In late January 2001, the day after George W. Bush was sworn
into office, a group of conservative politicos including recently retired House
Speaker Newt Gingrich gathered at Grover Norquist’s Washington, D,C. office for
a meeting with influential faith leaders.

That, in itself, was hardly newsworthy. Bush had swept into
office on the backs of values voters. But the gathering wasn’t catering to
evangelical Christians; the purpose was to discuss a variety of issues of
concern to American Muslims—everything from political appointments, to civil
liberties, to a Ramadan postage stamp. It was organized by the Islamic
Institute, a think tank founded by Norquist, the conservative anti-tax
crusader, and the guest list was culled from the ranks of American Muslim
organizations and community leaders. By some estimates, Muslims had turned out
in huge numbers for Bush; at least one prominent Republican credited them with
making the difference in Florida.

But those days are over, and if the rhetoric from the
current crop of candidates is any indication, there’s little hope for a rebound
in 2012. Since 9/11, Republicans have turned a once-promising—and rapidly
growing—voting demographic into a punching bag. Lately, Republican lawmakers
across the country have further antagonized their Muslim constituents by
pushing quixotic legislation to ban Islamic sharia law from being used in state
courts. Even the founder of the group Muslims for Bush, Colorado GOPer Muhammad
Ali Hasan, left the party, citing frustration with its newfound anti-Muslim
“bigotry.”

Now, as Republicans head full-steam into the nominating
process, they face a choice: Tone down the rhetoric, or risk permanently
alienating a community that’s expected to double in size over the next two
decades.

“[Republican candidates] have not reached out to me,
and I’m not aware of any efforts that they have made to reach out to other
community leaders,” says Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on
American Islamic Relations (CAIR), who attended Norquist’s meeting. “From
2000 until now, there’s been a huge difference in terms of what kind of
relationship we have with them. Their ability and desire to reach out to the
Muslim community is almost like night and day.”

The 2000 election was the high-water mark in the campaign by
Muslim leaders to position the community as the swing vote of the future. More
affluent than the American average, big on civil liberties and social justice,
and historically independent (they’d gone for George H.W. Bush in 1992 and then
for Bill Clinton in 1996), Muslims represented a natural target for both
parties. Or so the thinking went. But Muslims’ political clout had been
hampered by years of poor turnout. As Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) put it
in 1994, referring to Muslims, “I don’t have time to meet with people who
don’t vote.”

The bottom fell out for the GOP in 2008 when, according to
the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, just 2.2 percent
of Muslims voted for Sen. John McCain.

Leaders of four of the largest American Muslim organizations
decided to try something new: The plan was to emulate the model employed by
Jewish–Americans, who held a similarly small share of the population but
wielded outsize political power through groups like the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

So they formed a bloc. There are just 3 million Muslims in
the United States, but they’re clumped disproportionately in battleground
states like Michigan, Florida, and Ohio. Pool those votes, and you could have
the kind of powerful lobby politicians would have no choice but to listen to.
CAIR, along with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the American Muslim
Council, and the American Muslim Alliance, joined forces to form the American
Muslim Political Coordination Council PAC.

The new political action committee spurred voter
registration drives and candidate forums, and served as a portal for fundraising
efforts; it ultimately endorsed Bush, after securing key promises on the use of
secret evidence in deportation cases and racial profiling. After the election,
CAIR trumpeted the role of American Muslims in the Republican victory.
According to an informal survey of the group’s membership, 72 percent of
Florida Muslims had cast their votes for Bush. From all appearances, the bloc
experiment was a win-win.

The September 11 attacks changed things, but only gradually.
The Bush administration tacked hard against the kinds of civil liberties they’d
campaigned on while nonetheless taking steps not to vilify the Islamic faith.
But there was a shift within the party.

“There were people that took advantage of the lack of
communication that was taking place—people who had a specific agenda, and
specifically, people who were involved in the Islamophobic industry,” says
Haris Tarin, MPAC’s DC director, referring to a network of think tanks and
commentators that are benefiting from the sharia freakout.

Rising conservative politicos like Suhail Khan, a Bush White
House liaison to the Muslim community and later an official at the Department
of Transportation, increasingly found themselves in the crossfire. Khan, for
his part, was accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood (which he has
denied). Meanwhile, Mohamed Elibiary, a young Republican activist in Texas, was
attacked by right-wing sites like Jihad Watch and others for attending an event
at a mosque in Irving that honored the Ayatollah Khomenei, the late leader of Iran’s
Islamic Revolution. Some of those concerns were more serious—Sami Al-Arian, a
former University of South Florida professor who’d played a key role in Bush’s
2000 outreach efforts, was convicted of material support for terrorism and
sentenced to 57 months in federal prison.

The rift between the Republican Party and Muslims was
reflected at the polls. The bottom fell out for the GOP in 2008 when, according
to the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, just 2.2
percent of Muslims voted for Sen. John McCain. (Gallup placed that number at 11
percent, but no one has come up with a higher figure than that.)

In contrast to Bush, who visited a mosque during his
campaign and called Islam a “religion of peace” after 9/11, the
current crop of GOP presidential candidates have used Islam mostly as a
bludgeon.

Herman Cain, the Georgia businessman whom focus groups
declared the victor of the first debate in South Carolina, made headlines in
March when he vowed not to appoint any Muslims to his administration; former
Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum told Politico in May that “creeping sharia
is a huge issue”—a comment echoed by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). Even
former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, considered to be one of the more moderate
GOP contenders, has furiously disavowed efforts by his administration in St.
Paul to promote sharia-compliant mortgages for Muslims. (Islam forbids the
collection of interest.)

And then there’s Gingrich. Attentive and supportive at
Norquist’s gathering according to Awad, he now calls for a ban on sharia law in
the United States and warns that the nation is careening toward a takeover by
radical Islamists.

“Gingrich knows better,” CAIR’s Awad said.
“He knows the Muslim community. He met with them. And I think this is a
cheap shift, just for political gain. He’s a well-read individual. But I think
he’s not taking the leadership position. He’s exploiting the ignorance.”

Still, there may be hope. Elibiary, who founded the Freedom
and Justice Foundation to promote “centrist public policy” on behalf
of Muslim Texans, cites Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Mitch Daniels of
Indiana as candidates who could transcend the party’s recent rhetoric.

Christie, who has insisted he won’t run for president in
2012, broke with conservatives last summer to publicly support the Park 51
community center in Lower Manhattan (known by critics as the Ground Zero
Mosque), and ignored criticism from the anti-sharia crowd for appointing a
Muslim to the Passaic County Superior Court. Daniels, whose grandparents came
to the United States from Syria, was recently honored by the Arab American
Institute, which referred to him, in contrast to his fellow Republicans, as
“the adult in the room.” (Daniels has also ruled out a run in 2012.)

Elibiary believes that the party will come around to Muslims
again, but it may take some time. “Republicans, I think, will fix a lot of
those things come the 2016 election,” he says. “A lot of those guys
that are bottom feeders, like the Newt Gingrich type of people, thankfully are
going to be a lot less relevant come 2016.”

And in that sense, there seems to be some agreement: Beating
up on Islam is good for television ratings, but there’s little evidence it’s a
successful electoral strategy. Sharron Angle, who once warned that the city of
Dearborn, Michigan, was already under the yoke of sharia law, fell flat in her
Nevada Senate race. Lou Ann Zelenik, a Tennessee congressional candidate who
made opposition to a proposed Islamic community center in Murfreesboro her central
campaign issue, lost big to a conservative candidate who supported the mosque.
And Rick Lazio, the former New York congressman whose campaign sought to
exploit the Park 51 project, never made it out of his gubernatorial primary.

But even as Muslim leaders attempt to restore the
community’s political clout, it’s unlikely we’ll see anything like 2000 anytime
soon. MPAC’s Haris Tarin was not involved in those efforts, but he believes the
idea of a “Muslim vote,” championed by his organization a decade ago,
is unrealistic given the immense diversity of the American Muslim community.
“It could be done potentially at the local level—places like Northern
Virginia, or parts of Michigan,” he says. “But at the national level,
having a bloc vote is impossible.”

There’s also a debate as to whether there was any such thing
as a “Muslim vote” to begin with. James Zogby, a Democratic
consultant and founder of the Arab American Institute, says that reports of a
Muslim landslide in 2000 were based on wishful thinking. “The numbers
weren’t there,” he says. “That day in my office after the election, I
had like three different ethnic groups all claiming credit for winning. Anyone
who had more than 500 voters in Florida was taking credit.”

By Zogby’s count, Bush garnered just 46 percent of the
Muslim vote in Florida, a far cry from CAIR’s 72 percent tally. But that’s
still significantly higher than anything the party’s achieved since—and in a
state like Florida, every vote counts.

Ultimately, Elibiary says, the Republican Party doesn’t have
a Muslim problem—for the most part, grassroots activists don’t care about his
faith—it has an image problem.

“A Muslim voter or a Latino voter, or a South Asian
voter, if their window to the Republican party is Hannity or Beck or all these
opinion shows, then yeah, they won’t vote for these folks; they won’t vote for
the party,” he says.

But Fox News isn’t going away any time soon. And over the
last few years, through harsh immigration laws, an embrace of
“otherism,” and rhetorical jabs at Islam, GOPers have consolidated
their grip on white voters at the expense of virtually everyone else—even as
that demographic reflects a smaller and smaller share of the electorate as a
whole. It’s too early to say whether or not Muslim voters will make a difference
in Florida come 2012; President Obama has, after all, failed to deliver on many
of his big promises on civil liberties. Going forward, though, Republicans’
falling out with a once treasured constituency is emblematic of the question
facing the party as a whole: How far can it go to win present elections without
destroying its chances of prevailing in future ones?

Reprinted from Mother Jones