Henry Ford – as well as other items representing Dearborn’s history and diverse communities.

    ‘Policy outcomes aren’t dissimilar’

    Hammoud enumerated some of Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian policies, including moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, cutting off humanitarian aid to Palestinians and recognising Israel’s claimed sovereignty over Syria’s occupied Golan Heights.

    He also invoked Trump’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries as well as recent comments by the former president’s surrogate Rudy Giuliani, who proclaimed that Palestinians are “taught to kill us” at two years old.

    “But I think the difficulty is you want to counter Trump with something that seems to be more welcoming,” Hammoud said.

    “And so when you see the remarks of former President Bill Clinton, talking about how Israel is forced to kill civilians, and how the Israeli government’s claim to the land predates the existence of Islam, it gets extremely frustrating.”

    Clinton was addressing Arab American voters at an official Harris campaign event in Michigan when he made those comments this week.

    Earlier this month, Harris also campaigned in Michigan with ex-Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney – the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq and the so-called “war on terror”.

    “When you have surrogates like Liz Cheney campaigning across the state of Michigan, talking about how even Dick Cheney – the war criminal – is supporting Vice President Harris, is that supposed to be a welcoming message to this community?” Hammoud asked.

    He also noted that the Biden-Harris administration did not reverse Trump’s pro-Israel policies.

    “Yes, rhetoric may be different,” he said, referring to the approach of Harris and Trump. “Sometimes policy outcomes aren’t dissimilar, and I think that’s been the frustration for many.”

    ‘Hope exists’

    With the race for Michigan heating up, attention is turning to Dearborn, the country’s first Arab-majority city.

    Campaign billboards can be seen across the city. Residents are getting piles of advertisements in their mailboxes daily, focusing on Arab issues and Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon.

    But residents do not appear to match the enthusiasm of the campaign. The city’s Arab American community, especially its large Lebanese American population, is dealing with the anguish of watching the war that is destroying their homeland from afar.

    The conflict is deeply personal to them. Their families are being displaced, home villages decimated and loved ones killed by mostly US-supplied bombs. The community lost a respected leader, Kamel Jawad, who was killed in an Israeli bombing in south Lebanon on October 1.

    “We’re attending funerals far more frequently than celebratory events,” Hammoud said.

    Across the city, Lebanese and Palestinian flags and yard signs for school board candidates far outnumber those for Trump and Harris.

    Despite voters’ frustration and the growing sense of disenchantment with the political system, Hammoud warned against disengaging from the political process, calling it a “great fear”.

    The mayor highlighted the importance of elections, especially at the local level. He cited the election of officials like himself and other representatives, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who have amplified the community’s demands around the conflict.

    He said while people are struggling with the presidential question, “hope exists” on the ground.

    “There are rallies happening all across this world, and the centre of America has moved on Israel-Palestine, and the centre of the world has moved,” he said.

    “I think we are one generation away from having a generation of elected leaders who will be more reflective of the policy stances and the values and the principles of the broader electorate.”

  • US election 2024: Arab Americans united in grief, divided on strategy | US Election 2024 News

    US election 2024: Arab Americans united in grief, divided on strategy | US Election 2024 News

    Dearborn, Michigan – For more than a year, Layla Elabed says she and other Arab Americans have been at a “collective funeral”.

    “We’re grieving. We’re frustrated. We’re angry. We’re heartbroken. We feel betrayed,” Elabed said, finally taking a breath as she reflected on Israel’s raging wars on Gaza and Lebanon.

    And now, with bombs still raining down, she added that Arab American voters were being asked to hit pause on their sorrow and cast a ballot on Tuesday for presidential candidates who do not have a plan “to stop the killing”.

    It is a sentiment that reverberates across the large Arab American community in the battleground state of Michigan, where Elabed has been a leader in the Uncommitted Movement, which has aimed to pressure United States President Joe Biden and his vice president and Democratic contender, Kamala Harris, to end their unwavering support for Israel.

    Harris has promised to continue arming Israel while her Republican rival, Donald Trump, has a staunchly pro-Israel record despite his claims of wanting to bring “peace” to the region.

    Draped in a scarf featuring Palestinian embroidery, known as “tatreez”, Elabed told Al Jazeera that she was leaving the top of the ticket blank.

    “I’m skipping it because neither Vice President Harris nor Donald Trump has adopted a policy that clearly says the bombs are going to stop,” said the Detroit area resident, who is a mother of three and the 12th of 14 children of Palestinian immigrants.

    Other Arab Americans, however, are making different choices.

    Some are backing Harris, arguing that despite her pledge to sustain the flow of US weapons to Israel, the Democrat remains a better choice than Trump on domestic and foreign policy.

    Others see Trump’s unpredictability and self-proclaimed status as an antiwar candidate as an opportunity to break away from the Democratic Party and penalise Harris.

    Elabed belongs to the third camp: those who argue that neither candidate deserves the community’s votes.

    But even within that approach, there are divisions. Some are calling for skipping the presidential race altogether, while others are campaigning for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

    ‘We need to respect ourselves’

    Overall, however, there seems to be little enthusiasm across the board, underscoring the dilemma Arab Americans face as they struggle to agree on a strategy that could help influence the election and end the US-backed Israeli wars, which have so far killed more than 43,000 people in Gaza and nearly 3,000 in Lebanon.

    Alissa Hakim, a Lebanese American university graduate, said she has “no hope whatsoever” about the vote.

    Hakim in 2020 cast her first-ever vote in a presidential election, voting for Biden who she believed would be better than Trump. But after four years and a war that many experts have described as a genocide, the 22-year-old said she firmly rejected the “lesser of two evils” argument.

    “There’s been such a low bar for our presidential candidates that you want us to vote for you just because you’re not the other person,” said Hakim, sitting in a Yemeni coffee shop with a laptop featuring stickers of the map of historic Palestine.

    “It’s made me realise, we need to respect ourselves more than to just sell our vote to whoever says the nicer words,” she told Al Jazeera.

    Alissa Hakim
    Alissa Hakim, 22, sits at a coffee shop in Dearborn, Michigan, October 31, 2023 [Ali Harb/Al Jazeera]

    While Hakim remains undecided, she said her vote would certainly not go for either Trump or Harris.

    In Dearborn, a city of 110,000 people known as the Capital of Arab America, both major campaigns are trying to reach out in various ways but their efforts do not appear to be producing a decisive outcome.

    With Election Day approaching, Al Jazeera surveyed dozens of residential neighbourhoods in the heavily Arab east side of the city. Signs for school board candidates and Lebanese and Palestinian flags far outnumbered signs for the two major presidential hopefuls.

    Biden won more than 80 percent of the votes in predominantly Arab precincts in Dearborn in 2020, according to the city’s election data, helping him win Michigan.

    This time, however, Harris is facing an uphill battle in the local community. Even Arab Americans who backed the Democrat in interviews with Al Jazeera have voiced frustration with her positions and acknowledged her campaign’s shortcomings.

    Last week, former President Bill Clinton said at a Harris rally in Michigan that Hamas “forces” Israel to kill civilians. He also suggested that Zionism predated Islam in comments that stirred outrage among Arab and Muslim groups.

    Harris has also refused to meet advocates from the Uncommitted Movement after her campaign rejected the group’s demand to allow a speech by a Palestinian representative at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

    At a campaign stop in Michigan on Sunday, Harris was asked if she had a closing case to make to Arab Americans. She said she hoped “to earn” the votes of the community and repeated her position about the “need to end the war” on Gaza and secure the release of dozens of people held captive in the besieged territory.

    ‘Tough pill to swallow’

    Ali Dagher, a local Democratic activist who signed a letter by prominent Arab Americans endorsing Harris, said the community was in “shock” and “deep depression” over the carnage in Gaza and Lebanon.

    Dagher told Al Jazeera that endorsing Harris was done in partnership with other groups, including civil rights advocates and labour organisations that see Trump as a threat.

    “Another presidency under Donald Trump would be a greater danger, not just on international policy… but also on a domestic level – about human rights, about civil rights, about the environment,” Dagher said.

    Blue Harris signs on a door
    Harris’s campaign office in Dearborn, Michigan, features signs that include, ‘Arab Americans for Harris’ [Ali Harb/Al Jazeera]

    He acknowledged that voting for Harris was a “very tough pill to swallow”, but said the decision was made on the premise that Arab American Democrats would work with their allies to push her to shift US policy on Israel and Palestine.

    Some Arab Americans, however, advocate for a divorce from the Democrats altogether, arguing that working within the party’s system has proven futile.

    “You do not do the same thing over and over and expect different results,” Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib said at an Al Jazeera town hall in Dearborn earlier this week.

    Ghalib, one of the local Arab American officials to have endorsed Trump, said he had opened the channels of communications before the war broke out in an attempt to end the disconnect with the Republican Party after years of political engagement with the Democrats only.

    Arab Americans were not always considered a Democrat-leaning constituency. Many Arab voters in the Detroit area backed Republican President George W Bush in 2000. But the 2003 US-led war on Iraq and the so-called “war on terror” shifted the community’s support to the Democratic Party – and not just on the presidential level.

    Numerous Arab American politicians in southeast Michigan have been elected to public office as Democrats, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib as well as several county commissioners and state lawmakers.

    But those same Democratic officials, including Tlaib and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who have both served in Michigan’s House of Representatives, have refused to publicly back Harris over the war – signalling yet another shift.

    Campaigns target Arab voters

    Harris has welcomed the endorsement of Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney – an architect of the post-9/11 era that drove Arab Americans to the Democrats – and campaigned with his daughter, Liz Cheney.

    That embrace did not sit well with many in the area, and Republicans are trying to capitalise on that discontent.

    “Kamala is campaigning with Muslim-hating warmonger Liz Cheney, who wants to invade practically every Muslim country on the planet,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in October. “And let me tell you, the Muslims of our country, they see it and they know it.”

    A Republican-linked campaign has been aggressively targeting Arab Americans in Michigan with advertisements and text messages highlighting Harris’s ties to the Cheneys as well as her pro-Israel record.

    “I’m a volunteer helping elect pro-Israel candidates. Our records show you support VP Harris. Thats [sic] great,” a text message sent to Dearborn residents on Sunday read.

    “We need her to continue Biden’s policy of sending aid to Israel so they can continue to [stand] up to terrorism in the Middle East. Do you agree?”

    Conversely, Emgage PAC – a Muslim political group backing Harris – has sent mailers to voters in the Detroit area underscoring Trump’s pro-Israel policies and his close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Sign that says: Kamala Harris and Elissa Slotking, the pro-Israel team we can trust
    A Republican-linked advertisement campaign targeting Arab voters has been underscoring Harris’s pro-Israel record [Ali Harb/Al Jazeera]

    ‘What’s happening is trauma’

    Still, faced with “impossible choices”, many voters say they are not convinced by either effort.

    As Trump met a group of Arab Americans in Dearborn on Friday, Leila Alamri, a local health professional, brought a Palestinian flag to the gathering outside the Trump event.

    She said her message was about Palestinians, not the US election, adding that she would not vote for either of the two major candidates.

    “We’re here just to represent the people of Palestine. We’re not here in support of one candidate or the other,” Alamri told Al Jazeera.

    Wissam Charafeddine, a local activist backing the Green Party’s Stein, said the community felt humiliated by people in power and faced a “catastrophe” of retreating from the political system.

    “What’s happening is trauma,” he told Al Jazeera.

    “Every single person living in this area is affected directly somehow from this war – either by a family member or a friend being killed or by a house or property being destroyed. That’s other than the shared trauma of watching a genocide of children and women that’s being committed in front of their eyes on a daily basis.”

  • Harris says will end Gaza war in final election appeal to Arab Americans | US Election 2024 News

    Harris says will end Gaza war in final election appeal to Arab Americans | US Election 2024 News

    With the clock ticking, Harris risks losing support of Michigan’s 200,000-strong Arab Americans, who denounce the US handling of Israel’s war.

    In her closing pitch for the presidency of the United States, Democrat aspirant Kamala Harris has promised to end the war in Gaza.

    Campaigning in the swing state of Michigan, home to many Arab Americans, Harris, 60, on Sunday tried to reach voters disgruntled by the ongoing genocide, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and displaced almost the entire 2.3 million residents of Gaza.

    “This year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon, it is devastating. And as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, and ensure the Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination,” Harris said to applause during a rally in East Lansing city of Michigan, home to 200,000 Arab Americans.

    She did not elaborate on how she planned to end the Gaza war, which critics say is backed by the US, the largest military supplier to Israel.

    Both Harris, the current US vice president, and her Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, 78, are making their final appeals with less than 36 hours left until polls open for Tuesday’s election.

    Israel’s ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon have been a contentious issue in the campaign, with many voters condemning the US’s continued support for Israel amid mounting deaths, displacement and destruction in both places.

    Since Israel began bombing Gaza following a rare Hamas attack inside Israel in October last year, Harris, like her boss, President Joe Biden, has repeatedly stated that Israel had a right to defend itself against its enemies. That, despite expressing concerns over disproportionate Palestinian civilian deaths due to Israel’s military campaign.

    Harris, who has also promised to continue arming Israel if elected, badly needs to secure a majority in the seven pivotal battleground states in this year’s election amid a virtual dead heat with Trump nationally. A compilation of opinion polls by the RealClearPolitics website has Trump ahead by just 0.1 percent nationally, with five polls indicating they are locked in a tie.

    Michigan, with a vibrant Arab and Muslim community and 15 Electoral College votes at stake, is crucial to Harris’s prospects. It, as well as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are considered this year’s swing states.

    Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – once considered reliably Democratic – are crucial this year. Known as the “blue wall”, these states fell to Trump in 2016, only to be secured by Biden in 2020.

    Trump on Friday visited Dearborn, Michigan, the heart of the Arab American community, and promised to end the conflict in the Middle East, also without saying how.

    Ahead of Election Day, more than 78 million Americans have already cast early ballots, including about 700,000 more Democrats than Republicans, according to data published by the University of Florida Election Lab.