Consider This from NPR - How Conflict Can Influence Voters

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

This week marks a milestone in the presidential primary process. Fifteen states and one US Territory vote on Super Tuesday. This one day is the biggest delegate haul for candidates during the presidential primary season. The states voting on Super Tuesday include places with lots of Arab American voters, like Minnesota. Just last week, more than 13 percent of voters in Michigan's Democratic primary voted uncommitted. Many of those voters are Arab Americans who wanted to send Joe Biden a message about his support for Israel in the war in Gaza. The 2024 election is likely to be narrowly divided between President Joe Biden and Former President Donald Trump. The way the Biden administration handles conflicts abroad could have the power to shape the electorate here at home.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This week marks a milestone in the presidential election, when 15 states and one U.S. territory vote on Super Tuesday. This one day is the biggest delegate hall for candidates during the primary season. And the states voting on Super Tuesday include places with lots of Arab-American voters, like Minnesota. Just last week, more than 13 percent of voters in Michigan's Democratic primary voted uncommitted, many of them Arab-Americans who wanted to send Joe Biden a message about his support for Israel in the war in Gaza. The people who are dying, these are our family members and our friends, people who we know directly. You know, when I have a resident coming to my council meeting,

speaking to the fact that he lost 80 family members, that's personal for all of us. That's Abdullah Hamoud, mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, where three-quarters of Arab American voters cast Democratic ballots saying, uncommitted. Hamoud says the loss of lives in Gaza has caused deep pain in his community. And pain in that sense, but also pain due to betrayal. Betrayal by this president, betrayal by the administration, and betrayal by all those that are uplifting the most right-wing government in Israel's history

and continually supporting this genocide. Although President Biden hasn't directly addressed the protest votes out of Michigan, Mitch Landrieu, co-chair of the Biden campaign, told NPR the president knows the message voters were sending. He actually sent a team of high-ranking officials out to, of course, Michigan to talk to folks about the very difficult issue that the president and the United States is confronting in the war between Israel and Gaza. So that message has been received. This is not the first time U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts has shaped the way immigrants in the U.S. vote. There's a long history here. Take the Bush administration's so-called war on terror. My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of

military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders... After 9-11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Arab and Muslim Americans swung to Democrats, even in places like Dearborn that had supported Bush in 2000. Years before that, Ronald Reagan solidified Cuban-American support for the Republican Party by reminding them of the communist regime they left behind. Cuban-Americans understand perhaps better than many of their fellow citizens that freedom is not just the heritage of the people of the United States. It is the birthright of the people of this hemisphere. And sometimes these shifts can last long after the conflict began. In the case of Cuban-American voters,

the Republican tilt has endured for generations. Consider this. The 2024 election is likely to be narrowly divided between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. And the way the Biden administration handles conflicts abroad could have the power to shape the electorate here at home. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Tuesday, March 5th. It's Consider This from NPR. Most of the time, American voters don't cast their ballots based on foreign conflicts. But there is a long history of these events shaping the voting patterns of immigrant communities, like Cuban-Americans. My parents came over in 1961.

They didn't want to leave Cuba. They didn't have much choice because everything was changing overnight pretty much for them. Florida voter Annie Ruiz spoke to NPR ahead of the 2016 presidential election. You know, we need to maintain our rights. I think that whenever your rights are stripped away, your freedom is stripped away. And I saw that with my parents. Donald Trump, like other Republican candidates before him, spoke directly to Cuban-American voters when he campaigned in Florida. The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere and frankly in many,

many places around the world. Here's Trump speaking at a Florida rally in 2019. The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua and in Cuba as well. To understand what that history can teach us about the present day fight to win over Arab American voters, we reached Michael Bustamante. He's a professor of history at the University of Miami. So immigrants are not a monolith, but what can you broadly tell us about how much foreign policy tends to weigh on immigrant voters' minds when they cast ballots in the U.S.? Generally speaking, not that much. Polling that's been done, I think, pretty consistently shows that immigrants tend to think most about the issues that most Americans do, the economy, healthcare, gun violence, etc., where I think the dynamics can change is sort of in the midst of crisis moments, right? When there

is something happening in the country of origin that an immigrant is from, and that immigrant feels the United States should do something about it, that certainly has the greater chance to kind of impact their vote. But broadly speaking, foreign policy is not at the top of people's minds when they go to the ballot box. And so there are, I suppose, two questions about the Arab American vote today. One is, will this shape the way people cast their ballots in November? A second is, will this be a long-term generational shift? We don't know the answers to those questions right now, but you have studied a long-term generational shift in Cuban-American voters. I mean, this is a group

with a strong history of voting Republican. Can you tell us what the GOP did to win those votes initially in the 1960s and 70s? Yeah, the GOP were very strategic and effective,

I think, starting particularly in the mid-60s to the late 60s to sort of capitalize on what they argued were the Kennedy and Johnson administration' failures to unseat Castro. Cubans arriving in the United States in the 1960s arrived fleeing the Cuban Revolution. And ironically, perhaps while the Kennedy and Johnson administrations facilitated their entry through very generous refugee policies, Republicans sort of took advantage of a kind of a bitterness

that had settled in by the late 1960s that somehow the Democratic administrations hadn't very generous refugee policies, Republicans sort of took advantage of a kind of a bitterness that had settled in by the late 1960s that somehow the Democratic administrations hadn't been able to oust Castro and in fact had started to pay more attention to a conflict very, very far away in Vietnam. I mean, the irony is, of course, is that Republicans weren't successful either in this, and they haven't been. But somehow that narrative kind of stuck and it set in motion a long-term kind of party alignment that really congeals after Reagan's election. The long-term aspect of this is what I find so fascinating because even all these decades later, younger Cuban-Americans may be less likely than their parents to vote Republican, but they are still notably more conservative than other Latino groups in the U.S. So what keeps Cuban-American voters loyal, even when we're talking about voters who may never have lived in the country that their parents or grandparents came from?

Yeah, I mean, spend any time in Miami in the heart of the Cuban-American community, and in some sense, it's as if these things from 60 years ago had just happened yesterday. I mean, the stories, the legacies are kept alive. That sense of kind of inherited generational trauma is very, very strong. And so even when Cuban Americans who are born in the U.S. and didn't sort of experience Exxon migration or the Cuban revolution directly, they are growing up in a world where the experiences of their parents and grandparents are shaping their worldview. And that's where I think the long-term effect is so important, both for immigrants and their sort of U.S.-born descendants,

right? It's not so much that foreign policy is sort of at the top of the mind necessarily when people go to the ballot box, but it informs a broader worldview that immigrants and their descendants then map onto sort of their assessments of political choices in the United States. Any historical parallel is going to be imperfect. And there are lots of reasons that the story of Cuban-Americans may or may not map onto the story of Arab American voters today. But one big difference that stands out to me is that there are so many examples of American politicians fighting over Cuban voters and saying, I represent you. I'm waving the flag for the values that you align with. And the protest vote among Arab Americans right now doesn't seem like an opportunity that any other politician is taking advantage of.

It's not as though Donald Trump is out there saying how he would handle the situation in Gaza differently. Yeah, I think that is a key difference that, both political parties tend to have dominant positions that are, you know, more pro-Israel than they would like them to be, which leaves them in, you know, maybe a weaker position from the point of view of leverage. In the Cuban-American case, I mean, the Cuba policy issue has become a political football between Republicans and Democrats. And Republicans have built a very, very deep bench of political leaders from the community who are advancing that v. Gore election, which Bush won in Florida by a little over 500 votes, according to the official count, out of some 6 million votes cast, and that won him the presidency. I think it shows how few votes can actually swing a national

election right now. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen some comments coming from Democratic Party leadership in Michigan that suggest that they're not two-phased by the scale of the uncommitted vote. But there's plenty of examples in recent history where the margins have been really, really slim, razor sharp. And so I'd be wary of being sort of too callous about that, right? I think this vote does matter. It's certainly a shot across the bow for the Biden administration that I think they would do well to take into consideration. And so as someone whose research has focused on Cuban-American voters and the shift in their voting patterns, how worried do you think the Biden campaign needs to be

about the votes of Arab-American voters in 2024? And going forward, the Democratic Party needs to be about this voting group broadly. You know, I'm in less of a position to comment on the immediate implications for 2024. But I think you're right. The longer term implications here are as significant in terms of sort of sedimenting long term party alignments. I think in the case of the Arab American vote, given the lack of an alternative on the Republican side, what I worry about most is political disengagement, period. And that's not healthy for a democracy, you know, any way you cut it. So it's not that people are going to vote for Donald Trump who implemented an immigration ban affecting largely Muslim-majority countries over Joe Biden. It's that they're just not going to cast a vote at all. Yeah, I think that's the risk, that people will sit it out. And I think at Michigan, the question is how many never-Trumpers are just going to sit out a Trump v. Biden. And that's arithmetic that I certainly don't envy anyone having to try to calculate. That's Michael Bustamante, professor at the University of Miami and author of the book

Cuban Memory Wars. Thanks so much for your insights. Thank you. This episode was produced by Janaki Mehta with audio engineering by Maggie Luthar. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.