Why a small Democratic stronghold in Detroit is deserting Kamala Harris for Donald Trump

On the Saturday afternoon that Donald Trump held his Butler-revival rally in Pennsylvania, a small gathering of supporters met to enjoy the event in the newly opened Republican office in Hamtramck, an enclave of 28,000 in population and Democratic stronghold in the northern suburbs of Detroit with an estimated 60 per cent being Muslim-American.
Hamtramck made local political history by electing an all-Muslim city council and its mayor, Amer Ghalib, generated both support and alarm when he announced, in late September, that he was endorsing Trump for president.
In an interview with Detroit broadcast news anchor Carolyn Clifford, the mayor explained he had reached his decision after repeated overtures from the Trump campaign.
“They came to me in my office and visited me multiple times. When I requested a personal meeting, he [Trump] didn’t hesitate in sending me an official invitation. We have high hopes that he will end the chaos in the Middle East like he said and end the wars around the world. And he promised he will take our concerns into consideration and do his best to solve them. Hopefully it will be fruitful, and we will see a positive outcome.”
The feel-good factor of the office opening that Saturday might have been slightly dampened by some of Trump’s musings over in sunny Butler. Reflecting on the theme of illegal immigration, Trump said at one point: “A lot of people are coming from Yemen – and they are known terrorists.” Ghalib is an immigrant from Yemen and Hamtramck’s Jos Campau Avenue has a rich variety of Yemeni restaurants and cafes. The transformation of a neighbourhood that had, for the 20th century, been resolutely Polish is one of the classic American city stories of urban reinvention.
“It used to be Polish town,” says Assad Zamzami in explaining the transformation he witnessed.
“And then Yemeni people started to move here and one or two restaurants opened and they wanted to be around that. And Albanians and Bosnians were coming here but then started moving to different states and north of here. The Polish started to sell and moved to nice areas, getting better houses. So, the Yemenis stayed.”
A walk down Jos Campau on a drizzly and barren Sunday makes for a quick trip through starkly different cultures: the top half of the street is entirely populated by Yemeni and Bangladeshi stores before it changes, after Eveline Street, to its first incarnation, with the Polish Art Center and Bozek’s Market and Kowalski Sausage Co.
The transformation of Hamtramck in the years after the Dodge Main assembly plant opened there in 1914 is astounding: what had been a village of 3,500 people was a city of 56,000 just 15 years later. City banners hanging off the street poles read: All the World in Two Square Miles, which seems about right. A black and white photo in the local museum depicts the place in its automotive glory days of the 1940s, when Jos Campau was a riot of flashy signs for Pontiac, Chevrolet, Dodge and Plymouth.
Zamzami is from Yemen and has lived in Detroit for 30 years, having left his home as it moved towards civil war. His first experience in the city coincided, he feels, with the last flush of good and easily secured jobs with General Motors and Chrysler, before the automotive industry crisis really took hold. For years, he worked as a long-haul truck driver, but his company recently went bankrupt after its exports were badly affected by unrest in the Middle East. A father of five, he is concerned about his mortgage repayments and routine bills, and he understands the decision by Ghalib to publicly throw his influence behind the Republican candidate.
“The problem is we all were Democrat for a long time. And I found that if you voted for a Democratic government you got nothing from them. You got words and then no respect. Nothing changed in the neighbourhood. Trump keeps saying he is going to stop the war and make America great again. And to be honest when he was president the gas was cheaper. He is a businessman.
“I am not going to say he is really good. Nobody is perfect. He made some mistakes and said some crazy, racist words. But we need something better on the ground for our kids and for the local economy. We don’t want to work, work, work and then have nothing. We need more jobs to support our family. We don’t want to hear about overtime and double time. This lady [Kamala Harris] – she is going to keep it the same. We don’t need no words with all the same results. And who will stop the genocide in Gaza?”
For all of that, Zamzami still places himself among the undecided voters: when he speaks, it is as though he is listening and hoping for a clearer message from the Harris campaign that they are willing to pay more than lip-service to the horrors visited daily on Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon.
In January 2017, hundreds of locals held a rally outside Hamtramck City Hall to protest against executive orders issued by then president Trump banning travel to the United States from seven countries with large Muslim populations. To move from that moment to an official endorsement of Trump by the city mayor is an extreme shift.
Hamtramck, with its relatively small population, will not definitively swing Michigan but it is a perfect snapshot of the turmoil Arab-Americans have wrestled with for the past year. Macomb and Oakland counties are close to Detroit and are homes to almost half of Michigan’s Arab-American community of 300,000.
Dearborn, in Wayne County, has been a magnet for Arab-Americans who moved there to work for the Ford factory in the 1920s. Estimates vary that anything from 55 per cent to 70 per cent of its population, of 110,000, identify as Arab-American. In February, Joe Biden’s defeat in the Democratic primaries in Dearborn, when the majority of participants voted ”uncommitted”, was a clear warning to the Democratic Party of local rage and frustration at the unequivocal support the Biden administration has shown to Israel. The belief, three weeks out from the election, is that nothing has changed.
“Biden, he gave Israel the green light,” says Zamzami.
“It is not just Gaza. We have a lot of tax money going to Ukraine to support their war too. And I know a lot of people – children and old women – are dying there too and we don’t want to see no blood in the world. All those weapons going to Ukraine, where does it come from? They put their nose everywhere. And if this guy [Trump] can stop the wars …”
It is reported that Ghalib, the mayor, sent a message to Trump’s campaign team to seek clarification for the remarks made in Butler. In the days afterwards, three Hamtramck city council members – Mohammed Alsomiri, Mohammed Hassan and Muhith Mahmood – endorsed Kamala Harris after Trump’s remarks.
“Unless he makes a statement about what he said in Pennsylvania, then many are not going to vote for him,” Hassan told Michigan’s Arab American News this week.
There was some expectation that Trump would grace Hamtramck with a visit last week after his speaking engagement at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday, an address that stretched for some two hours. Optimistic volunteers placed signs and posters outside the Republican office that morning.
But word came through later on Thursday that Trump would not be calling by.