Musaiba Mubarak isn’t the biggest fan of Joe Biden, but she’s putting her heart into getting every last Muslim voter to cast a ballot for him anyway. “I’m not satisfied with the Democratic candidate,” she says. “But I’m doing everything I can to get Trump out of office.”
Mubarak, who is Muslim, isn’t alone in her sentiments. A recent CAIR poll found that just 18% of Muslim voters support Donald Trump, while 71% say they back Biden. But that disparity hardly guarantees that Muslims will vote for Biden in droves: the former Vice President will only benefit from his opponent’s dismal popularity if he can convince Muslim voters, some of whom feel disengaged by the Biden campaign, to go through the trouble of casting a ballot.
Turn-out matters: while Muslim Americans make up just about 1% of the U.S. population, the community carries outsized weight in several swing states, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and, of course, Michigan, where Trump won by less than 11,000 votes in 2016. He hosted a campaign rally in Lansing, Mich., on Tuesday.
