It’s panic time in the Kamala Harris campaign and the media.
Battlegrounds the Left thought Kamala Harris put away are back in play.
And a blue state will flip red for this reason that no one saw coming.
Michigan slips away from Kamala Harris thanks to backlash by Muslim voters
Michigan – along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – make up the fabled “blue wall.”
The blue wall is made up of states in the Rust Belt that Democrats tend to carry every election, except for when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Kamala Harris jumped out to a lead in the blue wall states when she replaced Joe Biden.
But while voters may have initially been curious about Kamala Harris, they didn’t like what they saw as she campaigned.
Quinnipiac’s latest poll out of Michigan had Donald Trump up four points.
Atlas Intel – the most accurate pollster in 2020 – found Trump leading Kamala Harris by three in Michigan.
One of the big red flags for Kamala Harris is the defection of Muslim voters from the Democrat Party in protest over the war in Gaza.
There are 300,000 Muslims in Michigan.
Joe Biden winning 69% of this vote was critical to the 154,000 vote margin in Michigan four years ago.
A poll from the Council on Islamic Relations of Muslim voters in Michigan found 40% backing Green Party candidate Jill Stein, 18% supporting Donald Trump, and just 12% saying they will cast a ballot for Kamala Harris.
NBC News correspondent Yasmin Vossoughian tried to measure just how strong the anti-Kamala sentiment was among Michigan voters.
Muslim voters open to Trump
Vossoughian conducted a focus group with four Muslim Michigan voters.
One said they were open to voting for Trump.
“It’s possible. It’s definitely not Bide-uh-Harris, that’s for sure,” one man told Vossoughian.
When Vossoughian asked about Kamala Harris, she got a much different response.
“Who is voting for Kamala Harris here?” Vossoughian wondered.
Not a single hand went up.
“Absolutely no?” Vossoughian asked.
“No,” one of the men told her. “Not possible.”
“There’s nothing she can do or say for us to change our mind,” a woman in the focus group stated.
But the openness to voting for Trump among Muslims in Michigan extended beyond the unpopular war in Gaza.
Reporter Reena Ninan told CNNs Abby Phillip that in her conversations with Muslim members of the business community, many longed for a return to the days of Donald Trump’s economy where inflation and taxes were low.
“The business sector in the Arab-American community and I was really surprised to get an earful. To hear them say that they would much rather either vote a third party, not vote at all, or vote for Donald Trump,” Ninan began.
Like Vossoughian with her focus group, Ninan said she couldn’t find a single Muslim she knew that was voting for Kamala Harris.
“And I’m telling you, it’s not obviously a significant sample size, but I cannot find one Arab American within my social circle, in business or personally, who have said that they will vote for Kamala Harris. When you look at the polling, it seems sort of neck and neck what they are saying,” Ninan added.
Ninan revealed that an unsung hero in the Trump campaign’s outreach was Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, who is a prominent Lebanese businessman.
“And this is not a Donald Trump campaign line that Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, who is a Lebanese businessman, has been successful in kind of converting and talking to people to explain why Trump would be better even with a Muslim ban, even with everything else that has happened, they feel, they do not have any political clout, they don’t have any political operation, the only political power they have is their vote, even if it means, revising, that’s extraordinary,” Ninan declared.
