How a Group of Arab American Women Powered One of Tuesday’s Biggest Upsets
Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy writes about get-out-the-vote efforts in New York led by Arab American women, which helped two Democratic candidates, Max Rose and Andrew Gounardes, win seats from Republican incumbents in Congress and the state Senate respectively. Somia El-Rowmeim, a Muslim American, led phone banking and canvassing campaigns to mobilize Arab American voters in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, whose Muslim community was the target of a decade-long NYPD surveillance program after 9/11. Murphy adds, “That effort was born out of a new sense of urgency in a community that has been devastated by the Trump administration’s travel ban and a rise in Islamophobia.”