Mobilizing Muslim Voters: How Campaign Contact Shaped U.S. Muslim Political Behavior in 2020

Abstract

Campaigns often contact potential voters in election years to mobilize them into voting and to educate them about candidates and issues. This contact can be especially powerful for minorities, who tend to experience lower rates of contact. Here, we evaluate whether contact by different groups was linked to Muslim political behavior and candidate preferences in the 2020 presidential election. Contact by partisan campaigns and community groups leading up to elections have previously been shown to break the “cycle of undermobilization” that minorities have long experienced, mobilizing these historically underrepresented groups into politics. We turn to the 2020 CMPS, which includes a Muslim oversample, and evaluate not only which subsets of the Muslim population were contacted prior to the 2020 presidential election, but also whether campaign contact effectively mobilized then into a range of political actions and shaped their candidate preferences. We find that campaign contact was indeed an important tool in increasing Muslims’ engagement in American politics. Not only were some of the contacts effective at increasing turnout, all were associated with greater political behaviors, beyond voting. Exposure to more forms of contact also activated Muslim voters, enabling them to overcome traditional barriers that exclude minoritized communities from politics.