Arab American organizing built after the 2024 Gaza protest delivers wins from Michigan to Florida
Abbas Alawieh initially thought the uncommitted movement of 2024 had failed. The uncommitted ballot campaign, which he helped co-found, had gotten more than 700,000 Democrats to vote “uncommitted” on their 2024 presidential primary ballots to pressure the US government to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. But when the group pushed for the Democratic Party to add an embargo on arms to Israel in its platform, it did not happen, and a Palestinian American speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention was also a no-go.
“I decided: ‘Oh, actually, the only fix here is we have to take power away from those leaders who are misusing it,’” Alawieh said, speaking to The Guardian over Yemeni coffee in Dearborn, a city neighboring Detroit that, according to Arab American Institute figures, has the highest share of Arab immigrants in the country. Alawieh won the August Democratic nomination for a safely Democratic state senate seat and is favored to hold it in November.
Alawieh’s victory is one piece of a broader pattern in the 2026 Democratic primaries. The marquee result is the win by progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open US Senate seat. Alawieh and El-Sayed have also fielded calls and meetings with Kamala Harris in recent weeks, according to Razi Jafri, a journalist who covered the uncommitted movement in a documentary of the same name.
“We’ve seen a lot of leadership from the Arab American community [and] Muslim American community,” said Amirah Sequeira, director of federal affairs for the Working Families Party. She described that organizing as “extraordinarily important” to the 2026 primary victories.
The uncommitted strategy links what were traditionally considered Arab American concerns — primarily the war in Gaza — to broader progressive politics. The argument inside the coalition is that money spent on war means less for domestic social programs, and that issues like housing, healthcare and affordability are central to those communities as well.
“The genocide in Gaza has obviously exponentially increased involvement in politics” for Arab voters, as well as for progressives and young people, Sequeira said. But “issues of affordability, housing, healthcare are central to those communities as well,” she added.
Andy Levin, a former congressman who has mentored Alawieh, said the 2024 campaign had framed its message in explicitly electoral terms. “Our point was, President Biden, wake up. We need you to win re-election,” Levin said. “We just can’t see how you can win Michigan if you don’t change course on Gaza.”
The arithmetic the uncommitted organizers cited in 2024 is visible in the returns. In Michigan precincts with majority Arab voters, Harris took 31% of the presidential vote, compared with 47% of Arab voters nationally, according to the Arab American Institute. Third-party candidates took 20% of the vote in those same Michigan precincts, more than double the 8% they drew nationally. Maya Berry, the institute’s executive director, said the concentration of Arab voters in particular Michigan precincts made them easy targets for campaign advertising and candidate visits, and that the Trump campaign and third-party candidate Jill Stein had made stops in Dearborn while Democratic candidate visits lagged.
“It was a lack of leadership from the [Democratic] campaign to not engage at the level of the candidate when the other guy was showing up to have meals with people,” Berry said. It “was a night-and-day difference.”
The post-2024 organizing response has been concrete. Two other uncommitted co-founders, Layla Elabed and Lexis Zeidan, have since founded Arab Americans for Progress in metropolitan Detroit, which runs a fellowship program to train Arab American leaders and organizes door-knocking and mailers for candidates. Emgage Action, which lobbies Congress and endorses candidates addressing concerns of Arab Muslim voters, expanded its 2026 endorsements across 14 states including Michigan, Texas, Florida, New York and New Jersey.
Emgage organized canvassers, coordinated mailers and sent text messages for several of the year’s most notable progressive wins, according to Nada Al-Hanooti, the group’s national deputy organizing director. In Michigan, the list included Alawieh and El-Sayed, white progressive Will Lawrence, and state Representative Donavan McKinney, a Black Detroiter who defeated Representative Shri Thanedar in a safely Democratic district. In Florida, Emgage backed Angie Nixon, a state lawmaker who had been the lone backer of a ceasefire resolution in the Florida House in November 2023. Nixon defeated a former national security official to win the Democratic Senate nomination by 12 points, The Guardian reported. In New Jersey, Emgage said it turned out canvassers and reached Muslim voters by text to support Adam Hamawy, a Palestinian American doctor who won the Democratic nomination for the state’s 12th congressional district in a field of 13 candidates.
Al-Hanooti said Emgage’s strategy is to endorse candidates aligned with the group on policy, not identity alone. “Muslim issues are American issues,” she said. “We’re here to prove that you need our vote in order to win, and you need to start visiting our communities.”
The uncommitted movement’s trajectory now exemplifies a broader shift organizers describe as a transition “from representation alone to shaping politics and coalitions,” according to Jafri. “The 2024 presidential election showed that Arab American votes are up for grabs,” said Branden Snyder, organizing director for Michigan’s Working Families Party.
Michigan’s Arab American electorate has grown sharply over the past decade. The number of Arab residents grew 75% from 2010 to 2020, and the group now represents roughly 4% of the state’s electorate, mostly concentrated in metropolitan Detroit, according to the Arab American Institute.
The November contests will measure whether the coalition holds. Alawieh’s state senate seat is safely Democratic. The bigger tests are El-Sayed’s open US Senate seat in Michigan, Hamawy’s New Jersey congressional seat, and the down-ballot races where the same organizing infrastructure is deployed.