When Israel lost Democratic voters, in 3 charts
When Israel lost Democratic voters, in 3 charts
Among Democratic voters, Israel’s reputation is in tatters.
Polls show Democratic voters have dramatically unfavorable views of Israel. Three incumbent Democrats who’ve supported Israel lost primaries in recent weeks; pro-Israel groups are spending millions of dollars to try to defeat high-profile candidates in other races. And there’s been dwindling Democratic support in Congress for weapons sales and even aid to the Jewish nation.
The basic reason is obvious: the devastation of the Gaza war. Yet though Democrats and especially young voters soured on the war soon after it began, rank-and-file Democrats did not initially turn so sharply against the country of Israel itself.
Indeed, a review of years of polling data shows that, in retrospect, the turning point — the year the bottom fell out — was 2025.
That year, a confluence of events — Donald Trump succeeding Joe Biden as president, Trump’s decision to join Israel’s attack on Iran, and that summer’s intense hunger crisis in Gaza — spurred a shift in which hostility toward Israel was no longer just for the Democratic left. Much of the party’s mainstream began feeling it too.
What’s resulted, pollster and University of Maryland scholar Shibley Telhami argued to me, has been “a paradigm shift.” The young generation of Democrats, Telhami said, quickly came to see Israel as “a genocidal villain” — and then many in the older generations came to a similar conclusion.
That’s not to say that Democrats are now all-out opposed to Israel’s existence. In an email, Jake McClory of the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC pointed to his own group’s polling of Democrats from last October, which found that 75 percent say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland.
But as bad as things are for Israel now, there’s still room to get worse. In one alarming sign for those sympathetic to the country, polls show that Democrats are now unfavorably disposed not just to the nation’s leaders — but also to its citizenry. A new Pew Research Center poll found that just 43 percent of Democrats say they view the Israeli people favorably — down from 58 percent in 2024.
This is partly why the question of timing matters. While Israel has struggled to maintain its support over the years, the arc of its decline suggests a complete collapse was not inevitable: Instead, the polling tells a story of Israel’s specific actions and partisan politics mixing together at a sensitive time to turn public opinion decisively against its government — and raise its importance in Democratic primaries.
How mainstream Democrats turned against Israel last year
In a sense, Democrats’ turn against Israel has been in the works for years. Gallup has polled voters about whether they are more sympathetic with the Israelis or the Palestinians for more than two decades. Among Democrats, a historic advantage for Israel tightened in the 2010s and vanished in the early 2020s.
Sympathy for Israel after the October 7, 2023, attacks quickly disappeared, as the country became viewed as the aggressor rather than the victim. In February 2024, 43 percent of Democrats sympathized with Palestinians more, and 35 percent sympathized with Israelis more.
“A few months after October 7, younger and progressive Democrats overwhelmingly took the opinion that Israel was committing a genocide,” Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told me. “But there were still elements of the Democratic Party — people watching MSNBC or NPR — that weren’t convinced. And the Biden administration was going back and forth.”
Indeed, Biden had attempted a kind of “middle ground” approach to the conflict, in which he tried to rein in Israel’s actions in Gaza somewhat while remaining sympathetic to the Israelis’ war aims.
But Biden’s status as the leader of the Democratic Party also complicated the debate. Protests against Israel, like the “uncommitted” movement, were divisive not just because of disagreements over the war, but because many Democrats saw them as undermining Biden (and later Kamala Harris) ahead of the 2024 election. When pro-Israel groups successfully backed challenges to left-wing incumbents that cycle, the ads often focused not on Israel but on their targets’ perceived disloyalty to Biden.
Once Trump took office and began working closely with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, this concern dissipated — and what Bendaas calls the “partisan-ization” of Israel took place. The pro-Israeli view of the conflict became much more associated with the GOP — and many older Democrats with more mainstream views began viewing Israel more negatively, as polarization did its work.
Milan Singh, a commentator at the center-left publication The Argument, concurred, recently writing: “When Trump came back into office, it was like a pressure valve was released. Older Democrats no longer felt conflicted between loyalty to their party’s leader and the arguments of elites they trusted.”
Indeed, by February 2025, the gap between Democrats’ sympathy for the Israelis and Palestinians in Gallup polling had turned into a chasm. 59 percent of Democrats now said they sympathized with Palestinians more, and just 21 percent sympathized more with Israelis. (In the same period, the share of Republicans and independents who said they were sympathetic to Israel also decreased, though by much less dramatic margins.)
These changes put public support for Israel on very shaky ground. But the events of the next few months sent it crashing through that floor, while also raising the issue’s importance among primary voters.
In March, a brief ceasefire collapsed and fighting in Gaza resumed.
Then in June, Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear program, a decision that was overwhelmingly opposed by Democratic voters.
And later in the summer, a hunger crisis in Gaza, widely blamed on Israel’s mishandling of food aid, was heavily covered and drew condemnations even from typically reliable defenders within the party. That July, a majority of Senate Democrats voted to block a weapons sale to Israel, a high watermark at the time that’s only grown since then.
All the while, Israel’s polling among Democrats kept on worsening. A Quinnipiac poll last August found that 77 percent of Democrats thought Israel had committed genocide (a sharp increase from earlier polls), and that just 13 percent of Democrats sympathized with the Israelis more than the Palestinians.
But perhaps the most striking shift has been in views of the Israeli people.
In Pew Research Center polls both before and after the October 7 attacks, Democrats’ views on the Israeli people had remained fairly stable — suggesting many were making a distinction between government policies they opposed and affection for the country’s people.
This mirrors the way Democratic politicians often talk about Israel, with many criticizing Netanyahu and his governing coalition while stressing their support for the country’s people and their security. That’s true even of some candidates who’ve made criticism of Israel central to their campaigns: Brad Lander, who defeated Rep. Dan Goldman in New York with left-wing support last month, identifies as a “liberal Zionist.”
By September 2025, though, the number of Democrats saying they viewed the Israeli people favorably had dropped significantly — from 58 percent the previous year, down to 48 percent.
And another Pew poll released last week found that number had dropped yet further, to 43 percent. Conversely, Democrats’ views of the Palestinian people (67 percent favorable, in last week’s poll) haven’t changed much over this period.
This new reality is already having major ramifications in Democratic primary elections across the country — and is likely to weigh heavily on contenders for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination. What once was a split on Israel among the Democratic base has become a consensus: Most of their voters view the country very negatively indeed.
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