Let’s start by looking at Dearborn and Michigan.

Joe Biden won Michigan in 2020 by a margin of less than 160,000 votes. In Dearborn, a city with a population of just over 100,000, more than half of the city’s residents identify as having Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) ancestry. The Arab and Muslim populations there, like most across the country, have traditionally voted largely blue. Four years ago, they helped get Biden elected.

This time, many of those voters felt alienated and resentful of the Democratic Party. In pre-election conversations, most Arab and Muslim voters I spoke to in Michigan said they would refuse to vote for Harris. Asked how they would feel if this helped Trump return to the White House, many would say it couldn’t get any worse. Like Dr. Ali Dabaja, a 43-year-old Lebanese-American critical care physician in southeast Michigan, who told me, “I don’t think it can get any worse than a genocide.”

In Hamtramckwhich is said to have become the first Muslim-majority US city just over a decade ago, Democrats went from Biden winning 85.4% of the vote in 2020 to Harris winning 46.2% of the vote in 2024.

In Wayne County, home to Dearborn, Hamtramck and neighboring Detroit, Biden secured a lead of more than 330,000 votes over Trump in 2020, more than twice the margin by which he won the state. The county, which is the most populous in Michigan, and also has the tallest the percentage of residents identifying as of Middle Eastern or North African descent in all US counties (7.8%), saw a 5.7% decline in Democratic vote share between 2020 and 2024. That’s 60,589 fewer votes, in a state Trump now won by a margin of less than 80,000 votes.

Micho Assi, a 40-year-old Lebanese-American from Dearborn, has worked as a Democratic community organizer for the past eight years. However, this time when he knocked on the door for Democrats, Assi said he didn’t have the guts or the guts to ask them to vote for Harris. “I tell them, ‘Use your own conscience who you want to vote for.’ Instead, she focused on getting voters to vote Democratic in down-ballot races in hopes of keeping the state legislature blue.

Like Assi, one in four MENAs in Michigan has Lebanese roots. Like her, many of them have friends, relatives and family members in Lebanon, even as the country continues to be attacked by Israel.