Source: Politico

Muslim Republicans fear Donald Trump’s escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric — capped this week by his call to block all Muslims’ entry into the country — could turn Muslims away from the GOP for a generation, severing all ties with a constituency just as its population is bulging in three crucial presidential battleground states.
Many American Muslims had already departed the GOP after their experiences under a Republican administration in the wake of 9/11, voting overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.
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Now, Muslim Republicans view Trump’s overheated oratory as poisoning the GOP brand — whether or not he becomes the Republican nominee — erasing any prospect of a return to a party that can ill-afford to alienate another growing, if small, constituency after hemorrhaging support from Latinos and Asian-Americans in recent decades. Prior to 9/11, Republicans were very much in the hunt for American Muslim votes: In 2000, George W. Bush won the backing of many key Muslim organizations, had a Muslim deliver a blessing at the GOP national convention and was the first president to say “mosque” in his inaugural address.
“Trump wants to shut down our mosques; he wants to ban our travel; he wants to take away our liberties; he wants to register us in a database,” said Saba Ahmed, who founded the Republican Muslim Coalition last year to help the GOP better appeal to the Muslim community. “It’s damaging the Republican Party, if it’s gonna be defined by Trump. It’s hurting all Republicans.”

Muslims remain only a tiny fraction — 1 to 2 percent — of America’s overall population, but many happen to be clustered in some of the most sought-after presidential battlegrounds, including Ohio, Florida and Virginia. Those pivotal swing states accounted for three of the four closest contests in the 2012 presidential campaign and each is home to more than 50,000 Muslim-American voters, according to estimates.
Top Republicans have already recognized the potential of Muslim voters to sway tight elections, particularly in Virginia.
Last year, Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman and a strategist widely viewed as one of his party’s savviest, quietly hired Sarah Cochran, a Muslim American, to serve as deputy director for outreach to that community in northern Virginia for his 2014 Senate race.
Cochran, whose role has been previously unreported, brought Gillespie to two northern Virginia mosques, introduced him to numerous community leaders and took him to more than a half-dozen events to meet Muslim voters. “We had a lot of Ed’s campaign materials translated into Urdu, Farsi, Arabic and Hindi,” Cochran said.
Asked why they didn’t publicize either the outreach or her hiring, Cochran said, “There is an element of the base of the Republican Party in Virginia — and I don’t want to use the word xenophobic — but they’re not ready for the diversity in some of the more urban areas.” Gillespie lost the race by fewer than 20,000 votes. He is now planning to run for governor in 2017.
Gillespie did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Trump’s proposal this week for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” has sparked enormous controversy and ensured more time in the spotlight for the Manhattan mogul. At a rally on a retired U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in South Carolina, Trump acknowledged his plan was “probably not politically correct — but I don’t care.”
“Just like the immigration debate turned Latinos away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats, what Trump is doing now is a similar trend with the Muslim American population,” said Amaney Jamal, a professor of politics at Princeton who has studied the political attitudes of Muslim Americans.
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