One Poll Suggests Arab-Americans’ Politics Are Similar To Other Minority Voters’

At FiveThirtyEight we process thousands of polls each year so we can power our election forecasts. While this gives us a general understanding of the opinions of the U.S. population in the aggregate, some groups are less surveyed than others. Take Arab-Americans: Most national polls don’t reach a large enough sample of Arab-Americans to reliably measure what their political beliefs are.

But Tuesday a poll crossed the FiveThirtyEight polling desk that helped shed some light on their beliefs. A survey by the Arab American Institutethat concentrated wholly on Arab-Americans showed that like other minority populations, they are mostly identifying as Democrats. Arab-Americans are, however, by no means a homogenous voting bloc. The poll of Arab-Americans shows many of the same partisan trends that we see in nationwide polls of all Americans, as you can see in this chart from the poll that shows Arab-American party identification:

 

Despite Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric towards minority populations and immigrants, such as his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., 77 percent of Arab-Americans who identified as Republican in this poll responded that they would vote for Trump. (Thirty percent of the 502 respondents self-identified as Muslim.) Sixty-two percent of Arab-Americans said that they are concerned about facing discrimination because of their ethnicity or country of origin. The number was even higher (78 percent), among Muslim Arab-Americans.

FULL ARTICLE FROM FIVETHIRTYEIGHT