Muslims, The 2026 Midterms And America’s Political Future
(ANALYSIS) It’s a fact that surprises people who don't follow the data and history very closely: Throughout the 1990s and even in the 2000 presidential election, a majority of Muslim Americans voted Republican. George W. Bush won a plurality of the Muslim vote that year, drawing support from a community that skewed socially conservative, entrepreneurial and open to the GOP’s messaging on family values and free enterprise.
Twenty-five years later, that alignment has flipped almost entirely. Polling consistently shows Muslim Americans now voting for Democratic candidates by lopsided margins. What drove Muslim voters away from the Republican Party and the ideological currents that have made parts of the American political left receptive to framing Islam, and Muslim political identity more broadly, through the lens of anti-colonial struggle.
Muslim Americans’ dramatic swing from a Republican-leaning bloc in 2000 to a reliably Democratic one today was driven by two converging forces — concrete grievances over post-9/11 security policy and a longer-running anti-colonial framework on the American left that pulled it toward a party increasingly willing to see Muslim political identity through that lens.
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The turning point was 9/11 and its aftermath. In the years that followed, Muslim Americans experienced a wave of government scrutiny and public suspicion that reshaped their relationship with the Republican Party, which controlled the White House and pursued the most aggressive of the post-9/11 security policies.
The PATRIOT Act’s expanded surveillance powers, the NYPD’s since-discontinued monitoring of Muslim neighborhoods and the FBI’s use of informants inside mosques were direct personal intrusions. The 2016 presidential election compounded this shift. Donald Trump’s proposal for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration was later implemented in a narrower form as a travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries.
Immigration and colonialism
Alongside these security and immigration concerns, foreign policy has remained a persistent flashpoint. Many Muslim American voters, whose family and religious ties to the Middle East, weigh U.S. foreign policy toward Muslim-majority countries and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as significant factors in their political choices — an issue set where they’ve often found themselves more aligned, albeit imperfectly, with the Democratic Party’s left flank.
Domestic policy priorities have reinforced this shift. Muslim Americans are a genuinely diverse community spanning South Asian, Arab, African American and other backgrounds. Polling shows they hold progressive views on issues like universal healthcare, economic inequality and criminal justice reform — priorities that align more with the current Democratic platform than with the GOP.
The second part is what comes from Muslim political identity seen through an anti-colonial lens. Since the 1970s, a strain of left-wing political thought — influenced by postcolonial theory — has framed the modern Muslim world’s political grievances as a direct legacy of European colonialism and decades of American intervention in the Middle East.
The conflicts, from Gaza to Iraq, are read primarily through a continuation framework of imperial domination rather than as freestanding religious or regional disputes. Under that framework, Muslim communities — both abroad and within Western nations — are cast as populations still contending with the afterlife of colonial subjugation. As a result, solidarity with Muslim causes becomes an extension of a broader anti-imperialist politics that also encompasses movements in Latin America and Africa.
Taken together, the political realignment of Muslim Americans and the American left’s anti-colonial reading of Islam are related. They’ve given birth to a political realignment that has led to the election of a new generation of several prominent Muslim Americans within the Democratic Party in the past few years.
Upcoming 2026 midterms
That realignment is no longer theoretical heading into the 2026 midterms — it’s on the ballot. A growing bench of Muslim American candidates, many of them younger, foreign-policy-minded progressives who came of age politically during the Iraq War or the more recent Gaza conflict, are running in districts from Michigan to Minnesota to New York, positioning themselves explicitly within the Democratic Party’s left flank rather than its center.
Their campaigns test whether the coalition that formed in reaction to the past 25 years can hold together as an organized political bloc rather than a loose demographic trend. That test cuts in more than one direction. Some veteran Democrats have grown wary of candidates who lean heavily on this anti-imperialist framing, worried it complicates the party’s broader coalition on issues tied to Israel where Democratic voters remain far more divided than the activist wing of the party.
Muslim American candidates who center that framing risk winning primaries built on energized, ideologically aligned turnout while still facing a harder path in general elections or within a caucus that doesn't share the same reading of foreign policy. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has shown little sign of trying to win back the voters it lost after 2001. Immigration restrictionism and hawkish rhetoric toward Muslim-majority countries remain more electorally useful to the GOP base than any renewed outreach to Muslim American voters would be.
Barring any sudden shifts, the Democratic Party’s hold on Muslim American voters is more likely to solidify than erode in the near term, even amid internal disagreements about how central the anti-colonial framework should be to the party’s future messaging.
Clemente Lisi serves as executive editor at Religion Unplugged.