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DEMOCRATS ARE GETTING A BRUTAL LESSON IN HOW MUCH THE POLITICS ON
ISRAEL HAVE CHANGED  
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Y.L. Al-Sheikh
October 23, 2025
The Nation
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_ From Pete Buttigieg to Gavin Newsom, party bigwigs are finding out
the hard way that the old platitudes don’t work anymore. _

Pete Buttigieg’s appearance on Pod Save America did not go very
well., Breaking Points

 

When the North Carolina Democratic Party adopted a
first-of-its-kind resolution
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its June convention calling Israel an apartheid state and demanding a
total US arms embargo, it didn’t receive much attention. And yet, in
the months since, it’s become clear that North Carolina’s
Democrats were ahead of a growing trend.

Multiple Democratic members of Congress who were previously backed by
AIPAC decided that it wasn’t tenable to be affiliated with the
pro-Israel group anymore. Deborah Ross
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Valerie Foushee, two members of the North Carolina congressional
delegation, have both disavowed
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organization, and the latter called for offensive military aid to
Israel to be halted. Elsewhere in the country, the likes of Morgan
McGarvey
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Kentucky and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts
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now trying to distance themselves as well.

These are relatively centrist Democrats, and yet AIPAC doesn’t seem
to be able to maintain its previously unquestioned influence on them.
What’s happening
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exactly?

To answer that question, one only has to look at the polling of
Americans, and Democrats more specifically, on the issue of Palestine.
Two years of genocide in Gaza and intensified apartheid across the
rest of occupied Palestine have severely degraded the public’s
perception of US support for Israel.

A Pew Research poll
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this month found that 59 percent of all Americans view the Israeli
state negatively. Among Democrats, that number increases to a whopping
77 percent. A _New York Times_/Siena Poll
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September found that 40 percent of all Americans, and 60 percent of
Democrats, believe that Israel has murdered children intentionally.
And according to a Pew poll
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earlier in the year, negative Democratic perceptions of Israel have
risen across every age demographic, with 71 percent of Democrats aged
18–49 having a negative view of Israel in 2025, and 66 percent of
Democrats over 50.

Clearly, the pro-Israel consensus has evaporated among the Democratic
and liberal base. Not only that—being uncritical of Israel and its
regime of control over Palestinians today is becoming an impediment to
Democratic politicians. While it won’t decisively win elections on
its own, especially in a local context where foreign policy is a
secondary or even tertiary campaign plank, a Democrat who is willing
to buck the previous consensus could benefit from being able
to distinguish themselves
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the party tries to find a path out of the deluge of Trumpian
authoritarianism. (Zohran Mamdani is the current favorite to become
New York’s next mayor in part because he understood that
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And, as several high-profile Democrats are discovering, a candidate
who tries to sing the same old song about Israel could find themselves
on the backfoot.

Take, for example, Pete Buttigieg. In a recent interview with _Pod
Save America_, the usually eloquent Buttigieg was asked a series of
straightforward questions. Would he support restricting aid
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Israel? Would he recognize the State of Palestine
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as other G7 countries have done recently? Would Israel’s behavior
finally be a factor in how we treat the country? Instead of having a
ready answer, Buttigieg delivered vague platitudes about moral
conscience and needing to support Israel’s security. In particular,
Buttigieg told
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“I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put
your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going
on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” It was an
odd choice, to say the least, to call an apartheid state a friend and
talk of genocide as somethig akin to self-harm.

PETE BUTTIGIEG: "I think that we as Israel's strongest ally and
friend, you put your arm around your friend when there's something
like this going on and talk about what we're prepared to do together."
pic.twitter.com/TUlFClFuh4 [[link removed]]

— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) August 11,
2025
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In the days that followed, Buttigieg was criticized
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Democratic public officials
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online. As a man who aspires to higher office, Buttigieg seemed to
understand where the wind was blowing. He sought to clarify and update
his public-facing positions in a subsequent interview
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Yes, he would indeed have supported Bernie Sanders’s resolutions to
restrict aid. Yes, he would in fact recognize the State of Palestine.
No, the US should not pass another 10-year military aid package
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a country that doesn’t change its behavior.

None of these positions are particularly radical, and it is rather odd
that it took this long for a potential 2028 front-runner to adopt
them, but it is notable that Buttigieg, who is not on the left flank,
has done so. It indicates something serious about the underlying
dynamics in Democratic politics, and to his credit, he sensed it.
The center has shifted
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Buttigieg is not the only one to have sensed it, though.

Another potential candidate for president, Senator Cory Booker, went
on the _I’ve Had It_ podcast last week. He probably thought he was
going to get softball questions about almond milk like Barack Obama
did when he appeared there in 2024
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grilled him relentlessly on Israel. When asked by cohost Jennifer
Welch if he believes Netanyahu is a war criminal, Booker called it a
“loaded and hot
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question designed to be a litmus test. In fact, he even went as far as
to say that the question undermines his ability to help make peace
happen.

To say that Welch was unimpressed might be an understatement, since
the pod’s official social media scorched
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not being direct in answering the question.

It’s a simple yes or no question pic.twitter.com/D6jY01uflY
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— I've Had It Podcast (@ivehaditpodcast) October 14, 2025
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California Governor Gavin Newsom, for his part, fared even worse when
podcaster Van Latham asked him about AIPAC in a recent interview,
responding by short-circuiting
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saying the question was “interesting” a full seven times.

pic.twitter.com/QJDAaZZFKR [[link removed]]

— Majority Report (@majorityfm) October 15, 2025
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Current candidates for public office, as well as incumbents, are also
feeling the pressure to differentiate from past positions and the old
consensus. Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat running for Senate in
Michigan, recently said at a campaign event in Allegan that
she believes
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has committed genocide in Gaza—a comment that many pundits would
have seen as fatal to her campaign even a year ago. This means that
two of the three candidates in the Michigan primary now agree that the
Gaza genocide is real, with Abdul el-Sayed having been clear
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the issue from the very start. (Elissa Slotkin, the sitting Michigan
senator, has said that she would have supported
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bid to restrict military assistance.)

McMorrow also said she would not welcome AIPAC’s endorsement nor
accept any donations from them—a seeming response to reports that
she had tried to solicit AIPAC’s support
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The announcement from Moulton—a hawkish Democrat with no history of
boldness on this issue—that he would be returning all AIPAC
donations and would refuse AIPAC’s support
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unseat Senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts was even more startling.

But the reality is that the trend line against Israel’s public image
isn’t likely to reverse in any dramatic way. An _Economist_/YouGov
poll
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August found that 45 percent of the public believe Israel is
committing genocide, and that 65 percent of all Democrats believe that
there is a genocide. Seven in 10 Harris voters in 2024 believe that
Israel has committed genocide. A whopping 54 percent of all Americans
aged 18–29 believe that Israel has committed genocide.

The Palestinian-American pollster Shibley Telhami has noted that this
is a paradigmatic shift
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public perception which is unlikely to be overturned. A whole set of
people believe that Israel has committed the highest crime in
international law, and this will influence Democratic (and American)
policy in the decades to come.

As of writing this, a so-called ceasefire in Gaza is supposedly in
effect. Despite this, Palestinians are still being routinely murdered
and displaced in Gaza and in the occupied West Bank. The theft of
Palestinian land via settlement and colonization
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ongoing. The Palestinians of occupied East Jerusalem are still under
threat. The Palestinian citizens of Israel are facing
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of the most oppressive days since the martial law on them was lifted
in 1966. It is thus abundantly clear that the question of Palestine
has not been resolved [[link removed]]. And
absent a comprehensive resolution of the question of Palestine, which
must clearly guarantee our rights and our ability to return and live
as equal and free people on the land, this change in American public
perception against supporting Israel won’t just be magically
stopped. Seeing as how Trump is in no way capable of facilitating this
resolution, it is safe to assume that these changes in public opinion
will only continue. It would be prudent, then, for Democrats up and
down the ballot to quickly determine how to oppose genocide,
apartheid, and colonialism and then articulate this opposition to the
base, which is increasingly hungry
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the moral clarity needed on this issue.

_Y.L. AL-SHEIKH is a Palestinian American writer and organizer._

_Copyright c 2025 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the
breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of
the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical,
independent, and progressive voice in American journalism._

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* Politics
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* elections
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* Israel
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* Gaza
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* United States
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