Bush received an official American Muslim endorsement in the 2000 presidential elections. This time round opinions have changed. Sadiq Reza* examines the situation in detail American Muslims are expected to have endorsed a candidate for president of the United States, something they have only ever done once before. The endorsement will come from the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), a new national coalition of Muslim organisations much broader than the four-group coalition that issued the first American Muslim presidential endorsement -- for George W Bush -- in 2000. But whomever the AMT endorses, the 2004 elections will have likely seen something the last one did not: a unified American Muslim vote. In the 2000 elections, despite the endorsement, only 42 per cent of American Muslims voted for Bush. Thirty-one per cent chose Al Gore and 12 per cent chose Ralph Nader, according to a 2001 poll by Zogby International and the Muslims in the Public Square (MAPS) project at Georgetown University. This division had ethnic dimensions: 55 per cent of African-American Muslims chose Gore and 20 per cent chose Bush, while the percentages were reversed among Arab- Americans (54 per cent for Bush, 16 per cent for Gore) and Pakistani-Americans (56 per cent for Bush, 18 per cent for Gore). This year, according to results released last week from a second MAPS/Zogby poll, in a two-way race Senator John Kerry is the choice of 76 per cent of American Muslims -- a figure that includes 82 per cent of the African-Americans, 76 per cent of the Arab-Americans and 72 per cent of the South- Asian Americans. When Arab-American Nader is included, he takes 11 per cent and support for Senator Kerry drops to 68 per cent. In both scenarios, President Bush receives no more than eight per cent of the American Muslim vote -- a percentage that remains constant among African-American, Arab-American and South Asian-American Muslims. With estimates of the number of American Muslims ranging from three to six million, their electoral support is no small matter. Democrats are not necessarily the American Muslims' party of choice in the long run. While over 90 per cent of American Muslims support Democrat-backed universal healthcare, increased government assistance to the poor and stricter environmental protections (according to this year's MAPS/Zogby poll), Republican-backed issues also get a lot of support from American Muslims. Seventy-nine per cent oppose gay marriage, 66 per cent support vouchers for private schools (including religious schools), 55 per cent support greater restrictions on abortion and 51 per cent would allow public schools to display the Ten Commandments. On foreign policy, while most American Muslims oppose the Bush administration's military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq (53 per cent and 81 per cent, respectively), more of them (87 per cent) agree on an issue that neither Democrats nor Republicans have addressed to their satisfaction. The American Muslims wish an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the creation of a Palestinian state, yet Kerry has offered no more than Bush on this subject. Instead, American Muslims seem inclined to vote as scholar Ali Mazrui advises: candidate by candidate rather than by party, using votes as leverage to reward candidates who take Muslim concerns seriously and to punish those who ignore them. But what are Muslim concerns? Sixty-nine per cent of respondents in this year's MAPS/Zogby poll said that "being Muslim" is an important factor in their voting decision -- so being respected as Muslims isn't a bad place to start. Ask former Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli, or better yet his Republican opponent in the 1996 elections that ushered Torricelli into the Senate from New Jersey. That year, in a district where American Muslims were pro-Republican, Republican candidate Mark Zimmer attacked Torricelli for his outreach efforts to Muslim organisations in the state, calling the organisations "terrorist groups". The district's Muslims promptly gave Torricelli 95 per cent of their votes, and Torricelli publicly attributed his victory to Muslim support. Look also at the 2000 US Senate race in New York, when Republican Senate hopeful Rick Lazio accused Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton of "cavorting with terrorists" and collecting "blood money" after she received a large campaign contribution from a mainstream American Muslim group. Mrs Clinton returned the contribution to fend off Lazio's attack, but New York's Muslims, who gave Bush 80 per cent of their presidential vote, still gave Mrs Clinton -- who had warmly welcomed Muslims in Washington during her husband's presidency -- 96 per cent of their vote for senator. In this year's tight presidential contest, American Muslims, like so many of the nation's sub-groups, easily decided their vote for the next US president. In Florida 2000, where President Bush's official margin of victory was 537 votes, an estimated 45,000 Muslim voters chose Bush, while only 6,000 chose Gore. What is different this time round is that they have only recently realised this voting power. The presidential candidates would be wise to realise it too. * The writer is an associate professor at New York Law School, and a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School's Islamic Legal Studies Programme.
