The Arab American Political Action Committee declined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, marking a blow to her efforts to court voters disillusioned with her stance on the war in Gaza.
The group is based in Michigan, a battleground state with the country’s largest Arab and Muslim community. The PAC’s announcement Monday came as a break with its tradition of backing the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee since its founding more than two decades ago.
“This year, we face a choice of two candidates who are harming our communities here and our families and friends in our homelands,” it said in a statement. “We simply cannot give our votes to either Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump, who blindly support the criminal Israeli government led by far-right extremists, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
AAPAC’s decision follows at least two other prominent anti-Israel groups based in Michigan that have decided against supporting Harris.
The Dearborn-based “Abandon Harris” movement pushed aside worries earlier this month that its endorsement of Green Party candidate Jill Stein might put former President Donald Trump in office.
“There might someday be a moment where we do have to choose the lesser of two evils, but now we’ve reached a point where the evil is so pronounced that we must denounce it at every moment, regardless of the cost, to send an undeniable signal that a reckoning will come upon … [the Democratic Party] and it will have to ask why it lost,” said Hassan Abdel Salam, the group’s leader.
Additionally, the Uncommitted National Movement, which staged a protest vote against President Joe Biden, then the presumed Democratic nominee, during Michigan’s primary in February, has also declined to back Harris.
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Approximately 150,000 Arab and Muslim voters call Michigan home. The movement away from Harris in Michigan, a state Trump lost by just over 154,000 votes four years ago, could signal the former president’s odds of flipping the state are increasing with just 21 days to go before Election Day.
The latest aggregate polling from RealClearPolitics shows Trump with a razor-thin edge over the vice president in Michigan.
