By Charles Hoskinson, CQ Staff

Muslim Americans, many of whom gave President Bush enthusiastic support in his first election campaign in 2000, have largely fled the Republican Party and could help Democrats win key states this November.

In surveys over the past six years, Muslims have cited administration policies in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq as reasons why GOP candidates no longer appeal to them.

The surveys by the polling firm Zogby International and the Pew Research Center show how dramatic the shift has been: In the 2000 election, 42 percent of Muslim-American voters surveyed said they had voted for Bush, 31 percent for former Vice President Al Gore and 12 percent for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. In 2004, just 14 percent voted for Bush, while 71 percent chose Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

“We can intuit that the Republican Party has lost a lot of goodwill among Muslims,” said pollster John Zogby.

This year, the bulk of Muslim support is likely to go to Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, said Mukit Hossain, a political consultant to the Muslim American Society, which has taken a leading role in mobilizing Muslim Americans to vote and be active in political life.

Obama, whose Kenyan relatives include Muslims and who lived in majority-Muslim Indonesia as a child, has courted Muslim voters, saying he would be more understanding of their concerns because of his background.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s presumptive nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, angered Muslims late last year when he said in an interview he would not be comfortable with a Muslim president, though he later clarified that statement.

Muslims comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, or about 3 million people, according to the most reliable estimates. But most Muslim registered voters are concentrated in key states that both parties need for electoral success in 2008: New York, New Jersey, Texas, California, Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.

A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center indicates that Arabs comprise the largest single group of Muslim Americans, at 24 percent, followed by black Americans at 20 percent, 18 percent from Pakistan and south Asia, 8 percent from Iran and 5 percent from Europe, including Bosnia and Albania.

Muslims are more socially conservative than the U.S. population as a whole, but they also are more likely to prefer a larger, more activist government. The 2007 Pew survey found that 63 percent identified themselves as Democrats or leaning Democratic, 11 percent as Republican or Republican-leaning and 26 percent as independent.

The conservative values of American Muslims and the belief that they would be receptive to a free-market, low-tax political appeal prompted GOP strategist Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, to attempt to mine Muslim votes for President Bush in 2000. He secured an endorsement for Bush from several major Muslim groups and community leaders after Bush came out against the use of secret evidence in immigration and national-security cases — one of their key concerns. One of the states where Muslims campaigned hard for Bush was Florida, which gave him the presidency when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed his 537-vote edge to stand.

Sept. 11 Aftermath

But efforts to win Muslims as a permanent GOP voting bloc have fallen apart in recent years due to effects of the Sept. 11 attacks by the Islamist militant group al Qaeda. Aggressive domestic security investigations seeking to ferret out Islamist extremists alienated many U.S. Muslims. And the U.S. military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq further eroded support for the Bush administration and GOP policies among Muslim voters.

Muslim groups take partial credit for the Democrats capturing control of Congress in the 2006 vote, which also saw Rep. Keith Ellison , D-Minn., become the first Muslim member.

The claim stems primarily from the role Muslim voters played in the narrow win by Sen. Jim Webb , D-Va., over former GOP Sen. George Allen. Webb defeated Allen by just 9,329 votes out of 2.4 million cast.

Out of some 60,000 Muslims registered to vote in Virginia, about 47,000 voted for Webb, including many who had backed Allen six years previously, Hossain said. And donations preceded the shift in votes, with Muslim donors abandoning Allen for Webb.

“Given the closeness of the race and the overwhelming support that Muslims gave to Democrats in the ‘06 race, that conclusion is reasonable,” Zogby said.

The percentage of Muslim Americans registered to vote this year is higher than in previous years, and they are likely to vote Democratic in even higher proportions, Hossain said. Democrats also have given Muslims a chance to increase their congressional representation by nominating André Carson , an Indianapolis City-County Council member, as their candidate in a March 11 special election to replace his grandmother, the late Rep. Julia Carson, D-Ind.

“For the Muslim community, the choice of voting Republican is becoming narrower by the minute,” Hossain said.

The shift in voting patterns concerns Norquist, who sees the problem with Muslims as mirroring the party’s loss of support among Hispanics over the contentious issue of illegal immigration.

He said Republicans have not adequately policed their ranks to discourage bigots and cool the heated rhetoric Muslims take as a lack of respect. Party leaders need to make sure policy proposals focus on real terrorism threats and do not smear an entire community, he said.

“You don’t do guilt by association,” he said. “There needs to be more discipline. The saving grace for Republicans is that Democrats pull that crap, too.”

But M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix doctor and Navy veteran who heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, blames much of the partisan shift on pressure for “Muslim collectivism” from organizations claiming to speak in the name of U.S. Muslims.

“They believe that a Muslim community should somehow vote the same way,” he said. “They used victimization issues to soak up the bandwidth of the Muslim community.”