To grasp the significance of Zohran Mamdani’s shocking victory in last month’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York, it’s worth recalling another upset, which took place 11 years ago and some 300 miles to the south, in a Republican congressional primary near Richmond, Va. In 2014 Dave Brat, a little-known economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, challenged Eric Cantor, who was then the House majority leader. Mr. Brat was outspent by a margin of more than 10 to one. Despite that, he won by 11 percentage points, thus becoming the first primary challenger to oust a House majority leader in American history.
Ideologically, Mr. Brat and Mr. Mamdani have little in common. But they won their primaries for similar reasons: Each exploited the chasm between his party’s grass roots and its elites. In 2014 many Republican voters loathed the G.O.P. establishment. Today, many Democrats feel a similar fury toward the politicians who claim to represent them. In 2014 Mr. Brat used one issue in particular to illustrate that divide: immigration. Democratic alienation today is more nebulous. No single topic seems to loom as large as immigration did among Republicans a decade ago. Still, Mr. Mamdani’s victory illustrates the huge gulf between many ordinary Democrats and the Democratic establishment on one subject in particular: Israel.
Mr. Mamdani focused his message on making New York City affordable. The campaign of the race’s presumed front-runner, Andrew Cuomo, in addition to attacking Mr. Mamdani as inexperienced and soft on crime, focused intensely on his opponent’s unapologetic commitment to Palestinian rights. That commitment was one reason that many political commentators and operatives assumed Mr. Mamdani, a young state assemblyman, could not win. They didn’t appreciate how broadly public opinion on this issue has changed.
The shift has been national. In 2013, according to Gallup, Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 36 percentage points. Those numbers have now flipped, after more than a decade of nearly uninterrupted right-wing rule by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the rise to power of crude bigots like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: This February, Gallup found that Democrats sympathize with Palestinians over Israel by a margin of 38 percentage points. According to a February survey by The Economist and YouGov, 46 percent of Democrats want the United States to reduce military aid to the Jewish state. Only 6 percent want to increase it, and 24 percent want it to remain at the level it is.
These opinions aren’t restricted to young progressives. Older Democrats’ views have swung even more sharply than young ones against Israel in recent years. Between 2022 and 2025, according to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Democrats age 50 and over with an unfavorable view of the Jewish state jumped a remarkable 23 percentage points. This shift has largely erased the party’s generation gap on the subject.
Only one in three Democrats now view Israel favorably, according to Gallup. That makes Israel significantly less popular than Cuba, and only slightly more popular than China. Despite this, the party’s most powerful figures — from the minority leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries to many of the Democrats likely to run for president in 2028 — oppose conditioning U.S. military support on Israel’s willingness to uphold human rights. This places them in clear conflict with their party’s base.
Support of Israel isn’t the primary reason that, according to Reuters, 62 percent of Democrats want new leaders. What seems to anger grass roots Democrats most is their party’s inability to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box and stand up to him as president. But unquestioned support for Israel has become, for many, a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites — and that leaves them vulnerable to political insurgents who don’t compromise the values of equality and anti-discrimination. That’s how Mr. Mamdani connected his support for Palestinian freedom to his broader message. “This is a politics of consistency,” he told Politico in April. “And it’s a politics that refuses to equivocate, no matter whom it applies to. That every single person deserves a dignified life.”
At the congressional level, following Mr. Mamdani’s path is difficult. Just last fall, the influential pro-Israel lobby AIPAC helped to defeat two pro-Palestinian members of the House, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Candidates for the House and Senate struggle to raise enough money to compete with pro-Israel funders. But presidential races are different. When a candidate captures the national imagination — be it Howard Dean in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 or Bernie Sanders in 2016 — he or she can harness thousands of small donors, who provide the resources to wage an effective campaign.
Mr. Trump announced his candidacy for president just one year after Mr. Brat’s victory. That trajectory should serve as a warning. The more Democratic elites continue their near-unconditional support for Israel despite overwhelming public opposition, the more vulnerable they will be to a Mamdani-style political insurgency in the next presidential primary.
In 2028, the path is open for a candidate willing to make support for Palestinian rights a symbol of moral consistency, and a refusal to back down from a fight. On the subject of Israel and the Palestinians, the voting base of the Democratic Party has changed as substantially over the last decade as the Republican Party changed on immigration in the decade leading up to Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. Any aspiring Democratic presidential contender who thinks he can ignore this transformation should recall what happened to Jeb Bush in the run-up to the 2016 presidential race, when Mr. Bush ignored the warning served up by Mr. Brat.
Mr. Mamdani’s victory is not a fluke. It’s a sign of things to come.
Source photographs by Scott Heins for The New York Times and Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
Peter Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. He is also a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York, an editor at large at Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. His latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”
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