标签： Asia

A sweeping unauthorized wiretapping scandal has erupted at the highest echelons of Indonesian power, triggering a formal treason investigation that has sent shockwaves through the country’s political landscape. The explosive case came to public attention this week, when authorities confirmed that President Prabowo Subianto was among dozens of high-profile individuals whose private communications were allegedly intercepted without legal authorization.

At the center of the controversy is Prabowo’s recently appointed chief of staff Listyo Sigit Prabowo — a longstanding ally of former President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, with no familial relation to the sitting president — who was arrested on Tuesday alongside two senior ranking police officers. A fourth suspect, Slamet Uliandi from the national police’s criminal investigation unit, was named by authorities on Thursday but not detained due to ongoing health complications following a stroke. Investigators allege the four suspects improperly entered hundreds of unvetted phone numbers, including the president’s personal lines, into the national police’s official electronic surveillance system, completely bypassing mandatory legal requirements such as securing formal investigation warrants or filing supporting case documentation. The alleged clandestine operation is believed to stretch back to 2025, when Listyo still held the post of national police chief under Jokowi’s administration, and was only uncovered last week after a whistleblower within the police force submitted a formal tip-off.

The scope of the surveillance extends far beyond the presidential palace: confirmed targets include sitting politicians, prominent journalists, civil society NGO representatives, and leading Indonesian business figures. A spokesperson for President Prabowo stated on Wednesday that the unauthorized interception of sensitive state and personal communications qualifies as a potential act of treason, as the improperly accessed materials contain state secrets that could “endanger the interests and sovereignty of the nation.” Under Indonesian penal code, treason carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment or capital punishment, though the country has not carried out any state executions for more than a decade. To date, investigators have not publicly identified a clear motive for the alleged wiretapping scheme.

The scandal has laid bare the rapidly unraveling political alliance between Prabowo and his 2024 presidential campaign backer Jokowi, a partnership that once seemed unshakable as it propelled Prabowo and Jokowi’s eldest son, vice presidential candidate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to a landslide electoral victory. Academic analysts including Made Supriatma, a visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, note that Listyo has long been considered one of Jokowi’s closest and most trusted confidants, and his high-profile arrest has made it clear the two former political allies are now “going their separate ways.”

The fractures between the two camps have been building for months, long before the wiretapping scandal broke. Since taking office, Prabowo has largely sidelined Jokowi’s signature legacy project: the multi-billion dollar construction of Nusantara, Indonesia’s planned new national capital on the island of Borneo, reallocating large portions of that budget to his own flagship universal free school meal program. A series of high-profile cabinet reshuffles over the past year has also seen many of Jokowi’s long-serving loyalists reassigned to less influential roles, including veteran finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati. Vice President Gibran, meanwhile, is currently embroiled in a separate public controversy over the legitimacy of his high school academic credentials, a mandatory eligibility requirement to run for national office, with growing public calls for his formal disqualification from the vice presidency.

National police chief Suyudi Ario Seto sought to downplay political overtones of the investigation on Thursday, telling reporters that the probe is “purely law enforcement and has nothing to do with rivalries or anything else.” Jokowi, when questioned about the scandal outside a court session on Thursday, offered only a brief comment urging the public to “respect the ongoing legal process.” But widespread public and expert consensus frames the wiretapping arrests as the latest and most dramatic escalation of the widening rift between the two former presidential administrations.

The high-stakes scandal unfolds against a backdrop of mounting national crises that have stretched the Prabowo administration thin: the flagship free school meal program faces critical funding shortfalls, large swathes of the country have been hit by the worst wildfire outbreaks in a decade that have blanketed major population centers in toxic haze, and the national stock market is teetering amid widespread allegations of systemic market manipulation. Thousands of Indonesian citizens have staged street protests in recent months to demand government action on the cost of living crisis, rampant official corruption, and life-threatening air pollution from wildfires. Nicky Fahrizal, a researcher at Jakarta’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, warned that the ongoing political drama is diverting critical government resources and attention from the public’s most urgent needs. “It’s like we’re living in a country on autopilot,” he told local reporters, adding that the current governing dynamic appears to prioritize the narrow interests of competing elite groups over the welfare of ordinary Indonesian citizens.

This is not the first major wiretapping controversy to roil Indonesia’s political class: in 2014, hidden surveillance devices were discovered in Jokowi’s official residence when he served as Jakarta’s governor, and former President Megawati Soekarnoputri publicly claimed in 2024 that she had long avoided using personal mobile phone lines due to repeated targeted surveillance attempts against her.

The October 27, 2026, Israeli general election was widely anticipated to serve as a public referendum on the long-running political career of veteran leader Benjamin Netanyahu. But the most transformative, unforeseen outcome of the vote did not center on Netanyahu or his longstanding rivals: it emerged from the roughly one-fifth of Israel’s population that national political systems have sidelined and treated as passive onlookers for decades. The two main Arab-led political blocs, the reconstituted Joint List and Ra’am, secured a combined 19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, the highest number of legislative seats ever won by Arab-aligned parties in the country’s history.

This landmark seat total falls directly in the narrow gap between the two dominant Jewish-led political factions, leaving neither Netanyahu’s right-leaning camp nor former military chief Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist coalition close to the 61-seat threshold required to form a stable governing majority on their own. For the first time in Israel’s 78-year history, the path to forming a functional national government runs straight through majority-Arab population centers including Nazareth, Sakhnin, and the Bedouin township of Rahat, communities that have long been sidelined in high-stakes coalition negotiations.

The magnitude of this political realignment cannot be overstated. Final verified counts released by Israel’s Central Elections Committee confirm the Joint List won 11 seats, while Ra’am took 8, doubling their combined representation from the 10 seats the two factions held in the outgoing Knesset. The previous record for Arab-led party representation stood at 15 seats, achieved when the original unified Joint List contested the March 2020 election.

Nearly 840,000 Israeli citizens cast ballots for the two Arab-led slates, marking a 64% surge in support compared to the 2022 national election. Arab voter turnout nearly doubled to roughly 80%, even outpacing the national overall turnout rate of 78% – itself a historic high for the country. Arab-aligned parties captured 14.7% of the total national vote share, a four-percentage-point jump from the previous election cycle.

Local-level voting data paints an even more striking picture of this electoral shift. In Tarabin, a Bedouin village in the Negev Desert where Netanyahu’s Likud party had secured clear majorities in the two prior national elections, voter turnout nearly doubled, and Ra’am captured 93% of all ballots cast.

This unprecedented surge in Arab electoral mobilization stemmed from three overlapping, mutually reinforcing forces. First was the return of unified Arab political representation. For years, Arab voter turnout rates have closely correlated with whether Arab parties choose to run as a single coordinated bloc: turnout hit 63.5% when the original Joint List formed in 2015, peaked near 65% in 2020, then collapsed sharply after the faction split ahead of the 2021 election. When Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad re-united to re-form the Joint List for the 2026 contest, Arab voters turned out in droves to reward the move.

The second driving force was widespread, deep-seated fear across Arab communities. Arab towns and cities have been ravaged by a years-long violent crime wave that state authorities have repeatedly failed to contain: 252 Arab citizens were murdered in 2025 alone, the deadliest single year for Arab Israeli communities on record. In the period following the October 7 conflict, Arab citizens also faced rising state suspicion, arbitrary arrests over social media speech, and a national campaign where numerous Jewish candidates openly courted right-wing voters with overt anti-Arab rhetoric. Even the basic right of the two Arab parties to contest the election was thrown into jeopardy, until the Supreme Court overturned the Central Elections Committee’s decision to disqualify both the Joint List and Ra’am on October 2.

Third, Arab voters for the first time sensed their ballots could carry tangible, decisive political weight. With the two major Jewish-led blocs almost perfectly evenly split in the Knesset, both Arab parties ran campaigns centered on a clear, unifying message: choosing to stay home on election day is not a neutral act. While the two factions held differing stances on broader regional and conflict issues, both campaigned on concrete promises to boost public safety in underserved Arab communities and deliver long-overdue public investment to underfunded Arab local municipal authorities.

The parliamentary arithmetic of the new Knesset is unambiguous. If Eisenkot’s centrist bloc forms a partnership with the two Arab-led parties, the combined total reaches 67 seats, a comfortable, stable governing majority. Netanyahu’s faction holds only 53 seats, with no plausible path to reach the 61-seat majority without rare, high-profile defections from opposing camps.

But the two Arab-led parties bring starkly different governing philosophies and priorities to the negotiating table. Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas, who in 2021 made history by leading the first independent Arab faction to ever join a formal Israeli governing coalition, is openly seeking a return to cabinet. He has stated his party would join an Eisenkot-led government if Ra’am is granted the powerful internal security portfolio, and the party’s inclusion of a Jewish deputy leader is a deliberate public signal of willingness to build cross-communal cooperation.

The Joint List, led by Yousef Jabareen, has outlined a far more limited framework for collaboration. The faction says it will vote alongside the opposition to oust Netanyahu and hardline far-right figures Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich from power, but will refuse to take any cabinet seats as long as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank continues. This framework points to a potential minority government structure, where Ra’am holds full cabinet membership while the Joint List provides external support on key confidence and supply votes to keep the administration in power.

The primary barrier to this historic cross-communal partnership is not reluctance from Arab parties, but deep divisions among Jewish political actors. Eisenkot and his allies campaigned on a public pledge that they would not rely on Arab parties to secure a governing majority. Prominent lawmaker Avigdor Liberman remains categorically opposed to any partnership with Arab factions, and right-leaning members of Eisenkot’s own Yashar party have signaled they may reject any deal that includes Arab political blocs.

Eisenkot has instead laid out a set of preconditions for formal cooperation, which local media reports indicate include requirements for partner factions to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, support mandatory national service frameworks, and formally condemn Hamas as a designated terrorist organization. Abbas has publicly stated these conditions do not pose an insurmountable barrier for Ra’am, while Jabareen notes the rules only apply to formal cabinet members – a status the Joint List has already ruled out for the duration of the West Bank occupation.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu and Likud have spread unsubstantiated claims that Arab parties “stole” the election with illicit foreign financial backing, framing any Jewish-Arab governing partnership as an existential threat to the state of Israel. Likud figures have also pointed to the arrest of three activists suspected of vote-buying with alleged ties to Ra’am – accusations the party firmly denies. Top election officials have dismissed the broader fraud claims outright: Central Elections Committee chair Justice Noam Sohlberg confirmed that even if the narrow, alleged vote-buying incidents are proven in court, they are not significant enough to overturn the overall election result.

Deep divisions have also spilled out onto Israel’s streets. Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in central Tel Aviv to rally in support of a Jewish-Arab governing partnership, while separate groups of protesters assembled outside Eisenkot’s private home in Herzliya to voice fierce opposition to any collaboration with Arab political parties.

Supporters of formal cross-communal political partnership argue that the 19 Knesset seats held by Arab-led parties represent the legitimate, democratic voice of one-fifth of Israel’s entire citizen population. Systematically shutting Arab representatives out of governing negotiations would send a clear message to Arab voters that record-high turnout and civic engagement produces no tangible change, risking the same widespread political disillusionment and disengagement that followed the collapse of the 2021 unity government. Proponents also point out that Ra’am’s prior stint in the 2021 coalition delivered the largest dedicated public investment budget for Arab community infrastructure in Israeli history.

Critics of the proposed partnership counter that the Joint List rejects Israel’s core self-definition as a Jewish state, and that a government dependent on factions outside the traditional Zionist political consensus would be inherently unstable during ongoing regional security conflicts. Skeptics also note that the 2021 unity government that included Ra’am collapsed after less than two years in office.

Regardless of the final coalition outcome, a fundamental, irreversible shift has taken place in Israeli politics. Once the election results are formally certified, President Isaac Herzog will launch official coalition consultation talks, where Arab party leaders are widely expected to formally recommend Eisenkot for the prime ministerial mandate, cementing his status as the clear frontrunner. The candidate who receives the presidential mandate will have 28 days – extendable by an additional 14 – to negotiate and finalize a functional governing coalition.

Electoral surges of this scale can fade over time, but whether this historic mobilization leaves a permanent mark on Israeli democracy will depend far less on Arab voters, who have already made their collective civic voice heard, than on whether Israel’s long-dominant Jewish-led political parties are prepared to treat Arab citizens’ electoral choices as a legitimate governing partner rather than a political problem to be sidelined. The final outcome of these coalition negotiations will not only determine the makeup of Israel’s next government, but also shape for decades to come what Arab Israeli citizens conclude about the real value of participating in the country’s democratic electoral process.

Following the November 3 US midterm elections that delivered full control of both the Senate and House of Representatives to the Democratic Party, a wave of initial cautious optimism among some Chinese social media users that the Republican electoral rout would ease Washington’s pressure on Beijing has been firmly dismissed by leading Chinese foreign policy and geopolitical commentators. The decisive defeat leaves sitting Republican President Donald Trump as a lame duck for the final two years of his term, which runs through January 2029, with a unified Democratic-controlled legislature poised to challenge his policy agenda. Vice President JD Vance publicly attributed the election setback to the ongoing Iran conflict, which has driven sharp spikes in global oil prices, a critique that Trump later endorsed. The electoral upheaval unfolds just two weeks ahead of Trump’s scheduled travel to Shenzhen for the November 18-19 APEC Leaders’ Summit, where he is set to hold a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping; the Kremlin confirmed in September that it had floated the possibility of a three-way trilateral gathering between Trump, Xi, and attending Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the immediate aftermath of vote results, Chinese domestic commentators rapidly revised early popular narratives that framed the Republican loss as a favorable development for China, urging the public to reject the simplistic assumption that any setback for the US automatically translates to gains for Beijing. Analysts uniformly emphasized that aggressive containment of China has long since become a cross-party bipartisan consensus in Washington, meaning Democratic control of Congress will not soften existing restrictive measures, many of which have already been codified into federal law. Existing US technology export curbs and targeted investment restrictions against Chinese high-tech firms are set to remain in place, and could even be tightened further as both major US parties compete to demonstrate a harder line on China policy to their respective voter bases. Pundits also outlined a plausible scenario where Trump, facing legislative gridlock on his domestic priorities, could move to wind down ongoing military engagements in Iran and Ukraine to refocus US strategic resources on the Indo-Pacific, while approving long-delayed large-scale arms sales to Taiwan to shore up support from disaffected conservative Republican voters. A Shandong-based political commentator writing under the pen name Weichang noted in a widely circulated Thursday editorial that the widespread initial Chinese public reaction of celebrating Trump’s lame duck status and assuming US domestic chaos would reduce pressure on China was emotionally satisfying but deeply analytically flawed. “Democrats and Republicans are not debating whether to block China’s rise, they are arguing over the most effective methods to do so,” Weichang wrote. “While the US may be distracted by domestic political infighting in the short term, its long-term strategy to contain China will become far more systematic and coordinated under unified Democratic congressional leadership.” This shift, he explained, will move US technology war policies away from the unilateral, impulsive ad-hoc decisions made by the Trump White House over the past two years, and embed them in permanent, binding congressional legislation. The bipartisan MATCH (Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware) Act, first introduced in April, would compel US allies to synchronize their export control regimes to target leading Chinese semiconductor firms including Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). Democratic lawmakers are also expected to push to repair the US alliances that Trump strained with his unilateral “America First” policies, repackaging coordinated China-focused restrictions as a collective effort to defend shared democratic values. Even if Trump is disinclined to deliberately escalate cross-strait or tech tensions, the Democratic-controlled Congress will introduce a steady stream of legislative bills focused on Taiwan, Xinjiang, and chip export controls that will force him to take increasingly hardline public stances. Guizhou-based foreign affairs columnist Jiang Tao echoed this assessment, noting that partisan disagreements over China strategy are tactical, not fundamental. “Republicans prefer to apply unilateral, brute-force pressure on China, while Democrats prioritize building broad international coalitions to enforce restrictions. Their methods differ, but their core goal of suppressing China’s technological and geopolitical rise is identical,” Jiang wrote. He added that cross-strait relations are entering an unprecedentedly high-risk volatile phase: while Trump previously paid relatively little attention to Taiwan and was willing to treat arms sales to the island as a negotiable bargaining chip in trade talks with Beijing, his post-midterm political weakness will push him to aggressively play the Taiwan card to win back alienated conservative base voters. This dynamic will combine with Democratic efforts to amplify cross-strait crisis narratives to push tensions to historic new levels. Back in January 2026, the US Congress approved a $14 billion arms sale package for Taiwan, including advanced air defense missile systems, but the Trump White House subsequently ordered relevant federal agencies to halt all progress on the deal, as it sought to advance trade negotiations with Beijing and avoid disrupting a planned May 2026 bilateral summit with Xi. Trump later publicly described Taiwan arms sales as a useful negotiating chip in US-China talks, and the package remains on indefinite hold pending his formal submission to Congress. The two countries had previously agreed to a tentative trade truce after a full-scale tit-for-tat trade war in April and May 2025, under which the Trump administration agreed to allow expanded sales of older-generation graphics processing units to China to buy time for the US to stockpile critical rare earth minerals, while Beijing agreed to avoid steep retaliatory tariffs and give domestic Chinese manufacturers time to diversify supply chains and relocate production facilities to new markets. The two sides extended that existing trade truce, originally set to expire on November 10, 2026, by an additional two months through January 10, 2027, during a September 2026 meeting between Xi and Trump at the White House. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning offered a restrained official response to the US midterm results at a regular Wednesday press briefing, noting that the elections were an internal US domestic affair, and reaffirming Beijing’s commitment to upholding the consensus reached between the two heads of state, expanding pragmatic cooperation, and managing differences on the basis of mutual respect, fairness, and reciprocity. A third Shandong-based analyst writing under the pen name Yanbian warned that Trump’s electoral setback was objectively negative for China, as it would not produce a less capable US rival, but a far more strategically focused, coordinated one. “China should not pay attention to empty rhetoric from US officials, it should track actual US government budgets, passed legislation, export control lists, military deployments, and procurement activities by US allies,” he wrote, warning against three dangerous common illusions: that China can take a strategic break while the US is consumed by internal partisan fighting, that any future new US administration will soften China policy, and that sustained GDP growth alone will automatically solve China’s domestic high-tech bottlenecks. He emphasized that there are no shortcuts to technological self-reliance, and that China must continue to invest heavily to master every segment of critical industrial supply chains, from advanced semiconductors and lithography equipment to industrial software, operating systems, and high-precision manufacturing. Taiwan-based defense research fellow Chen Liang-chih of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research noted that the immediate priority for both sides ahead of the APEC summit is to ensure that the progress made over the past year in high-level bilateral contacts and trade negotiations remains intact, rather than being derailed by the new US domestic political landscape.

A newly released public opinion survey commissioned by progressive pro-Israel U.S. think tank J Street has uncovered striking, underrepresented perspectives among American Jewish voters, revealing a stark disconnect between mainstream political narratives around antisemitism and the community’s on-the-ground views. Conducted by leading research firm GBAO Strategies between October 28 and November 3, the poll captured responses from a representative sample of Jewish American voters, yielding data that challenges long-held conventional wisdom about the community’s political priorities.

The most headline-grabbing finding shows that a staggering 80% of surveyed Jewish voters believe the Israeli government’s ongoing operations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are directly driving a surge in antisemitic sentiment across the United States. An additional 66% of respondents stated that high-profile campaign spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) targeting political candidates who criticize Israeli policies is actively exacerbating domestic antisemitism. Further, 60% of participating Jewish voters argued that mainstream Jewish advocacy groups that reflexively frame all sharp criticism of Israeli state actions as antisemitic are cynically exploiting legitimate public concerns about antisemitism to shield unpopular Israeli government policies from scrutiny.

Jim Gerstein, founding partner at GBAO Strategies, emphasized that the poll results dismantle oversimplified media and political portrayals of the American Jewish community’s stance on Israel and antisemitism. “For years, conventional narratives about how Jewish communities process concerns over antisemitism and what it means to support Israel in U.S. political spaces have been wildly off base,” Gerstein explained. “What we see here is deeply nuanced, layered thinking that is almost entirely erased from most mainstream coverage of Jewish American views.”

The survey’s findings also align with notable outcomes from the most recent U.S. midterm elections, where Middle East policy, including U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel, emerged as a central wedge issue in competitive races nationwide. In Michigan, progressive Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed secured a historic landslide victory over AIPAC-endorsed Republican Mike Rogers, with separate post-election polling from Mercury Public Affairs showing El-Sayed earned 60% of votes cast by Jewish residents during early voting. El-Sayed ran explicitly on a platform of restructuring U.S. foreign aid to Israel and other Middle Eastern states, and publicly condemned Israeli actions in Gaza as genocidal. The same Mercury Public Affairs survey found that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has repeatedly been targeted by right-wing critics with false accusations of antisemitism, holds a 49% favorability rating among Jewish American voters — more than double the 20% favorability score assigned to outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Across the full J Street-commissioned poll dataset, 72% of Jewish American voters reported casting their ballots for Democratic candidates in the midterms, while 76% stated they support implementing formal U.S. sanctions against violent extremist settler groups operating in the West Bank. J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami noted that the data thoroughly debunks pervasive, harmful stereotypes about American Jewish political priorities that dominated discourse throughout the 2024 election cycle. “For months, politicians and media pundits treated Jewish Americans as a monolithic political football, claiming our community uniformly demands unconditional, unwavering support for every policy of the current Israeli government,” Ben-Ami said. “These results tell a completely different, far more accurate story. Jewish voters overwhelmingly rejected the Trump-aligned Republican agenda, voted for Democratic candidates by a wide margin, and firmly believe the Israeli government must be held accountable for its actions. They want U.S. leadership that works toward lasting, equitable peace and security for both Israeli and Palestinian people, and they are resoundingly rejecting the false framing that supporting Israel means giving its government a blank check with no oversight.”

A historic milestone for Muslim American political representation has emerged from the 2025 U.S. midterm elections, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) confirming a minimum of 97 Muslim American candidates have secured wins across federal, state, and local levels as of Friday morning. An additional 13 candidates hold narrow leads as jurisdictions continue processing mail-in ballots per local election rules, putting the final total on track to far outpace any prior election cycle for Muslim American elected officeholders.

This wave of victories draws from a pool of 168 Muslim American candidates who successfully navigated their party primaries earlier in the cycle, far exceeding past participation metrics. At the federal level, seven Muslim Americans are set to head to Washington D.C. for the upcoming congressional session. Six will serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, including returning incumbents Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Andre Carson, and Lateefah Simon, alongside newly elected progressive newcomers Adam Hamawy and Darializa Avila Chevalier. If Aisha Wahab holds her narrow lead once remaining ballots are tabulated, she will join the House Democratic caucus as a seventh Muslim representative. Making unprecedented history, Abdul El-Sayed has secured a U.S. Senate seat, becoming the first Muslim American ever elected to a full six-year term in the U.S. upper chamber.

Down ballot, 39 Muslim American candidates won statewide offices spanning attorney general posts, state legislative seats, and state senate positions, while 16 claimed county and municipal offices, 27 earned spots on local school boards, and 8 were elected to judicial benches. This record-breaking representation surge unfolds against a documented backdrop of soaring anti-Muslim hostility across the United States. Data from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSO), and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) confirms anti-Muslim rhetoric and organized hostility, largely coordinated by Republican party actors, has reached its highest point in a generation. The CSO’s 36-page investigative report *Manufacturing the Muslim Threat* documented that in 2025 alone, Republican elected officials ran a coordinated anti-Muslim campaign consisting of 1,111 targeted social media posts, 8 discriminatory bills, and a 62-member congressional caucus pushing rhetoric classified as speech with a high likelihood of inciting real-world violence.

Over the month leading up to Election Day, a spate of violent anti-Muslim incidents unfolded nationwide: explicit Islamophobic vandalism targeted multiple buildings across California, Illinois law enforcement received credible threats of gun violence against hijab-wearing Muslim women, and a shooting at a California mosque killed a Muslim security guard. The ISPU’s 2025 National American Islamophobia Index quantifies this rising bigotry, showing the index climbing from 25 in 2022 to 33 in 2025, with the sharpest spikes recorded among white Evangelical communities (15-point increase), Catholic communities (12-point increase), and Jewish communities (11-point increase). MPAC had issued pre-election warnings that coordinated voter intimidation tactics targeting Muslim communities could suppress turnout, but these efforts backfired dramatically.

Muslim American voter registration surged by at least 25 percent over the 12 months leading up to the midterms, and post-election surveys show a staggering 93 percent turnout rate among registered Muslim voters. CAIR data indicates 80 percent of participating Muslim voters cast their ballots for Democratic candidates, compared to just 6 percent for Republican nominees, though exit polling from NBC confirms Muslim voters were the most reliably Democratic demographic of any faith or non-faith group in the 2025 cycle. This marks a notable shift from 2024, when ISPU data showed more than 20 percent of Muslim American voters supported Donald Trump over his Democratic rival, drawn by his pledges to end ongoing foreign wars and curb cost-of-living pressures.

Urooj Ali, communications director for the non-partisan Georgia Voter Project, emphasized that Muslim electoral behavior is not strictly partisan. “From our field programme… we are seeing that Muslims tend to vote more based on policy than party lines. So a lot of them actually identify as independent rather with the Democratic Party or with the Republican Party,” she explained, noting that Georgia, a fiercely contested Southern swing state, broke its midterm early voting record this cycle, with roughly 30,000 Muslim residents casting ballots early – a figure nearly matching the total 36,000 Muslim votes cast across the entire 2022 midterm election, including Election Day turnout. Among the historic winners in Georgia is Ruwa Romman, one of four hijab-wearing Muslim women elected to state senate seats nationwide this cycle.

CAIR’s post-election survey found 70 percent of Muslim American voters cited rising anti-Muslim sentiment as a key motivating factor driving them to the polls, while 76 percent named Gaza and Palestinian human rights as top-tier policy priorities, with 80 percent stating that Israel’s U.S.-backed military campaign in Gaza – which the United Nations and leading Holocaust scholars have formally classified as a genocide – was a major influence on their voting decisions. Sameerah Munshi, a Gen Z Muslim activist who made headlines earlier this year for resigning from Donald Trump’s Religious Liberties Commission in protest over the ousting of a Catholic colleague who advocated for Palestinian rights, noted that younger Muslim voters who did not experience the full trauma of the post-9/11 era are far more politically emboldened than prior generations, and that shifting mainstream cultural conversations around Palestinian rights have further galvanized community engagement.

The midterm results also upended long-standing assumptions about progressive political campaigning, as successful Democratic candidates increasingly centered their personal faith values rather than avoiding public religious expression. In deep-red Texas, where nearly every statewide Republican incumbent was ousted in a historic blue wave, long-serving anti-Muslim Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick – who chaired the Religious Liberties Commission that removed Munshi’s colleague – lost his re-election bid by a wide margin, defeated by the first Democrat and first woman to hold the post in nearly 30 years. Only staunchly pro-Israel, frequently Islamophobic Senator Ted Cruz retained his senior Republican post in Texas, where he has publicly attacked two newly elected Democratic Senate candidates who have openly embraced interfaith solidarity with Muslim and Palestinian communities. Newly elected Texas Senator James Talarico, a former public school teacher and Christian progressive, has stated publicly that Islam is an “equal pathway to truth” and condemned the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as morally abhorrent, while newly elected Kansas Senator Adam Hamilton – the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in the state in nearly a century – has spoken of his belief that Christians and Muslims will worship together in heaven, remarks that drew public outrage from Cruz.

Haris Tarin, vice president for policy and programming at MPAC, noted that this shift towards values-centered campaigning resonates deeply with diverse faith communities. “Historically, Democrats didn’t know how to talk about faith. They were scared to talk about faith. They actually tried their best to run away from talking about faith. What [Tuesday] showed was that the Democrats who actually lean into their faith, whatever their respective faith may be, it works, because Americans want authenticity and they want people who actually believe in who they are themselves,” he explained, pointing to shared moral framing across faith traditions: “At James Talarico’s victory speech, you had people holding ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ signs. That is the same as saying ‘alhamdulillah’ on stage. That’s the same expression.”

ISPU polling also confirms that beyond top-tier priorities of addressing Islamophobia and Palestinian human rights, the vast majority of Muslim American voters cast their ballots based on core economic issues including job creation and cost-of-living relief, mirroring the priorities of most U.S. voters. The new cohort of Muslim elected officials also represent a diverse spectrum of ideological positions, including newly re-elected Arizona House Republican Abe Hamawy, who earned former President Trump’s endorsement despite the Republican party’s formal alignment with hardline pro-Israel policies and documented history of anti-Muslim organizing.

Ahmad Maaty, chair of the non-partisan Muslim Americans in Public Service, celebrated the record results in a public statement, noting “Seeing members of our community increasingly represented in elected office and civic institutions is both inspiring and meaningful. These victories reflect years of community engagement, perseverance, hard work, and the growing participation of Muslim Americans in shaping the future of our communities and our country.” Even unsuccessful candidates, including Muslim progressive Junaid Ahmed who fell short in Illinois’ 8th District Democratic primary earlier this year, hailed the results as a historic win for U.S. political diversity, and announced plans to mount another House campaign in 2028. Ali of the Georgia Voter Project emphasized that the Muslim community’s shared political priority is rooted in collective care rather than a religiously defined partisan agenda: “Being Muslim is more of a way of life rather than an identity. It’s more… to ensure that like we are leaving the world a better place than we received it.”

A newly released analysis from independent foreign policy watchdog Responsible Statecraft has laid bare a historically underperforming election cycle for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), revealing the pro-Israel lobbying group poured more than $84 million into the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, with roughly two-thirds of that massive sum directed at unsuccessful candidates.

Breaking down the spending breakdown, AIPAC’s affiliated Super PACs and allied advocacy networks funneled a staggering $55 million toward campaigns that ultimately ended in defeat. The single largest allocation of these failed funds, totaling approximately $32 million, was deployed in a high-profile bid to unseat Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat projected to win Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat. This cycle marks one of the worst electoral showings for AIPAC in recent memory, a trend analysts attribute to widespread voter frustration over the U.S.-backed Israeli military campaign against Iran, which many voters tied directly to persistent spikes in national cost-of-living pressures.

The sharp reversal in AIPAC’s electoral fortune stands in stark contrast to its recent track record: during the 2022 midterms, its flagship Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, saw 69% of its total spending go toward victorious endorsed candidates, and that success rate climbed even higher to 87% in the 2024 election cycle, held in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

In his triumphant victory address earlier this week, Senator-elect El-Sayed directly called out AIPAC by name, citing a $42 million figure spent against his campaign – a total that accounts for additional independent expenditures from smaller aligned Super PACs beyond AIPAC’s direct reported outlays. “To AIPAC, who spent $42 million against us: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice,” El-Sayed declared, referencing AIPAC’s earlier failed attempt to defeat him during the competitive Democratic primary race.

AIPAC also poured significant resources into defeating Daniel Biss, a prominent critic of current Israeli government policies. Biss, the former mayor of Evanston, Illinois, and grandson of Holocaust survivors, secured the Democratic nomination for Illinois’ 9th congressional district earlier this year despite nearly $6 million in AIPAC spending targeting his campaign, before coasting to a general election win in the reliably blue district on election night.

While AIPAC faced high-profile losses of progressive critics, the lobbying organization remains a formidable force in U.S. political circles. AIPAC released a victory statement on Wednesday via its X (formerly Twitter) account, claiming more than 234 candidates endorsed by its members had secured electoral wins, though it did not publish a full public list of those races. For context, thousands of candidates across all party affiliations ran for federal, state and local offices in the 2026 midterms, and AIPAC retains deep ties to Democratic congressional leadership: both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have received campaign support from AIPAC’s donor network, with the group releasing a separate formal statement congratulating the two leaders on their caucuses’ strong election showings.

Even so, longstanding critics of AIPAC are framing the 2026 midterm results as a landmark turning point in U.S. electoral politics. AIPAC Tracker, an independent project that monitors the lobbying group’s influence across Washington, confirmed that 30 newly elected members of Congress won their races without accepting any financial backing or formal endorsement from AIPAC. Even prominent Republican figures acknowledged the lobbying headwinds the group faced in 2026: Vice President JD Vance noted in a post-election analysis published Wednesday that Republican underperformance on election day was driven in large part by voter backlash to the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, a military campaign AIPAC had openly endorsed as part of its longstanding policy priorities.

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