Inside the Harris Campaign’s Push to Win Back Muslim and Arab Voters

The campaign is hoping Facebook ads, WhatsApp channels and small meetings with disillusioned voters will help turn the tide.

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Vice President Kamala Harris campaigning in Detroit on Saturday. Although Ms. Harris has not strayed from President Biden on policy, she has taken a stronger tone on the suffering of Palestinians.

With two weeks to go before the election, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is making a final push to win back Arab and Muslim voters.

The campaign has launched Facebook ads targeting Muslims, created WhatsApp channels and distributed fact sheets with Ms. Harris’s most forceful statements on the war in Gaza. And in private meetings in living rooms and basements across the country, including in the battleground states of Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, campaign workers are trying to reach voters who say they may stay home, vote third party or even vote for former President Donald J. Trump because of the Biden administration’s policies in the Middle East.

The message from the campaign is simple: Ms. Harris has expressed sympathy for Palestinians and called on Israel to respect international laws, while Mr. Trump wants to reinstate a travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries and has used “Palestinian” as an insult.

Although reliable polls of these groups are challenging to come by, interviews with voters suggest that Ms. Harris is struggling to win over Arab and Muslim voters — a deeply worrying sign for her campaign at this point in the race.

Nowhere is the task more urgent than in Michigan, home to more than 300,000 residents with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. President Biden won the state by nearly 155,000 votes in 2020.

Hussein Dabajeh, a Lebanese American resident of Dearborn, Mich., said he had voted primarily for Democrats in the past, including for Mr. Biden in 2020. But this year, he cannot bring himself to vote for the Democratic ticket.

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