U.S. Muslim Voters Won't Be Enough to Elect President
The Claim
In 20 years there will be enough Muslim voters in the United States to elect the president.
News posted on
Emerging story
A popular Facebook post says that in 20 years there will be enough Muslim voters in the United States to elect the president.
Misbar’s Analysis
Douglas Massey, director of Princeton University's Office of Population Research, weighed in on the post:
“That claim is completely untenable. Muslims are less than 1 percent of the U.S. population and… [including immigration] are projected to reach 2.1 percent by 2050.”
In corroboration of this statement, a January 2018 Pew Research Center report estimated there were about 3.45 million U.S. Muslims of all ages in 2017, and that the religious group made up about 1.1 percent of the country’s total population. Thus we can imagine that the US Muslim population contains a simliar percentage of eligible voters compared to the total. Still, this doubling of the Muslim population in 20 years represents a very fast rate of growth for the community.
Overall, though, the assumption that a group of people who share religion, ethnicity, nationality, or other traits all think, behave, or vote uniformly is widely considered to be prejudicial, a pre-judgment of peoples’ individuality based on the heuristic of a collective.
Regardless, in addition to this story, here are some interesting (and True) statistics regarding the Electoral College, as well as regarding American population growth between now and 2050. In 2016, NPR determined the lowest percentage of voters a candidate would need to reach the U.S. White House. Assuming a race of two candidates, they found that this threshold is as low as 23 percent.
Furthermore, by 2050, the projected number of Americans who identify with no religion at all will be around 100,860,000 (25% of the total). Furthermore, with current immigration rates, by 2050 European-Americans will comprise less than 50% of the nation’s population, with first-generation immigrants composing 1/5 of the nation’s total population, meaning that a hypothetical coalition of non-Europeans would indeed be able to elect the president.
In summary, based on all available population estimates, Muslim-Americans will comprise 2% of the population by 2050, not nearly enough to elect a president.
