JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For many Americans in the Detroit Metro area, war in the Middle East thousands of miles away feels close to home. The city of Dearborn just outside Detroit has the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the country. The state of Michigan also hosts the largest Lebanese American community. And in recent weeks, war has expanded to places in Lebanon, including Beirut, where their families live. Well, our colleague Leila Fadel, co-host of Morning Edition, has been reporting from the state of Michigan, which could very well decide this year's election. Hey, Leila.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: So, Leila, starting in Dearborn - was that intentional?
FADEL: Yeah, it was. I mean, this community - Arab American, Muslim American community - is a really big question mark for both presidential candidates. And as you pointed out, it's a pretty significant population here, and they've reliably voted Democrat for a couple decades. But this year that might be different. Many here say they feel betrayed by this administration over the war in Gaza. There's still no cease-fire, which they've been calling for.
They've also been calling for the U.S. to condition aid to Israel over serious accusations of war crimes. In Israel's war against Hamas and Hezbollah, those accusations include indiscriminate killing of civilians and collective punishment, things Israel denies. And it feels particularly important today because it was exactly a year ago that Hamas carried out the deadliest attack in Israeli history that prompted the deadliest war in Palestinian history.
SUMMERS: Right. Leila, this group of voters that we're talking about, is it a big enough population to potentially swing an election?
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, it's possible. Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by something like 10,000 votes back in 2016. Polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck in Michigan. And I found that many voters here are just trying to figure out the right way to express their grief and anger over this war at the polls over the killing and displacement, in some cases, of their own family members abroad. So it's really fractured the community politically and turned many people we spoke with away from the Democrats. That became really clear when I met Samraa Luqman in a coffee shop in Dearborn. She's a Yemeni American community organizer.
SAMRAA LUQMAN: I have endorsed Trump, yes. And this is coming from somebody who wrote in Bernie Sanders in 2020. That's how far left I was.
SUMMERS: I mean, Leila, that's quite a turn there. She's endorsing a candidate who has promised to bring back a travel ban that is known conversationally as the Muslim ban.
FADEL: Yeah, and she's Muslim and endorsing him. And I should say Trump's also made it pretty clear he'd be even more staunchly behind this war than President Biden. On the trail, he's called on Israel to, quote, "finish the job," unquote, and criticized Harris and Biden for calling for a cease-fire. But Luqman says Harris and Biden to her are one and the same, and they've provided weapons for this yearlong war that's taken so much civilian life. So she's determined to punish the Democrats, she said. And she says whatever rights Trump limits domestically doesn't compare to a year's worth of death and destruction in Gaza.
SUMMERS: Interesting. What she's saying - is that a common sentiment that you found?
FADEL: No, not everyone is going the way of Luqman. A lot of people I spoke to think both candidates have shown they are fine with the level of civilian killing going on in both Gaza and Lebanon. So they're backing a third-party candidate, Jill Stein, or staying home. They say their lives just don't seem to matter to the two candidates who actually have a chance at winning.
SUMMERS: Leila, beyond Detroit and then Dearborn, have you been able to get out of the city alone?
FADEL: Yeah. My team and I spent some time in some of Michigan's smaller towns, and there's quite a bit of anxiety around how Election Day may play out after what happened in 2020, when Trump claimed without evidence that the election was stolen. Four years later, a lot of people still don't accept that it was a fair election. So they're on the lookout for fraud or suspicious activity. We went to a meeting for a group known as America First. It's a right-wing offshoot of the Republican Party. And a representative from the Trump campaign's election integrity team dropped by, and here's what he was telling the crowd.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: What I need are people on the ground. I need troops in the trenches. I need poll challengers. I need poll workers. We're going to do our bit to make sure that everything goes according to plan without a hitch.
SUMMERS: Leila, just how concerned are poll workers?
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, I spoke to a couple poll workers who are going to be at a tiny polling station, and they're a little nervous that it could get confrontational or ugly. And they are at a polling station that's pretty small, so they've thought about whether they can climb out of a window if something goes wrong.
SUMMERS: Well, looking forward to hearing your reporting all week on Morning Edition. That is NPR's Leila Fadel. Thank you.
FADEL: Thanks, Juana. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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