Hillary Clinton, Michigan and Arab-Americans

Quoted in the Independent by Robert Fisk, Nick Noe thinks that Clinton might have won the election, or at least done better in states like Michigan, had she put more effort into courting Arab voters:

Nicholas Noe was Hillary’s senior man in Michigan, the beating heart of 186,000 residents who claim Arab ancestry. Noe also lives in Beirut where he runs Middle East Wire, which translates the Arab media, and writes long – sometimes over-wordy but often all too accurate – analyses of the Arab world. “We lost Michigan with its 16 electoral votes – and we lost it by a little more than 10,000 votes,” Noe says. “We were never able to get Hillary herself in front of the Arab community to listen to them. She went to Detroit but she never came to see this community – even though she was nearby.”

It’s easy to think that Hillary, whose sense of entitlement never stopped her currying up to the wealthiest or most powerful lobby groups in Washington and New York, was frightened of offending the pro-Israeli lobby and thus avoided Dearborn and its residents’ questions on "Palestine" and Israel. But so far as Noe is concerned, “most pundits believed that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric would be sufficient to give the Arab-American vote to Hillary – but they needed to hear from the candidate herself.”

Who knows how much difference this might have made – the Arab-American vote is far from united and often goes Republican – but this kind of thing reinforces my view that Clinton was not only the wrong candidate for the Democrats, but also ran a poor campaign.