Source: The Washington Times
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20061114-121054-5433r.htm
Muslim voters, an electoral ally of President Bush as recently as 2000, played a key role in turning over control of the Senate to Democrats, a study shows.
"Although the-get-out-the-vote campaign was nonpartisan, there is no doubt that our strategy to support a large Muslim voter turnout in areas with potentially close election races was a correct one," said Mahdi Bray, director of the Muslim American Society (MAS) Freedom Foundation. "We looked at the states with close races and matched them up with states that had a large concentration of Muslims."
MAS also targeted races in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
In the U.S. Senate race in Virginia, more than 50,000 self-identified Muslim voters went to the polls, MAS said. A commanding majority of them, 92 percent, or 47,092, voted for the Democratic challenger, James H. Webb Jr. Mr. Webb won his race against Sen. George Allen, the Republican incumbent, by 9,326 votes.
"If Muslims had decided to put their weight behind Allen, Republicans would have had at least a tie in the Senate," said Mukit Hossain of MAS, which conducted the survey.