Marwan Alie is a man of routine.
Each day, he wakes up at 4 a.m. Every other day, he goes to the gym and swims laps at The Avalon Golf & Country Club, located near his home in Howland Township.
His discipline is a product of his time in the U.S. Air Force.
“It gave really good bearing, very structured with your everyday life,” Alie said of his service. “I could see myself still locked on every day as I wake up and do my normal routines with work, or it's just my everyday life.”
That’s what the 41-year-old Republican said he’s seeking in the upcoming presidential election: stability. He thinks he can find that by reelecting former President Donald Trump this fall.
The biggest draw, said Alie, a real estate agent, is the prospect of lower inflation and an improved economy, which he perceived was better during Trump's time in the White House.
“Real estate business was just booming. In the military, we got raises. Things were still much cheaper,” said Alie. “It took years for him to get to that point, of course. So a lot of people are banking on him going and bringing all that back.”
The NEO Voter Voices poll showed that more than half of Northeast Ohioans agree with Alie's position that the economy would be the most likely issue to shape their presidential vote — more than every other possible topic combined. A majority of those respondents, 64%, told pollsters they’re worried about the economy, with nearly 45% saying they’re “very” or “extremely” worried, according to the poll commissioned by Ideastream Public Media, WKYC and Signal Ohio.
Alie called Trump his “ideal candidate” and believes Trump beat President Joe Biden in 2020, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The unfounded theory of a “stolen election” spread by Trump and other Republicans in office was, in part, what drove his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and spurred some GOP voter mistrust in election credibility.
Post-election audits and recounts in six swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — found no evidence of fraud and reaffirmed Biden's victory. But distrust in the 2020 election results has grown since the attack on the Capitol. Last December, less than a third of Republicans, 31%, said they think Biden's election was legitimate, according to a Washington Post - University of Maryland poll.
“We definitely have to do a lot of the research and look more into it,” said Alie of the 2020 results. He's concerned about turmoil and unrest, no matter who wins in November. He said he hopes "we don't ever end up in a civil war."
“I don't think there's anything wrong with a peaceful protest,” he said. “The rioting is where it becomes problematic."
Despite his support of Trump, Alie said he is not a straight-down-the-ticket Republican voter. He appreciates the bipartisan work of Ohio's Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, who’s running for reelection against Republican Bernie Moreno, a Cleveland businessman who has Trump’s endorsement.
“As much as I like Donald Trump, people need to stop looking at the fact that he would endorse this person, this person, this person,” Alie said, mimicking someone going through a checklist. “People need to think for their own and do their own research. For somebody to work across lines, that's golden, okay? It's very rare that people are like that. So, yeah, I think Sherrod Brown would be a great candidate to continue.”
Alie was born and raised in Warren. His parents are from the West Bank, once part of the traditional eastern Mediterranean region of Palestine. They live in the Warren area, as do Alie's two sisters.
He is a first-generational Palestinian-American, but the Israel-Hamas war does not rank among the top election issues for him the way it does for many Palestinian Americans on the left. Alie said all foreign conflicts concern him because of their demands on U.S. resources.
"If we continue to be the world police, we could become very hated in most countries, and that could be a big issue," he said.
Aside from inflation, a top-of-mind issue for Alie is crime. Public safety is the third most-cited pressing problem facing Northeast Ohioans, according to the NEO Voter Voices poll, but relatively low numbers shared having personally unsafe experiences.
The same is not true for Alie. In March, he was checking on a vacant property when he witnessed the shooting of a postal worker who was killed while driving his mail van.
Like many cities, Warren’s police force is understaffed. According to the Warren Police Department's 2023 Annual Report, there are 46 officers, seven less than the 53 officers authorized in the city budget.
Alie believes the shortage is due in part to the public scrutiny and criticism that officers receive, especially since the 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck.
Opinions of police did shift after Floyd's death, surveys showed. In 2020, the share of Americans who said police used the right amount of force in each situation dropped 10 points to 35% from 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. By early 2023, that share had rebounded to 44%
“I have seen kids at such a young age, even today, who had a dream of being a policeman, saying, 'I don't want to be a police officer anymore,'" said Alie. "That’s sad. That really is.”
But Alie also said he sees a lot of good in Warren. He cites more restaurants Downtown and the restoration and reopening of the historic Robins Theatre, which stood vacant for 45 years.
“Warren used to be, like, Downtown, dead, completely dead,” Alie recalled. “You wouldn’t even know you're in the city. Now, even on the weekday, in the evening, you see cars lined up all over the place. I have sold condos [in] Downtown Warren — who would buy a condo, Downtown Warren? And people are buying them.”
He craves that rebound for the rest of the country, too. He wants stability: a stable economy, a stable world order and a stable election process.
It's a vision that makes sense for someone like Alie, a realtor whose job it is to sell people a piece of the American Dream.
