Democratic congressional hopeful Dorothy McAuliffe fielded a poll in April with a question that rarely would have been asked in a Democratic primary race even two years ago: Should the United States cut off arms sales to Israel?
The poll by McAuliffe, a former first lady of Virginia, illustrated how the U.S.-Israel alliance has rapidly gone from a point of bipartisan consensus to a wedge issue dividing both parties. Almost half of Republicans (47 percent) and three-quarters of Democrats (72 percent) called support for Israel an issue that was causing problems in their respective parties, according to a CNN poll in late March. Some Democrats and Republicans alike are now campaigning on ending foreign aid to Israel.
Democrats, already outraged by Israel’s war in Gaza, have started using Israel’s role in the Iran war to attack President Donald Trump and Republicans. Forty Democratic senators voted for a resolution last month from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to block arms sales to Israel, up from 27 for a similar measure in July. Outside groups that support Israel have become a political liability for the candidates they back in House and Senate races around the country, most prominently in Michigan, a must-win for Democrats’ hopes of gaining a majority in the upper chamber.
“This is what America wants, and unfortunately the leadership in both parties have not been listening,” said Adam Hamawy, a combat surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza and is running in the crowded Democratic field to succeed Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey), with $2 million in support from a pro-Palestinian super PAC called American Priorities.
“If they wanted to get elected or reelected this coming cycle, you’ll see more and more people being critical of Israel than in the past.”
On the right, Trump faces backlash from supporters who say the Iran war conflicts with his “America First” pledge. The president and his allies are working to marginalize anti-Israel voices, including podcaster Tucker Carlson, former counterterrorism official Joe Kent, former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in March, saying “it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Some long-shot GOP primary challengers are running on open hostility to Israel.
“You can criticize Russia, no one bats an eye. You can criticize Ukraine, no one bats an eye. You can criticize the Vatican,” said James Fishback, who is running in Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary against Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds with a campaign that has appealed to the GOP’s most extreme elements. “We should not be fighting anyone’s wars.”
Unfavorable views of Israel are more common among Democrats but are rising in both parties, especially among young people. Forty-seven percent of Americans said the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, a late-April Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found, more than doubling the 18 percent found in a 2015 Pew Research Center poll. Since 2015, the view that the U.S. is too supportive increased among Democrats from 26 percent to 66 percent, among independents from 20 percent to 51 percent and among Republicans from 7 percent to 22 percent.
The partisan divide overlaps a generational one. While only 24 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning adults over 50 had a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel in a March survey by the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of right-leaning 18-to-49-year-olds did. By comparison, 84 percent of Democrats under 50 and 76 percent of Democrats 50 and up viewed Israel unfavorably.
A national survey of Republicans by the conservative Manhattan Institute last year found that anti-Israel and antisemitic views were more common among young voters and newcomers to Trump’s coalition than the traditional rank and file.
“The real remaining strong pro-Israel constituency is over-50 Republicans. That’s not a durable political coalition,” said Matt Duss, a former Sanders adviser now with the progressive Center for International Policy. Democrats, he said, “are taking good, courageous positions that are becoming more politically safe.”
Democrats: ‘It tells folks who you are’
Pro-Israel Democrats argue that Mideast issues are not a priority for most voters and that the party should not be driving away Israel supporters. Progressives say the issue has appeal beyond pro-Palestinian activists because it helps candidates establish themselves as antiestablishment, authentic and willing to take on entrenched interests.
“If you can’t call a genocide a genocide, if you can’t stand up against that, if you can’t stand up to the interests of your own party telling you that you cannot tell the truth about the obvious murder of children, then it’s kind of hard to believe that you’re going to stand up to anybody,” said Abdul El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health official and strong critic of Israel running as a Democrat for Senate in Michigan. “It tells folks who you are.”
El-Sayed was statistically tied with Rep. Haley Stevens, who supports Israel, in an April poll by the Glengariff Group for the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, with 25 percent for Stevens, 23 percent for El-Sayed and 16 percent for state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, while 36 percent remained undecided. El-Sayed has attacked Stevens for accepting support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group known as AIPAC. Pro-Palestinian activists booed her at a convention in Detroit in April.
Stevens has said she does not consider Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Her campaign declined to make her available for an interview. AIPAC has not said whether it will get involved in the race.
McMorrow attended an AIPAC-funded Israel trip in 2023 and a local AIPAC event in May 2025. (A spokeswoman said she “has an open-door policy.”) In October, McMorrow shifted her stance to call the Gaza war a genocide.
“We had, you know, the reporting that shows Benjamin Netanyahu convinced President Trump to go into war with Iran,” she said in a local radio interview last week. “We are paying the price for a war we had no reason to be dragged into.”
Evidence of the shift in views toward Israel has popped up in Democratic races across the country, from San Francisco, where all three leading candidates running to represent former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district have called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, to Philadelphia, where state Rep. Chris Rabb has collected progressive endorsements in part by staking out the strongest position against Israeli policy.
“Democrats lost in 2024 because we didn’t listen to our base,” Rabb said in a statement. “Voters are hungry for bold leaders who will call out injustice and fight to stop these illegal wars.”
Major political groups that support Israel, such as the Democratic Majority for Israel and AIPAC’s super PAC, known as the United Democracy Project or UDP, in several races have targeted candidates they oppose by employing issues other than the Middle East. In February’s Democratic primary for the special election to fill the New Jersey congressional seat that Mikie Sherrill vacated when she became governor, the UDP spent more than $2.3 million attacking former representative Tom Malinowski, who declined to support unconditional military aid to Israel. The ads did not mention Israel.
“It says they know their positions are unpopular,” Malinowski said in an interview. “There are folks in the party who worked for past administrations and felt like they couldn’t say anything before, and some of those feelings are coming out now at a time when this government in Israel has led both Israel and the United States down a path not good for us.”
Malinowski lost the primary to Analilia Mejia, who was more critical of Israel and went on to win the seat.
UDP’s spokesman, Patrick Dorton, said the super PAC is a single-issue group but uses a variety of tactics that include running ads about most voters’ priorities, such as the economy.
“It’s clear that Gaza and Iran have made the environment very difficult for pro-Israel activists,” he said. “We are not going to let pro-Israel voices be silenced in either the Democratic or the Republican party.”
Republicans: ‘Obviously a problem’
Republican primary candidates who are emphasizing opposition to Israel are facing longer odds.
Fishback and Casey Putsch, a YouTuber who on Tuesday night lost the Republican primary for governor in Ohio to Vivek Ramaswamy, have condemned state holdings of Israel bonds and state laws against antisemitism that have been applied to criticism of Israel’s government. Mark Lynch, a South Carolina appliance store owner challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham, has attacked the incumbent as “not America First, he is Israel instead.”
Graham, who has Trump’s endorsement, has demanded that Lynch fire a staffer for a social media post he called antisemitic. “Mark Lynch is one of the most anti-Israel Republican candidates to ever run for Senate,” Graham spokeswoman Abby Zilch said.
Both parties accuse the other’s Israel critics of tipping over into antisemitism. Carlson’s interview with far-right internet personality Nick Fuentes last year sparked a reckoning over antisemitism at the Heritage Foundation and in the broader conservative movement.
Trump has denied that Israel influenced his decision to attack Iran and has reacted angrily to other prominent right-wing voices who have broken with him over the war, calling them “LOSERS.” In April, Carlson apologized for supporting Trump in 2024 and said the U.S. should detach from Israel.
“Tucker, I’m no longer in Congress because I did not bow in obedience to AIPAC and to the Zionists that literally fully control Washington, D.C.,” Greene said on Carlson’s podcast last week, referencing her proposal to stop U.S. funding to Israel last year.
Since Greene left Congress in January, the House Republican most outspoken against aid to Israel has been Massie, who has argued that the country is not a U.S. ally. AIPAC’s super PAC and another group affiliated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, funded by megadonor Miriam Adelson, have joined to campaign against him.
“The Democrats have a full-blown 105-degree fever, Republicans have a sore throat,” RJC spokesman Sam Markstein said. “It’s obviously a problem, we recognize it, we are addressing it. We can’t lay down and let the radicalized fringe part of the party do to us what happened to the Democrats.”
Even Graham, though, who has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel in the Senate, has shown openness to reexamining the U.S.-Israel alliance. In January he proposed phasing out American aid to Israel faster than the 10-year timeline Netanyahu has proposed. When Ramaswamy ran for president in 2024, he was the only Republican advocating an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
“Views have changed since I was up there two years ago. I think a lot of people who might have disagreed with me then agree now,” he said last month at a Turning Point USA event at Ohio State University.
That position starts to resemble the views of many Democrats.
“You’re beginning to hear some similarities about whether our taxpayer dollars need to be going there anymore,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of J Street, a liberal alternative to AIPAC. “Rest in peace to the old-fashioned ‘Israel right-or-wrong’ approach of the special relationship and can’t ask questions, can’t enforce the law, blank checks. All of that is over.”
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