Another 2024 Election Surprise: US Muslims (Also) Shifted Republican
(ANALYSIS) Among the little-noticed aspects of the 2024 U.S. election is Muslims’ substantial 33% vote for Donald Trump — with a remarkable 42% backing from those who attend mosque weekly.
In past elections, Muslims overall gave Trump a dismal 9% in 2020, 22% in his 2016 win, 13% for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 and 6% for John McCain in 2008. Political scientist Ryan Burge draws those numbers from the authoritative Cooperative Election Study (CES) in a July 28 post.
The two parties differed little on the Israeli-Gaza war during the 2024 campaign, so that may not have been a factor (Jews’ customary Democratic loyalty held steady at 65%). CES reported that Muslims maintain their traditional Democratic identification at 50%, versus 27% Republican and 22% independent.
That differs from Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, which like CES had a huge sample that allowed breakdowns for Muslims. Pew’s Muslim split was 53% Democratic or leaning Democratic vs. 42% Republican or leaning Republican and 6% identified with neither party.
Is this Muslim jolt a fluke or an emerging political shift? Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris also involved noteworthy gains with Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants, Black Protestants and Asian-American Protestants, as Religion Unplugged analyzed last month.
Muslims have turned into a significant U.S. minority since 1965, when a bipartisan immigration act abolished national quotas that had favored Europeans. The 2020 Religion Census counts 4.454 million Muslims (and 2,771 mosques), compared with 4.9 million in the 2020 edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, 4.05 million per Pew Research and a four million estimate at IslamiCity.org. (Some bigger past numbers presumably counted Christians with Arabic surnames).
Burge is properly cautious about the CES scenario because polling of Muslims is so difficult. Even CES’s vast total of 60,000 respondents yielded only 464 Muslims. But he says our best available numbers indicate a Muslim migration from “deep blue to a much more purple hue.”
Will Muslim voters make a difference? CES reported that 59% of Muslims voted for president last November, compared with only 19% in 2020 and 22% in 2016. However, Muslims are thin on the ground across most of America. The Religion Census shows they are 2% or more of the population in only 9 of 50 states. The four largest concentrations are in normally non-competitive Democratic strongholds: Illinois (Muslims at 3.7% of the population), New York (3.6%), New Jersey (3.5%) and Maryland (3.1%).
But one swing state, Michigan, is in fifth place at 2.4% Muslim and potentially significant. Harris came just over 80,000 votes short of beating Trump there, and would be president today if she’d have also overcome Trump’s narrow margins in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (both 1% Muslim). The U. S. Census lists Michigan with 241,828 Muslims, in 127 mosques, concentrated in Detroit and nearby counties (though that includes children, non-citizens, and other non-voters). The other states with 2% or higher Muslim populations are heavily Democratic Massachusetts and Minnesota, and politically competitive Arizona and Virginia.
Muslims could possibly be drifting from the Democratic Party due to less affinity on contentious “culture wars.” Pew Research reports that Muslims by 55% think society should discourage homosexuality, and 55% want to let schoolteachers lead classroom prayers.
At the same time, these findings come as Zohran Mamdani — a 33‑year‑old Democratic Socialist — won the New York City Democratic mayoral nomination this past June in a stunning upset over Andrew Cuomo. His platform emphasized affordability such as free buses, rent freezes, city-run grocery stores and taxing the wealthy
A Muslim, Mamdani engaged with immigrant communities through mosque outreach and made his heritage — in addition to his support for Gaza — central to his campaign. Nationally, his rise signals a left‑leaning generational shift within the Democratic Party, challenging establishment centrism and potentially inspiring progressive activism across the U.S.
Mamdani’s support, however, comes largely from younger voters, regardless of their faith or lack of one. Burge, for example, cites the 2020-21 Nationscape survey from UCLA and partners where Muslim Democrats, when compared with Democrats as a whole, were 22% higher in supporting a total abortion ban, 22% higher in opposing transgender soldiers, 23% higher against legalizing marijuana, 25% higher in favoring school vouchers, 15% higher in believing all illegal immigrants should be deported and 16% higher in backing Trump’s border wall.
This journalist must once again underscore that our generation’s key religious change is none of the above, but rather the consolidation of white Catholics’ Republican majority. That occurred alongside white evangelical Protestants’ traditional G.O.P. support, which has grown ever more lopsided since 1968.
The flip side to religion groups’ Republican trend is highlighted in Burge’s Aug. 4 column about atheists and agnostics. CES shows that combined they now claim a politically potent 13% of the U.S. population. In 2024, atheists voted Democratic by 83% and agnostics by 76%, and together produced 23.9% of the Harris vote, versus a negligible 5.2% of Trump voters. Burge thinks any Democrat “hoping to win the White House from the G.O.P. in 2028 needs to take them seriously — or risk losing again.”
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.