Israel Is Losing Americans’ Support. Will Democrats Take Notice?

New polls show broad opposition to Israel’s genocide — and that Democrats’ intransigence on Gaza greatly reduced turnout in the Nov. 5 election.

By Halah Ahmad, +972 Magazine

In recent months, multiple new public opinion surveys have illustrated the extent to which Israel has lost Americans’ support. In early April, a poll from the Pew Research Center attracted widespread attention when it revealed that more than half of U.S. adults now express an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli state — an increase of over 10 percent since March 2023. And this month, after Israel launched a new military operation to occupy the entire Gaza Strip, a new poll from Data for Progress showed that 76 percent of U.S. voters support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and 51 percent think that U.S. President Donald Trump should demand one.

These dramatic shifts come alongside several recent polls demonstrating that Gaza played a definitive role in the Democrats’ loss in the November U.S. presidential election. In February, a YouGov poll from the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project found that the genocide was the leading reason cited by former Democratic voters who did not cast a ballot for former Vice President Kamala Harris.

And beyond those “single issue” anti-genocide voters, new data analysis suggests that Democrats lost a larger population of voters — whose top concerns were rising inflation, the state of the economy, and other domestic issues — due to the demobilization effects of the Democrats’ failure on Gaza. In other words, more than by a rightward shift among Democratic voters, the November election was shaped by the fact that many of them simply sat it out.

These findings add to the evidence not only that support for Palestinian rights and a Palestinian state are far higher than many within the political establishment have been willing to acknowledge, but that Democrats’ refusal to take these issues seriously has become a severe political liability.

Yet over four months into the Trump presidency, even as it positions itself as the party defending democracy, the Democratic establishment has failed to respond to public sentiment and signal any serious shift in its support for Israel.

At the beginning of April, for instance, Senator Cory Booker broke Congressional records with an over 25-hour speech on the Senate floor in April to protest the Trump Administration and “defend democracy”; two days later, he voted against two resolutions that would block billions of dollars in new weapons sales to Israel, shortly after it violated the ceasefire with renewed attacks on Gaza.