The two highest-ranking Democrats in Congress, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), have not yet endorsed Zohran Mamdani, their party’s nominee in New York City’s upcoming mayoral election. Last week, The New York Times reported that Schumer’s reluctance to do so stems in part from Mamdani’s deeply critical views of Israel and a “sense of responsibility to Jewish voters.”
Democrats’ growing opposition to Israel
But Schumer’s “ironclad” support of Israel is increasingly out of step with his party’s base, including a sizable majority of Jewish Democrats. A recent Quinnipiac University Poll, for instance, revealed that two-thirds of Democrats oppose sending more military aid to Israel. And over three-quarters of Democratic registered voters think that the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza.
Rank-and-file Democrats were not always so staunchly opposed to Israel. The chart below instead shows that they were significantly more likely to sympathize with the Israelis over the Palestinians for several weeks following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks.
Democratic support for Israel has plummeted since then, though. YouGov/Economist polls now show that Democrats are nearly 40 percentage points more likely to say that they sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Gallup’s polling similarly shows that the share of Democrats who approve of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has declined from 36% in November 2023 down to just 8% this past July.
Among Republicans, strong support for Israel has remained relatively steady over the past two years, in both the Gallup and YouGov/Economist data. The upshot is that the widening partisan divide in public opinion stems entirely from growing Democratic opposition to Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza.
Jewish Democrats increasingly disapprove of the war in Gaza
This big partisan divide also extends into Jewish Americans’ opinions of Israel. A new survey of 1,166 Jewish adults, conducted by Ipsos in collaboration with James Druckman at the University of Rochester and Bruce Fuller at the University of California, found that most Jews in the U.S. disapprove of Israel’s two-year military campaign in Gaza (53% vs. 31% approve).
The chart below further shows that this opposition is heavily concentrated among the large share of Jewish Americans who identify with or lean towards the Democratic Party.
Indeed, the left side of the display shows that 70% of Jewish Democrats disapprove of Israel’s war efforts during the past two years. You can see on the right side of the display, however, that only 16% of Jewish Americans who identify with or lean towards the GOP disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Unfortunately, the lack of consistent polling data makes it impossible to pinpoint just how much support for Israel has declined among Jewish Democrats over the past two years. But it is clearly waning. After all, most Jewish Democrats (53%) said that “the way Israel is carrying out its response to Hamas” was acceptable in a February 2024 Pew poll of over 1,000 Jews living in the United States.
Why Jewish Democrats oppose Israel’s military campaign
American Jews, in general, and Jewish Democrats, in particular, have historically been committed to core liberal values like pluralism, tolerance, egalitarianism, and support for minority rights. Pew survey data, for example, show that Jewish Democrats are much more concerned than either Jewish Republicans or U.S. adults in general about the prevalence of discrimination against marginalized outgroups (e.g., Black people, gays and lesbians, Muslims, and Hispanics).
Those longstanding values, of course, are diametrically at odds with Israel’s mounting human rights violations against the Palestinians since the war in Gaza began nearly two years ago. So, it is not at all surprising that most American Jews, including a super-majority of Jewish Democrats, now oppose Israel’s ongoing military campaign.
In fact, it appears that political and ideological aversion to Israel’s conduct increasingly trumps religious identity and in-group affinities in Jewish Democrats’ opinions of that country.
