‘It’s very personal’: could Abdullah Hammoud, a Michigan mayor, hold the key to the 2024 elections?

Since the war in Gaza erupted six months ago, Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, has contended with death threats, toxic media coverage of his city and family members overseas driven from their homes by Israeli airstrikes.

Today, he stands at the head of a community that could hold the key to the 2024 presidential election. Two months after the state primary, which saw unprecedented numbers of Michiganders casting a protest vote as a warning to Joe Biden, Hammoud doesn’t seem to think Biden got the message.

Related: The anti-war protest secured a huge primary vote. What happens next?

“I think there is an immediate and direct implication come November,” he says. “There’s a segment of the [Dearborn] population who will never vote for Biden again.”

Hammoud, 34, has been thrust into the spotlight in recent months as the mayor of a city that’s home to one of the largest Arab communities in the US.

His scathing criticism of Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza has turned Hammoud into a leading voice for many of the more than 200,000 Arab American residents of Michigan, a crucial swing state.

“It’s very personal. We had a resident come to a council meeting who lost over 80 family members. That’s somebody whose entire life has been altered,” he says.

“What people are trying to grapple with is: ‘How is it that my family was obliterated in Gaza with American-manufactured weapons? How does that happen?’”

Hammoud supported a campaign calling on Dearborn residents to send the president a warning by voting “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democratic party primary in February, to make clear how precarious his standing in the critical state is ahead of the November election. More Dearborn residents voted “uncommitted” than for Biden by a margin of 17%.

Biden won Michigan by only 154,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election. A host of recent polls of Michigan voters show him currently trailing Donald Trump, the Republican party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

Two months later, Hammoud will not say if he will vote for Biden in November. But he hasn’t seen any meaningful changes in US policy.

“The temperature among the community is that we are so fed up of [the narrative that] ‘Biden criticized Benjamin Netanyahu in private.’ We are really looking for action to be taken,” he says.

Americans’ dissatisfaction with Biden’s support for Israel has grown beyond Dearborn or Michigan. In Wisconsin, a state Biden won by just 20,000 votes in 2020, a similar campaign received more than 48,000 votes in that state’s Democratic primary on 2 April.

Protesting against Biden at the ballot box is not without risk for Hammoud and his constituents. Donald Trump has again promised to crack down on immigration should he win in November. The so-called “Muslim ban” in 2017 that divided families on a massive scale is still fresh in the minds of many Arab and Muslim Americans.

Hammoud says that while Trump back in the White House is “the last thing people want to see”, many Dearborn residents have more pressing things to think about.

“I think that you cannot make the argument to them that somehow under Trump things would be worse. What is worse than losing 80 family members? I think that’s extremely disrespectful.”

All the while, Dearborn residents have had to deal with media reports depicting it as “America’s jihad capital”. Hammoud ramped up police patrols around schools and places of worship in the city following publication of a Wall Street Journal op-ed in February that described Dearborn as a place of “radical politics” and encouraged counterterrorism agencies to “pay close attention”.

The article followed an online threat of terrorism made against Palestinian Americans in Dearborn by a resident of metro Detroit who was arrested in October.

“I wish I could say that I was surprised, but I grew up in the post-9/11 era, especially here in Dearborn,” he says. Hammoud recalls how in 2012 Christian evangelicals marched through the streets of Dearborn with a pig’s head on a spike while shouting anti-Muslim slogans. The community was again in the spotlight when chants of “death to America” by one person were heard at a protest this month. Hammoud and Biden condemned the chant, while the protest organizers called it “wrongful”.

Before being elected mayor of Dearborn at the age of 31, Hammoud served in Michigan’s house of representatives as a Democrat until 2021. The son of a small business-owner mother and a truck-driver father, both from southern Lebanon, he too has felt the effects of the deepening conflict in the Middle East.

“Both my father’s and mother’s villages have been bombed by Israeli airstrikes. They have all moved towards Beirut now,” he says. “That’s the reality for many of us who are Lebanese.”

While Hammoud has been thrust into the national and international spotlight for his criticism of Biden’s support for Israel, he says his schedule is still mostly made up of dealing with day-to-day local issues.

It’s a position that’s made him popular on the streets of Dearborn.

“He is beyond what we expected and is doing a wonderful job,” says Khader Masri, a native of Nablus in the West Bank who has run Masri Sweets in Dearborn for the past 35 years.

Despite voting for Biden in the 2020 election, Masri holds a very different view of the president today.

“It’s sad to say if you compare Gaza to Ukraine and Russia to Israel, it’s a day and night difference,” in terms of the Biden administration’s support for civilians under bombardment, he said. “I will not vote for him; he is not welcome in my store,” he says.

Despite a death toll in Gaza that’s approaching more than 34,000 people, and the growing threat of a wider conflict engulfing the region, Hammoud says there is still potential for change that could save Palestinian lives.

He cites a recent speech by Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, calling for new elections in Israel, claiming the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had “lost his way”. “When you see Senator Schumer drop a floor speech in the fashion that he did … that tells you that the center of the party has moved. Now we need a president that recognizes that change and reflects that change,” he says.

“My biggest fear is that Biden isn’t going to be remembered as the person who saved American democracy in 2020, but the one who sacrificed it for Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024.”