A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll published Tuesday delivers hard numbers to a trend Israel’s supporters have watched unfold for two years: the Democratic Party is turning against the Jewish state, even as American Jews continue to vote for it in overwhelming numbers.
The poll, conducted June 11-17 among 3,040 adults, including an oversample of 1,022 Jewish respondents, found that 58% of Democrats now say the United States is too supportive of Israel, up from 45% in January 2024. 62% of Democrats say the U.S. is not supportive enough of the Palestinians, up from 49% over the same period. 31% of all Americans now say Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute genocide, a claim embraced by 52% of Democrats and rejected by 87% of Republicans.
Republicans moved in the opposite direction entirely. 61% now say U.S. support for Israel is “about right,” up from just 33% in January 2024. In 2024, 39% of Republicans said Washington wasn’t supportive enough of Israel; today, most Republicans believe the balance has been struck.
The poll’s most revealing numbers concern Jewish Americans themselves. Jewish adults remain sharply divided along party lines even as their community as a whole tilts toward supporting Israel’s actions: 73% of Jewish respondents call Israel’s immediate military response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack justified, and 42% support Israel’s ongoing operations in Gaza. But among Jewish Democrats, 51% say the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, and 45% believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza, a figure that stands in stark contrast to the 3% of Jewish Republicans who say the same.
A Party That No Longer Wants Jewish Votes on Israel’s Terms
The numbers in the AP-NORC poll describe a structural shift inside the Democratic Party that is now showing up in primary results, congressional votes, and the public statements of the party’s own leadership.
Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York and a stalwart supporter of Israel, lost badly in his primary to a Mamdani-backed challenger. CBS News reported that the race centered on the United States’ relationship with Israel. His opponent, Brad Lander, declared after the win that he intends to be one of Congress’s most vocal Jewish advocates for Palestinian rights.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was born Jewish, has led efforts in the Senate to block arms sales to Israel, arguing in April that continued military aid props up what he called “the racist, extremist Netanyahu government.” He is representative of a majority of Senate Democrats who have now voted for measures to restrict weapons shipments to Israel altogether, even when those weapons are defensive.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, long regarded as a reliable friend of Israel, has declined to commit to supporting Israel’s security in the party’s next platform. So has Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, though for opposite reasons. Both, by treating the question as irrelevant, are signaling the same underlying reality: continued Democratic support for Israel is no longer assumed.
Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, one of the few remaining Democrats willing to publicly defend Israel, has acknowledged that his positions on Israel and immigration make him an outlier in his own party. He is widely expected not to seek re-election in 2028. New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Israel democratic socialist, as mayor. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, one of the last national Democrats attempting to hold the center on Israel, could not answer a direct question from CNN’s Dana Bash about why most Democratic voters are no longer proud to be Americans — a question rooted in the same leftward drift on Israel, race, and national identity reshaping his party’s base.
This anti-Israel trend follows a documented rise in antisemitic incidents on American college campuses, from 179 in the 2019-20 academic year to 2,334 in 2024-25, concentrated on campuses where opposition to Israel has become an organizing principle of the political left.
What the Democrats Actually Did When They Held Power
Every one of these shifts inside the Democratic Party was built on a foundation laid by the Biden administration itself. Between 2023 and 2025, the Biden White House took a series of concrete actions that marked the most significant departure from the U.S.’s long-standing strong support for Israel in decades.
In March 2024, the Biden administration abstained on United Nations Security Council Resolution 2728, allowing a ceasefire resolution to pass that did not condition a halt in fighting on the release of the hostages Hamas had taken on October 7. Israel’s government canceled a planned Washington visit by senior officials in response. In May 2024, the administration paused a shipment of 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs to Israel over concerns about a planned operation in Rafah, the first time in the war that Washington had actually withheld munitions rather than simply criticizing their use. In February 2024, President Biden signed an executive order creating a sanctions framework aimed at Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria, ultimately designating seventeen individuals and sixteen entities tied to the settlement movement over the following year. Eighty-eight Democrats in Congress had pushed Biden to go further still, demanding sanctions on sitting Israeli cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
President Barack Obama set the stage for the deterioration years before Biden took office. In 2015, his administration pushed through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran over Israel’s explicit objections, lifting international sanctions in exchange for temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. The deal unlocked an estimated $100 billion in previously frozen Iranian assets and reopened Iran to global markets. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the agreement as an existential threat to the Jewish state, and in March 2015, he took the extraordinary step of addressing a joint session of Congress at the invitation of House Republicans, bypassing the White House entirely to warn lawmakers directly that the deal would finance Iranian aggression and leave Tehran a nuclear threshold state. The speech infuriated the Obama administration and exposed a rift between Washington and Jerusalem that had no precedent in the modern alliance.
Netanyahu’s warning proved accurate. Sanctions relief filled Iranian government coffers and financed the network of proxies Tehran uses to encircle Israel: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Shiite militias across Iraq and Syria. That rejuvenated Iranian economy bankrolled the buildup Hamas required to plan and execute the October 7, 2023 massacre, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. The threat Netanyahu described to Congress in 2015 was not theoretical. It arrived eight years later on Israeli soil, and it arrived courtesy of money Iran gained access to under a deal an American president championed over Israel’s strongest objections.
President Trump rescinded the entire sanctions regime on his first full day back in office in January 2025. The contrast in approach has been just as visible on Iran. Where Biden’s team spent the war treating ceasefire diplomacy and Israeli military operations as matters requiring constant American pressure, Trump has demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender and backed Israel’s military campaign against the Islamic Republic without equivocation.
The Evangelical Fault Line and Why It Matters
The Democratic Party’s shift on Israel has coincided with a parallel argument breaking out on the right, one that cuts to the theological core of why tens of millions of American evangelicals support the Jewish state at all.
In a widely watched interview this year, commentator Tucker Carlson pressed Sen. Ted Cruz on why he considers himself Israel’s leading defender in the Senate. Cruz explained that he was raised to believe those who bless Israel are blessed and those who curse it are cursed, and said plainly that he wants to be “on the blessing side of things.” Carlson pushed back, asking whether the blessing applied to the modern political state governed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or only to some abstract, ancient nation. Cruz held his ground, insisting that the promise applies to the nation of Israel as it exists today.
The exchange exposed a genuine split among American conservatives over whether the modern State of Israel is the rightful heir to the biblical promise made to Abraham. It is a split that mirrors, from the opposite direction, the split now consuming the Democratic Party. Carlson’s line of questioning echoes a theological position, most associated with segments of the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations, that treats the modern nation-state of Israel as disconnected from the biblical Israel. Evangelical Zionists like Cruz reject that separation entirely. That rejection has made Christian Zionism one of the most durable pillars of American political support for Israel, even as it grows increasingly out of step with the party Jewish Americans have supported since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.
The Blessing Is Not Complicated
God’s words to Abraham were not vague, and they were not conditional on shifting political winds. “And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless you, and him that curses you will I curse; and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).
Nations rise and fall by how they treat the people God chose for this promise. Yet for eighty years, American Jews have given their political loyalty to a party that funded their institutions, endorsed their candidates, courted their donations, and won 78% of the Jewish vote in 2024. That party is now abandoning them on the one issue that has never been negotiable in Jewish history: the right of the Jewish people to their own land and their own defense. The AP-NORC poll did not create this rupture. It only measured it.
The Republican Party, for all its own internal arguments over Iran and foreign intervention, is the party currently standing on the blessing side of Genesis 12:3. Its voters believe it, its president acts on it, and its Jewish support is rising precisely as Democratic support collapses. History does not reward nations or parties that curse what God has promised to bless. It rewards those who don’t.
