Michelle Dawi (née Moons), a former Breitbart News reporter and White House official, has taken the initiative and launched an effort to register Arab American voters who are showing an increasing interest in Donald Trump.
As Breitbart News has reported, some Muslim and Arab voters who are dissatisfied with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are turning to Trump, hoping he can bring peace to the Middle East again. There are also a wide variety of groups within the overall Arab American community, including Christians from many backgrounds.
Dawi, whose reporting on immigration for Breitbart News flagged the issue as a major public concern in the years before Trump launched his political career, helped set the narrative for conservative activism on the issue.
She herself has since married into an Arab American family from the Orthodox Christian community in Syria.
Dawi, who worked in the Trump White House during his first term, saw that there was a potential constituency for the former president among Arab American immigrants, but that it was being overlooked. Acting independently from the Trump campaign, she set up a political action committee, the Conservative American Middle Eastern PAC, and began mounting a voter registration effort.
Dawi has been funding a grassroots effort to set up tables outside grocery stores and other communal locations in the Detroit suburbs to help pro-Trump Arab Americans register to vote and learn where their polling places are.
“There are Chaldean Americans in the hundreds of thousands … [in] Oakland County, Michigan. There are Albanians there, other Christians. The vast majority of them are what I call the low-hanging fruit. They are pro-Trump conservatives, but they haven’t gotten registered to vote,” Dawi said.
“My team is seeing a huge response,” she added.
“Many of them don’t want Harris. They want her to lose. Some of them are moving toward [Green Party candidate Jill] Stein, but we think there is room to convince them towards Trump as well. And that could be what gets us over the line.”
Many of the issues Arab American voters care about are simply bread-and-butter issues, not foreign policy, Dawi said, especially those relating to small business.
“I really think we can win Michigan. … We agree on important issues. … More Arab Americans are coming out in support of Trump.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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