In the year of Trump, Arab-American voters are moving away from Republican Party | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Once solidly Republican, Arab-Americans have transformed in recent years into a majority-Democratic bloc that will vote overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, a change that carries weight in battleground districts with large Arab-American communities, according to a poll released Tuesday.

“You can say we are not unlike Hispanic voters. We identify as 2-to-1 Democrat and we vote 3-to-1 Democrat – that’s a significant shift,” said Jim Zogby, co-founder and president of the Arab American Institute, which commissioned the poll. He has family ties to the polling house that did the survey, Zogby Analytics

The political effects of such a change are evident in demographic data that show more than two-thirds of Arab-Americans are concentrated in 10 states, including such electoral battlegrounds such as Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio.

“Nationally, yes, the numbers might be very small,” said Amaney Jamal, a Princeton University politics professor who researches Arab and Arab-American political engagement, noting that Arab-Americans are estimated to number from 2 million to nearly 4 million. “But they are very critical in some of these swing states.”

The poll shows other changes that analysts say reflect a political climate of heightened anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hostility. Arab-Americans are more attuned to their ethnic identities, increasingly worried that they’ll face discrimination and more supportive of social-justice issues such as police reform and citizenship for immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, the survey found.

Still, like any other minority voting bloc, there are sharp differences, too, including on presidential picks. While the majority of Arab-Americans – 60 percent – supports Clinton, 26 percent favor her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. And the survey makes it clear that Clinton isn’t the runaway favorite among Arab-Americans – a third of those planning to vote for Clinton said “voting against Trump was their primary reason.” In the Trump camp, 32 percent cited “opposition to Clinton” as their main motivation.

They each received single-digit marks among Arab-American voters for likability as a primary factor of support.

The poll was conducted Oct. 4 to 12 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Other notable findings include:

– Half of all Arab-Americans say they’ve personally experienced discrimination based on ethnicity or country of origin; 62 percent are concerned about future discrimination.

– Nearly 8 out of 10 Arab-Americans who are Muslim say they’re worried about discrimination.

– Arab-Americans from both parties cite “jobs and the economy” as their biggest concern.

– Sixty-two percent agree that “policing needs to be reformed, but not radically.”

– Ninety-one percent of Arab-Americans say they’re likely to vote on Nov. 8.

A complex, nuanced set of factors is behind those figures, according to Arab-American activists and political analysts.

Arab-Americans aren’t homogenous. The majority descended from a first wave of mostly Christian immigrants who came generations ago, but Muslims – roughly 30 percent of the total – make up the fastest-growing segment of the community, according to the Arab American Institute.

Some political divisions among Arab-Americans linger as holdovers from messy, sometimes violent schisms in ancestral nations such as Lebanon or Iraq. Other divergences are the same as those in the wider American electorate; for example, conservative Arab-Americans of both Christian and Muslim backgrounds might lean Republican because of their staunch opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and other polarizing issues.

What’s most surprising to the pollsters and analysts are the commonalities among the disparate factions as they continue what Zogby called a “steady migration” away from the Republican Party. He said the shift, accelerated by the recent surge of anti-immigrant rhetoric, had its roots in the aftermath of 9/11, when “the incendiary rhetoric coming from Republicans, and the policies – the national registration, the deportations, the total insensitivity on the Palestinian issue, and the war – all combined to produce a hostile climate.”

The result, analysts say, is that Arab-Americans are emerging as a Democratic force that’s more politically engaged and, especially in the case of Arab-American millennials, more likely to mobilize around and support causes such as Black Lives Matter and a path to citizenship for law-abiding immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.

Jamal, the Princeton politics professor, said sociologists called the phenomenon “negative reaction formation.” In other words, she said, people cling to their ethnic or religious identities when they feel they’re under attack. For U.S.-born Arab-Americans, she said, that means a departure from their assimilation-minded parents’ or grandparents’ approach of playing down – or even hiding – their ethnic identities.

“The second generation that was born here – that say, ‘I’m a proud American. I have rights’ – they’re much more inclined to assert their Americanness through identity. They’re not going to cower and hide their identity – they’re going to claim their identity.”