Let's Talk about the Muslim Vote in Michigan

One of the narratives that is forming in the media right now when it comes to religion and the 2024 presidential election is the Muslim vote, especially in the state of Michigan. There are some prominent voices in the Islamic community who are upset about how President Biden has handled the conflict between Israel and Hamas since October. Many Muslims feel that Biden has been too friendly to the Israeli government.

Back in January, the Washington Post ran a story with the headline, “Michigan’s Arabs and Muslims push to defeat Biden in critical state”

NBC News published an article in March, “Michigan Arab and Muslim leaders fuming after second Biden visit this year with no meeting.”

Slate ran one with the ominous title, “The Storm Brewing in Michigan.”

And this seems to be carrying over to the Harris campaign, as the New York Times published an article on August 8, “In Detroit, Harris Confronts Divisions Roiling Democrats Over Gaza War.”

All of these stories make the same general point - the Democrats’ posture on the Middle East could cost them a significant number of Muslim votes in the key battleground state of Michigan, and thus could cost Kamala Harris the White House.

I am going to completely sidestep the whole discussion of the conflict in the Middle East in this post and just focus on a narrow question: How many Muslim votes are there in the state of Michigan and could it actually cost the Democrats the state?

Really the only way to estimate such a thing is by using the 2020 Religion Census. They contact every major religious group in the United States and ask for records related to number of congregations and number of members of that faith group. The data is aggregated all the way down to the county level.

Now, I must say that they had a pretty hard time getting mosques to respond. According to this appendix (PDF), they sent questionnaires to 2,948 mosques and just 164 responded - 5.5%. They did follow up with a phone survey that yielded another 470 responses, though. But, let’s be clear - this data is not perfect. And let me also be direct about this point: there’s no way to do this work in a manner that could get an accurate count. It’s methodologically impossible. This is as best as we can do.

Let me start by showing you the share of the entire population of a state that is a member of a mosque based on this data.

The state with the highest concentration of Muslims is Illinois at 3.7%. New York is right behind at 3.6%. Followed by New Jersey (3.5%) and Maryland (3.1%). Michigan ranks fifth on Muslim concentration at 2.4%. It is absolutely not the most Islamic state in the United States. Not by a long shot.

Here are the numbers from the 2020 Religion Census about Muslims in Michigan.

• There are 127 mosques in the state. That ranks #7.

• There are 242,000 Muslims in the state. That ranks #6.

Let me reiterate this point - Michigan is in no way the most Islamic state in the United States. It’s not even close. There are nearly three times as many Muslims in New York State as Michigan. There are twice as many California Muslims. It’s just not a very big group.

Where are they in the state? This is a county level map of Michigan.

There are a total of 83 counties in the state. The Religion Census found an Islamic house of worship in 19 of them. That means over three quarters of all counties in the state have no mosque. As can be quickly ascertained, the highest concentration of Muslims is in the Detroit area and the surrounding suburbs. Once you get outside the eastern part of the state, there are very few Muslims to be found.

There are a total of five counties where the Muslim population exceeds 2% of the entire population of the county. There are four more where it’s between 1% and 2%. And then, there are nine counties where it’s between 0% and 1% of the population. Here’s a table of those 19 counties with a mosque.

There are a total of three counties in the state of Michigan with a Muslim population that exceeds 10,000. Wayne County is clearly the largest with 146,000 Muslims. That’s where Dearborn (population 110,000) is located and they recently elected their first Muslim mayor just two years ago. According to the Census Bureau, about 55% of Dearborn is Muslim - but numerically that’s less than 60,000 people.

Again, let me make this point clear - there is a significant population of Muslims in the state of Michigan but 61% of them live in one county and 80% of them live in just three of the eighty-three counties in the state.

But let me focus in on the more relevant question - is there a large Muslim vote in the state of Michigan? I’m not sure it’s nearly as many votes as people think that it is based on some other metrics.

First, we have to discuss the topic of immigration. Obviously, only American citizens can cast a ballot in a presidential election. Here’s the distribution of immigration status among the Islamic population of the United States compared to the entire sample.

As can be seen, about 35% of Muslims in the United States were born somewhere else. Now, a quarter of Muslims have immigrated here and then become naturalized citizens and another 10% live in the United States but have not been naturalized citizens - meaning that they can’t vote. Recall that there are 242,000 Muslims in the state of Michigan. There just aren’t enough Michigan Muslims in my sample (64 out of a total sample of 171,000) to see if this pattern holds in that specific state, but let’s just assume it does.

That means that there are 215,000 Muslims left in the state who could potentially vote.

Let’s go a step farther, though. One really interesting aspect of Islam in the United States is that it is young. Incredibly young. It’s hard to conceive of just how young Muslims are compared to the rest of the population. Let me show you what I mean.

Yeah - they are that much of an outlier. The Cooperative Election Study only surveys adults (18+). In the entire sample from the last couple of years, about 30% of folks are between the ages of 18 and 35 years old. Among Muslims, it’s nearly two-thirds of them. No other tradition is even close. Orthodox Christians are next, but only 46% are in that lowest age bracket.

A Muslim adult in the United States is three times more likely to be between the ages of 18 and 35 than a Protestant and more than twice as likely as a Catholic. The average Muslim adult is 34.2 years old. The average age in the entire sample is 48.2. The average Protestant is 53.3 years old. I know what you are thinking right now - “What does this have to do with the voting population?” Young adults are much more likely to have children than older people. And that’s certainly the case when it comes to Muslims.

The survey question is a bit weird here - it’s are you the current parent/guardian to a child under the age of 18. So it’s not, “Have you ever been a parent?” It’s, “Are you a parent right now?” In the entire sample, about 23% currently have kids at home.

Muslims score near the top on this metric - 36% of them are parents to minor children. The only group that is higher are Hindus at 42%. Muslims are young. A whole lot of Muslims are currently parents to children. But, among those who are currently parents, how many children do they have?

The average number of kids per parent (among those who are currently parents) is 2.5 children. Among Muslims it’s 3.6. That’s the highest average among any religious group (tied with Orthodox Christians). The average Protestant household has 2.5 kids. It’s 2.8 for Catholic parents. Notice that atheists and agnostics score the absolute lowest on this metric, by the way.

Do you see the point of this exercise now? The Religion Census estimate is not age-restricted. It’s just counting people who are on the rolls of the local house of worship. That includes adults and children. For many traditions, like Protestants and Catholics, there aren’t a ton of children to be found on those rolls.

So, let me try and estimate the number of Muslims that will cast a ballot in Michigan in 2024.

The top number is 242,000.

Of that, 10% are ineligible because they are not citizens. We are down to about 220,000.

Now, how many of them are children? A quick Google search yields the result that 22% of all Americans are under the age of 18. It has to be higher among Muslims based on the data that I just showed you. I don’t know how much higher, but I think a very conservative guess is that 33% of Muslims in Michigan are children. That gets us to about 145,000 Muslim adults who are eligible to vote.

According to this PDF from the Secretary of State of Michigan, turnout among eligible voters was 71% in 2020 - that was much higher than normal. But let’s just assume that it will hold in 2024, too.

That gets us to a total number of Muslim votes of just over 100,000 in 2024.

The total number of ballots cast in the state in 2020 was 5.45 million. Which means that the Muslim vote will make up about 1.8% of all ballots cast in the state of Michigan in the upcoming presidential election.

Joe Biden received 154,000 more votes than Donald Trump did in 2020.

Even if half of the Muslim voters went from Democrat to Republican in 2024 (which is incredibly unlikely), it’s not numerically true that the Muslim vote would change the outcome of the election.

Code for this post can be found here.