Carol Kelly wrote:
Those “people” being Muslims. Re-district!
MORE....
https://www.politifact.com/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2019/mar/05/viral-image/meme-wrong-about-somali-americans-ilhan-omars-dist/However, the post is wrong on multiple levels.
Did Obama settle 43,000 Somali refugees in Minnesota?
For refugee resettlement figures on Obama’s watch, we turned to an interactive website from the Refugee Processing Center that provides data going back to 2002.
As it turns out, 6,320 refugees from Somalia were resettled in Minnesota between 2009 and 2017, when Obama served as president. That’s about one-seventh of the amount claimed in the meme.
That’s fewer than the number settled in Minnesota during the final seven years of the George W. Bush presidency. From 2002 to 2008, the government resettled 9,858 Somalis in Minnesota.
During the Obama years, 54,514 Somali refugees were resettled nationally, meaning that Minnesota accounted for about 11.5 percent of the national total.
During the Bush years, the national total was 46,439, making Minnesota’s share higher under Bush than it was under Obama, at 21.2 percent.
Did Omar win because of Somali-American votes?
Omar won the Democratic nomination with 65,237 votes, which was 24,081 votes ahead of her closest competitor. (In such a strongly Democratic district, the Republican nominee ended up losing to Omar, 78 percent to 22 percent.)
So was the Somali-American electorate in the district the main reason she won the all-important primary? We don’t have exact figures, but we were able to reverse-engineer some answers.
According to the refugee resettlement data, we found that the major jurisdictions of the 5th district -- mainly Minneapolis, but a few others as well -- received roughly half of the Somali refugees who were resettled in the state under both Bush and Obama.
If we use the high end of the Census Bureau’s statewide estimate for Somali Americans in Minnesota -- 55,200 -- then this means the 5th district was probably home to about 27,600 Somali Americans.
So, Omar won more than 65,000 primary votes in a district that likely had about 27,600 Somali-Americans. This means she had to have won tens of thousands of votes from non-Somalis.
And even this probably overstates the impact of Somali-American voters.
Not all of the 27,600 Somalis in the district are able to vote, since Minnesota’s Somali population skews young.
In addition, even those who were eligible to vote may not have turned out at the polls. The district as a whole saw only 18.8 percent of the population turn out to vote in the primary. If the district’s Somali population turned out at that rate, no more than about 5,000 Somali voters would have cast a primary ballot.
And 5,000 votes would have been less than one-tenth of Omar’s primary vote total, and only about one-fifth of her margin of victory.
Our ruling
The viral image said, "Obama settled 43,000 Somalian refugees in Minnesota. As of 2016, there were around 80,000. No wonder Ilhan Omar was elected. It was planned."
The meme significantly overstates the number of Somali refugees settled under Obama in Minnesota, the total number of Somali refugees in the state, and the impact that Somali voters could have had on the primary election results, much less the lopsided general election. In no way can Omar’s victory have been "planned," by Obama or anyone else.
We rate the statement Pants on Fire.