In Dearborn, Michigan, dubbed the ‘capital of Arab America’, residents gathered for an Election Night watch party to be with each other rather than root for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon lost the Democrats a once loyal Arab American vote base, leaving the political and watch parties bereft of punch.

There were bright lights, colourful balloons, plenty of people, tons of food – all the trappings of a party. But there was no celebratory spirit from start to finish.

At an Election Night watch party in a sprawling food court in Dearborn, Michigan, residents ate, chatted, but didn't spend much time watching the TV screens displaying the 2024 election results coming in from across the country.

Dearborn is the largest Arab-majority city in the US, with nearly 54% of the 110,000-strong population identifying as having Middle Eastern or North African ancestry, many of them of Lebanese and Palestinian origins.

The Arab-American vote in these parts was once solidly Democrat.

But Israel’s brutal wars in Gaza and Lebanon have shattered the American Arab “blue wall”, with many enraged over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the Middle East crisis.

This year, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was off the ballot-menu for many of the people at the grand Election Night watch party organised in Dearborn’s sprawling The Canteen premises.

Donald Trump was not a favoured candidate either after his tumultuous first term in office, which saw the imposition of a “Muslim ban”, that barred US entry to citizens of several Muslim-majority countries.

The term watch “party” was a bit of a misnomer, acknowledged Ali Dabaja, a physician.

“For many Arab and Muslim Americans, this is a very difficult and sombre time for us. We're not coming here to party at a watch party. I'm not coming here to celebrate,” he explained.

Dewnya Bazzi, an attorney of Lebanese origins, said she was not rooting for any of the two main party presidential candidates. She was simply attending the party to be with like-minded people for the night.

“I felt like I wanted to be around people in my community tonight,” said Bazzi. “We were supposed to be sitting at home actually, watching it on the TV, and I was like, you know, let's go. Let me get a babysitter and let's go. I just wanted to be around people in our community, just to take the edge off a bit because I think it's a really nervous time for everyone.”

That, according to watch party organiser Hassan Chami, was the purpose of the event.

“People are just comfortable being around each other, but no one's going to celebrate regardless of who wins. No one's going to celebrate, you know,” said Chami.

‘I'm not rooting for anyone to win’

As the night wore on, with Trump picking up key, electoral college-rich states, Zainab Shami admitted to feeling “sombre”.

Smiling ruefully as competing TV screens above her relayed CNN and Fox News, Shami settled for the words “unexcited” and “hopeless” to capture her mood.

“Honestly, I just don’t know. I'm at a loss for words. I'm not rooting for anyone to win. I'm just hoping Kamala Harris loses. I don't even want Trump to win. But, you know, I want Harris to lose,” she said.

The 40-year-old schoolteacher said she was long frustrated by the US two-party political system and its “broken” electoral college votes. The latter system, which gives an undue advantage to voters in swing states, made Shami’s vote particularly powerful since Michigan, with 15 electoral votes, was a battleground state in a tight race.

In the 2016 race, Hillary Clinton lost Michigan to Trump by only 10,000 votes. Four years later, the Arab American vote turned out overwhelmingly for President Joe Biden, with the Democrat winning Michigan in 2020 by 150,000 votes. In Dearborn itself, Biden won 74.2% of the vote to Trump's 24.2%. 

By the end of his presidential term though, Biden had lost the support of this community.

As Biden appeared deaf, month after month, to repeated calls from protesters to link the continuation of US military aid to Israel to getting ceasefires in the Gaza and Lebanon conflict, the US president earned a new moniker in these parts: “Genocide Joe”.

Israel strenuously denies allegations that it is conducting a genocide in Gaza or targeting a specific community, the Shiites, in Lebanon.

But Shami has skin, literally, in the conflict and has little patience for Biden’s or Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s assertions.

Born in the US to parents who migrated from southern Lebanon, Shami has elderly aunts and uncles who have lost their homes, medical clinics, workplaces, and have been forced to flee the latest Israeli bombardments.

“I'm a natural born American citizen. But being somebody who has roots elsewhere, I understand what it’s like to care about people in another part of the world,” said Shami.

As the hours ticked by, and a second Trump presidency looked inevitable, Bazzi acknowledged that there could be a backlash, or misunderstanding, from some in the left against people like her, who opted to vote for a third-party candidate or skip the presidential race section of their ballots.

“We have seen a Trump administration before, and I'm not going to lie, I'm visibly Muslim,” said the attorney who wears a headscarf. “You could see it and we felt it during the Trump times, in terms of hatred and racism. But honestly, at least we weren't being slaughtered at that time, right? So it’s like we’re going to face that hatred here, as US citizens, in a country that will hopefully protect us based on the laws while we're watching our families and friends get slaughtered overseas.

"If Trump does come into office, I'll take that backlash all day and bear that on my shoulders instead of seeing my family and friends get slaughtered overseas,” she said.

With a new dawn a few hours away, Albert Abbas, who voted for Trump, said he was feeling hopeful about the old-new president.

“He gives us a glimmer of hope. He's spoken about ending the wars and guaranteeing the end of the wars on his first day of office in regards to Lebanon and Gaza,” he said.

Abbas had the opportunity to meet Trump days before the November 5 Election Day, when the Republican candidate made a pit stop on Friday in Dearborn and met community members at a restaurant, The Grand Commoner, which is owned by his brother.  

“You know politicians speak all the time and they'll tell you what you want to hear. And then they'll go say something somewhere else on what the other population wants to hear,” he said. “But the fact that he gave us that glimmer of hope, that one percent chance for our people to survive in Gaza and in Lebanon, you know, it forced us to open the doors to him.”