A tale of two polls landed this week, and together they reveal a fracture in American political life that should alarm every friend of Israel and every American Jew who has not yet done the math. Taken together, the polls show that a solid majority of American Jews plan to vote for a party whose base opposes American support for Israel by a margin of nearly four to one.
For decades, American Jewish organizations operated on the assumption that support for Israel was a bipartisan constant in American political life. A sweeping new poll released this week by The New York Times and Siena College reveals just how thoroughly that assumption has shattered.
Among Democratic voters, 74% now oppose providing additional economic and military support to Israel. Only 20% support it. 60% of Democrats say they sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis, with a mere 15% sympathizing more with Israel. These numbers now represent the Democratic mainstream.
But this should be a warning to patriotic Americans. The nations that have historically aligned themselves with the Jewish people have flourished; those who have turned against them have not.
The poll’s generational breakdown is where the story becomes most alarming. Among Democratic voters between the ages of 18 and 44, only 7% sympathize more with Israel. Among those over 45, the number is 22%, itself a collapse from where it stood a generation ago. Across all registered voters, 57% now oppose additional American economic and military support for the Jewish state, the highest level of pro-Palestinian sentiment since the Times began tracking this question in 1998, when 58% of Americans sympathized more with Israelis compared to 13% who favored Palestinians.
This inversion is the result of a decade of sustained, well-funded advocacy that reframed the story of Israel’s miraculous national rebirth as a story of colonial oppression, a narrative that found a ready audience among young Americans already primed to view every conflict through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. The 90% of Democrats who disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects not a policy disagreement but a deeper ideological rupture, one in which support for Israel has been transmuted, for a significant portion of the American electorate, into a marker of moral failure.
None of this means Israel is without friends in America. Republicans remain supportive, and the evangelical Christian community, tens of millions of Americans who read the Hebrew Bible and take its promises to the Jewish people seriously, has not wavered. But the poll is a warning that cannot be dismissed. American Jews who have leaned on the Democratic Party as their political home for generations must now confront the reality that a supermajority of that party has moved to a position of open hostility toward the state the Torah promises belongs to the Jewish people.
Israel stands. The land is not going anywhere. And history, which has a longer memory than any polling cycle, has a way of vindicating those who trust the words of the Hebrew Bible over the shifting sympathies of nations.
The Other Poll: How Jewish Voters See It
Released almost simultaneously, a separate national survey from the Jewish Voters Resource Center tells the other half of this story, and the contrast is striking.
The JVRC poll, conducted by GBAO Strategies from April 28 to May 3, 2026, surveyed 800 self-identified Jewish voters nationwide with a margin of error of ±3.5 percentage points. Its headline finding: 67% of Jewish voters intend to support Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, a figure essentially unchanged from the spring of 2024. That number, placed alongside the NYT/Siena data, means that a solid majority of American Jews plan to vote for a party whose base opposes American support for Israel by a margin of nearly four to one.
The JVRC poll does show that Jewish voters retain strong emotional ties to Israel; 70% describe themselves as emotionally attached to the Jewish state. But that emotional attachment has not translated into political alignment with Israel’s strongest defenders. Only 28% of Jewish voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Vice President JD Vance sits even lower at 19% favorability, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at 27%.
On Israel specifically, the numbers inside the JVRC poll complicate any simple narrative. While 70% express emotional attachment to Israel, 67% hold an unfavorable view of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and 55% oppose the way Israel conducted the war in Gaza. Those figures track far more closely with the Democratic base captured in the NYT/Siena poll than with the pro-Israel evangelical community that has stood most firmly behind Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas terrorists.
The JVRC poll asked about antisemitism as well. Ninety percent of Jewish voters surveyed say they are concerned about antisemitism in the United States, and 73% believe the war with Iran will lead to increased antisemitism. Yet 52% of respondents believe President Trump is antisemitic, and 68% believe he is racist. Those perceptions, whether accurate or not, are clearly driving voting behavior more than Israel policy is.
The demographic picture the two polls together produce is this: the Democratic Party’s base has moved into open opposition to American support for Israel, while the majority of American Jewish voters remain committed to that same party, connected to Israel emotionally but not prepared to make that connection the decisive factor at the ballot box.
