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In the months leading up to the presidential election, a Somali community leader sat in a crowded south Minneapolis café, taken aback by the conversation around him.  

Mohamud Farah recalls listening to a group of young Somali men rail on about the need for change. As they sipped chai and snacked on sweets, the young men made their case. The economy was failing, they said; education was a mess; the killing of women and children in Gaza needed to end.

While Farah knew some of those men to consistently vote blue, they apparently weren’t betting on the Democrats to bring change to the table.

“And the change they want is Donald Trump?” Farah asked himself, witnessing a plot twist in real time. He wondered if he heard that correctly. “They wanted Trump, the guy who came to 

 and called Somali resettlement a ‘disaster?’ The guy who enacted the so-called 

’ on several countries, including Somalia?”

But Farah said while he’s no fan of Trump, he understood where the men were coming from: “That was the time I realized that this election is going to be a very interesting election,” he said. 

State elections data shows that support for Vice President Kamala Harris in parts of the city with concentrations of East African immigrants and Somali voters — like the young men in that café — was weaker than in the city as a whole. In Cedar-Riverside, a neighborhood near the University of Minnesota with a large Somali population, barely half of eligible voters cast a ballot at all — down from a 67 percent turnout in 2020. 

Among those who did vote, the majority voted for Harris. Yet, support for the Democratic presidential candidate dropped 14 percentage points compared to the 2020 election. Of note: Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar — who is also a Somali immigrant and has been openly critical of Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon — outperformed Harris in her re-election there.

Trump’s largest base of support came from white voters. However, exit polls show that the Republican presidential candidate made significant gains in support from 

The Cedar-Riverside neighborhood houses one of the mosques where Farah serves as an Imam, a community and religious leader. As the election approached, Farah said people would ask him “is it Haram or Halal? That means: is it forbidden to vote for a party that is killing Muslim people? And you cannot say yes, as Imam. How can you?”

During her acceptance speech at the DNC in August, Harris repeated the administration’s stance, saying she would stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis. The Biden-Harris administration has sent a 

record of at least $17.9 billion in military aid

“At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” Harris said. “So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

Farah said he couldn’t accept that the Biden-Harris administration failed to produce a ceasefire, continuing to send taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel, which then showered them down on Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed 40,000. He couldn’t ignore the images of decimated villages and hospitals, of dead women and children and babies broadcast for more than a year.

Farah remained uncertain about his vote, even as the ink dried on the ballot. 

 of 343 Somali Americans, many of them Muslim, reflected a similar shift in what Farah observed.

Among those polled, support for the Democratic ticket dropped by seven percentage points compared to the 2020 election. Meanwhile, support for the Republican ticket increased by 13 percentage points, with 23 percent of respondents indicating they would vote red. 

The survey was conducted by the St. Anthony-based Bayan Research Center, a nonprofit led by experts from the Somali community. The survey included Somali Americans beyond Minnesota, although about half of those polled reside in the Twin Cities metro area. A quarter of all respondents indicated they wouldn’t vote. 

That was the case for Abdirizak Farah, an Imam at Masjid Rawdah in the Seward neighborhood.

Previously, Abdirizak Farah had voted for Democrats. When he first gained the right to vote, he remembers eagerly casting his ballot for former President Barack Obama and being thrilled by his vote. And when it became clear, after midnight, that he’d witness the first Black man to lead the country, Abdirizak Farah found himself by the lobby of his South Minneapolis high rise, celebrating alongside dancing elders. 

But this time, Abdirizak Farah didn’t vote at all. 

He was hopeful when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Harris became the new face of the Democratic party — but she committed in words to send more arms to Israel, and nothing in action that brought peace. He wouldn’t vote Republican, but he couldn’t give Democrats his approval, either.

Overall, he said he doesn’t see proof of a Somali swing to the right in elections to come — but he is noticing increased grievances with the Democratic party in his own community, particularly with those opposed to the “liberal agenda.” He said many Somalis hold conservative religious and family values that have more in common with Republicans than Democrats.

Meanwhile, Republicans ramped up their outreach efforts, pushing harder to connect with Somalis and other East African communities than in previous years. Anna Mathews, executive director of the state GOP, said for the first time, the party was disseminating information in Somali. 

Republican leaders were making appearances on Somali TV shows, waiting outside mosques to chat casually after prayer and connecting with prospective voters over conservative values. The GOP pushed early voting too, texting reminders about where and when to hit the polls. 

Mathews said she sensed the Somali community was “ready for change,” that they were “sick of the status quo” and of feeling “taken for granted by the Democrats.” 

She pointed to a gathering of Somali Americans endorsing Trump at the State Capitol, the weekend before the election. Nearly 20 stood behind a podium, pushing their priorities — the fentanyl crisis, school choice, public safety, the economy and peace — as more aligned with Trump. 

One of the leaders who supported that push, Tawakal Ismail, said he’s been a Republican since 2022, already shifting right because of a drug crisis, inflation and rising taxes and the suspicion that the state Democrats in power profile and target Somali businesses. He said hordes of Somali families have left Minnesota for other countries, as a result of public schools teaching what he says goes against many of their cultural and religious values. 

“The last 10 years, the Somali community has been voting with Democrats with no return on investment in the community,” Ismail said. “They took their vote for granted.”

He said if it’s clear Republicans don’t “hate” the community, more may rally behind them. 

With about two months to go before the election, Saciido Shaie was hired by the DFL to organize African immigrant communities across the state. She’d been door knocking for the DFL since 2002, when as a teenager she volunteered for Paul Wellstone’s last U.S. Senate campaign (actually, she’d been door knocking since she was 13, asking neighbors to pitch in five bucks to build a mosque). 

Shaie is a natural organizer, a young Somali immigrant who, before the age of 10, was translating for older generations and helping people transition into life in the U.S. She was on the state’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee and the Cultural and Ethnic Communities Leadership Council. She felt connected to the party that gave her opportunities and a seat at the table. 

And she felt enthusiasm from her community for that party, too. 

But this time around, she said something was different. In past years, she could have gone door-knocking by herself — but this year it was necessary to go in a group, she said. People were mad. They took their gripes with the Democratic party out on her. 

It was a noticeable shift — more people saying they would vote for Trump, more people saying they wouldn’t vote at all. Every day was a slog.

She remembers knocking on one door and being met with that anger, even though it was someone she knew personally. Shaie said she asked him what was going on.

“And he was like, ‘no, you guys are liars. You’re a liar because you say one thing, but then you do another thing,” she said. “You’re telling us you’re doing something about the genocide in Palestine. You promised all these things, but you guys never kept it.”

Shaie added that for many refugees who left war behind, there’s another layer of urgency and pain — of understanding firsthand the devastation of having “lost so many families and so many children.” More than half a million people are estimated to have been killed in Somalia since the start of civil war in the late ‘80s. 

She had a suspicion the Democrats would lose the election when she heard from Imams across Minnesota, and nationwide, that they were being ignored by the DNC. She tried to get a seat at the national organizing level, reaching out to leaders to make sure the Muslim and East African immigrant community were heard, but nothing landed. 

The state DFL’s communication director did not respond to calls or communication about the party’s outreach to Somali voters.

“If my Imam said don’t vote this year, I’m not gonna vote,” she said. “People are connected and they have leaders. Those leaders are important.”

She said she hopes the shift is a wake-up call for Democrats, especially at the national level, to engage more meaningfully —  to listen and take no community for granted. 

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Cari Spencer

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According to state elections data, support for Vice President Kamala Harris in parts of Minneapolis with concentrations of East African immigrants and Somali voters was weaker than in the city as a whole.

In deep blue Minneapolis, many Somali voters withheld support for Harris

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