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Islam’s advocates are using their mosque networks to maximize voter turnout in favor of Democratic candidates in Michigan, Texas, and other states.
“You need to vote for candidates that represent your interests and our interests … especially in the battle states of Texas and Michigan,” said Yasir Qadhi, an apparent top U.S. leader of the dominant Muslim Brotherhood faction among U.S. mosques.
Qadhi (pictured), who is based in Texas, said via X on October 29:
It is our ethnic duty, it is our civic duty, it is our religious duty to go and support those candidates and choose those that represent the best of our interests … We are undergoing perhaps the most important election season, perhaps of our entire lifetimes, and it is imperative that we, as Muslims of this country, as American Muslims, we avail ourselves to the same rights, the same privileges, the same sense of civic engagement and civic duty as everybody else.
He added: “And so, today, tomorrow, pray jumma [midday prayer, usually at a mosque] and go to vote for the ummah,” which is the Arabic term for the worldwide political society of Islam.
In the 2026 election, Muslims’ hopes for a Senate seat are rising. On November 1, Activist Wajahat Ali posted on X:
If, God forbid, Abdul [Mohamed El-Sayed] loses, this will be a watershed moment in Democratic politics. The fire will rise. It’s over. People will be radicalized against corporate, pro-Israel Dems. There will be a reckoning. If, when, he wins, it will be a watershed moment. And that reckoning will still come.
For more than 100 years, many ethnic and religious groups in the United States have organized themselves to participate in politics. In the early 1900s, for example, Mayor Michael Curley mobilized organized Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans against establishment political groups. Irish voters also organized themselves into ethnic blocs in New York, Chicago, and many other cities, often with the aid of Catholic clerics.
The ethnic blocs gradually died out because Congress stopped immigration in 1924. Subsequently, politics shifted to a left vs. right economic split, represented by the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Since immigration restarted in the 1970s, the long period of economic-class politics has largely been supplemented and sometimes overshadowed by fights over religion and civics, abortion, the environment, racial equality, transgenderism, and, increasingly, by the debates over the economic and civic impact of mass migration.
For example, the huge inflow of migrants welcomed after 1990 by Congress has revived ethnic identity politics in many cities and states, such as California and Minneapolis. In Boston, for example, Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu leads a diversity coalition of Democrats, immigrants, and other minorities that often adopts self-serving policies harmful to ordinary Americans.
Nationwide, the huge post-2001 influx of Muslims has naturally created a new wave of unprecedented Islamic activists and candidates in the United States. The beneficiaries include Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, who gained greatly from high turnout by Muslim groups in New York, as well as progressives who expect Muslim voters to boost their Red/Green political coalition.
The Muslim vote is especially important in low-turnout elections and in close districts, because they are more likely to vote than other Americans.
In 2025, “There’s one block [in New York] that was 75 percent Trump last November and this time Mamdani won it with a plurality because all the Pakistani Muslims in the neighborhood voted for [Mamdani],” New York magazine reported in 2025.
Muslim turnout can be very high because Islam mandates a central role for mosques and clerics in Muslims’ commingled social, civic, and political lives.
In the 2026 election, Muslims groups likely have the ideology, money, and organization needed to win elections, especially in close races. For example, the well-funded Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) posted an October 30 statement urging a high turnout among Muslim voters: “We urge every eligible Muslim voter to visit Muslims.Vote today and make a specific plan to cast their ballot.”
The jihadi-linked group claimed to have reached roughly 250,000 voters in 10 states via texts. The Muslims.Vote site claims there are a total of 2.5 million Muslim voters in the United States.
An October 28 statement from CAIR claimed that a late October survey of 861 Muslims showed that Muslim voters are very agitated about Israel’s defense against terror attacks:
Gaza and Iran: 89% say a candidate’s Gaza position is extremely or very important to their vote, 87% oppose the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, and 81% want Congress to block renewed military action against Iran.
“72% plan to support Democrats and 6% Republicans in their state’s November election,” the statement claimed.
“Voting isn’t everything, but it also isn’t nothing,” said Omar Suleiman, a Muslim cleric and a member of the Ethics Center Advisory Board at Southern Methodist University. He added: “Especially when politicians think they can score points by picking on our community. If you can, get out and vote early. Texas & Michigan, I especially mean you!”
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