During a string of rocket attacks and fighting between Hamas and Israel in 2021, and following an attack on the Al-Aqsa mosque by IDF forces during Ramadan, then candidate for Mayor of New York Andrew Yang issued a series of statements that he and his campaign must have seen as somewhat routine:

“I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists,” and “The people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.”

In saying this, Yang was following a long tradition of candidates for public office in New York loudly voicing their support for Israel. For decades, every Mayor of New York from Fiorello La Guardia onward has made support for Israel a pillar of their roles. Robert Wagner canceled a welcome event for King Saud in 1957 on the basis of his anti-Israeli views. John Lindsay would cancel a dinner for Saud’s successor, and Rudy Giuliani had Yasser Arafat booted out of a city event. Every single Mayor since 1951 has visited Israel during their time in office at least once, and the prevailing political winds in 2021 would have told you that this remained smart politics, even within a Democratic Party with a subsection of voters who have become increasingly opposed to the Israeli government. 

Yang’s statement was different, however, not in its content but in the response it received. These statements saw pushback from his fellow opponents, multiple city organizations, NY Assemblyman Ron Kim, who had endorsed Yang, and very vocal criticism from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. All of this eventually forced Yang to issue a revised statement in which he included, “I mourn for every Palestinian life taken before its time as I do for every Israeli”.

New York City is home to the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel, and the sizable Orthodox community within the city has long been considered one of the single most important constituencies for any winning coalition to court. In 2021, the pushback Yang received for his adamantly pro-Israeli stances was seen by political observers in New York as only a mildly interesting new development. After all, the eventual winner of the race for Mayor in 2021 proved to be far more publicly adamant in his support for the Israeli state than Yang had ever been. Just in June of this year, Mayor Adams signed an executive order requiring city agencies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes opposition to Israel. However, the hardline pro-Israeli stances of Eric Adams are now increasingly at odds with the electorate both in New York, and across the country. 

For decades, the allegiance of American voters towards Israel had been steadfast. Both Pew and Gallup have been collecting polling data on American views towards Israel since the 1990s - couched in a broader question of their view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While this is far from my favorite way to pose this question, it is at least easy to extrapolate the “general vibe” from. As of 2006, somewhere between an overwhelming plurality and a clear majority of voters identified as having closer sympathies towards Israel, (Gallup at 59%, Pew at 48%). As of 2011, the Gallup poll clocked 63%. Even among Democrats, that number was 57%. As of 2018, the overall number had actually grown to 64%. This is a remarkable level of polling stability over such a long span of time – and we see a similar level of stability on the inverse side. For decades, the percentage of Americans who sympathize more with the Palestinian cause has hovered very consistently between 10-20%.

Since American sympathies towards Israel hit a high-point of 64% in 2018, we have seen a dramatic shift take place. It is difficult to find the exact turning point, which may have originated from a variety of factors. In 2017, the US formally recognized Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel – before recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights two years later, as part of Donald Trump’s personal commitment to Israel. During the 2018-19 border protests across Gaza, 223 Palestinians were killed, and another nearly 10,000 were injured. The latter resulted in global protests, but garnered limited media coverage in the United States, where mainstream outlets were very reticent to openly criticize the IDF. Despite this, it is around this time where a noticeable shift away from overwhelming sympathy to Israel begins to register in polling, perhaps couched in broader widespread opposition to Donald Trump during his first term. 

This slow but steady downward trend continued under the early part of the Biden administration as tensions once again flared up, the Al-Aqsa mosque was attacked, and American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by IDF forces. By 2022, overall sympathy towards Israel over Palestine had fallen down to 55% by Gallup’s measurement. At the same time, Pew registered the exact same percentage of Americans with a “favorable” view of Israel (important distinction). Even with only a 10% shift nationally, changing attitudes towards Israel from the Democratic left had become very apparent, a dichotomy of which can be seen in the example presented from the 2021 New York City Mayoral race. 

After decades of steady support, Americans are changing their attitudes towards Israel

Since 2001, Gallup has been tracking whether poll respondents identify as having more sympathy for Israelis or Palestinians. Overall sympathy towards Israelis is down 18% since a high-point in 2018, while sympathy towards Palestinians has reached an all-time high.

This brings us to 2023 and onwards, where the slower shifts in public opinion that began under the first Trump administration cascaded into something much more dramatic. Following the October 7th attacks and an initial bump in measured sympathy towards Israel, the trend has been moving quite steadily in the opposite direction. Nearly two years into the Gaza War, with as many as 20,000 children killed by the IDF, and virtually every international organization classifying what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide, the often rock-steady favorability of Americans towards Israel has taken a very sizable hit. Since 2023, overall American sympathy towards Israel over Palestine has fallen by 8%, and has now fallen 18% in total since the high watermark of 2018. Conversely, overall sympathy towards Palestine has risen to an all-time high of 33% by Gallup’s tracking. This shift is especially pronounced among Democrats, where sympathy towards Palestine is now the norm, and the numbers have more or less flipped entirely from their historical baseline. 

This shift is far more pronounced among Democrats

Gallup's same polling data shows a near total-inversion from the norm in primary sympathies towards either Israelis or Palestinians from Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents.

What this shift will result in at a national level for the Democratic Party remains to be fully seen, but one place where we can see the change most visibly is in New York. Andrew Yang’s statements in 2021 generated a lot of pushback from the liberal groups he was attempting to court – those same statements today would be total non-starters. Despite what is by all accounts an extremely well-run campaign by an extraordinarily savvy candidate, Zohran Mamdani is somebody that one cannot really envision winning over a majority of New York’s Democratic voters in a prior cycle. 

From his outright support of the BDS movement, his calling of the Palestinian cause “central” to his identity, his campaign appearances with pro-Palestinian protesters who had been detained by the Trump administration, his belief that Israel should exist not as a Jewish state, but as a state “with equal rights for all”, and especially his on-air justification for the term “Globalize the Intifada”. Mamdani’s commitments on this issue would have by all means made him virtually unelectable in the City at any point in the last three decades. Even amid the current backdrop of genocide in Gaza, Mamdani has faced an unrelenting wave of criticism from prominent pro-Israeli groups, Orthodox Jews, prominent members of the business community, current and former city, state and national elected officials, legacy media, and of course his direct political opponents. 

In the primary, Mamdani faced off against Andrew Cuomo, who we can use here as an imperfect but obvious template for the sort of typical boldly pro-Israeli candidate one would expect to do well in a New York City mayoral election. Cuomo is of course more than just simply pro-Israeli, he has been a lifelong supporter of the Israeli government, and is even part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal defense team against the International Criminal Court. Now, I am by no means saying that Andrew Cuomo lost the Mayoral race because of his pro-Israeli positions. In many areas, Cuomo ran a truly terrible campaign that could do nothing to repair the public perception of him as a corrupt and power-hungry member of the old guard political establishment. In attempting to drag down Mamdani however, the strategy employed by both Cuomo and his aligned PACs relied a good deal on painting the 33-year-old Assemblyman as a virulent anti-Semite for his Palestinian sympathies. Using publicly available data from the New York City Campaign Finance Board, we tracked more than a million dollars of spending just by independent expenditures in opposition to Mamdani both purely or in-part on account of his pro-Palestinian views. 

In response, Mamdani has largely held his ground on the issue. In what became a viral debate clip, the candidate said that he would NOT make a priority of his to visit Israel as Mayor, instead choosing to remain in the city and focus on the responsibilities of the office. His comments justifying the use of “Globalize the Intifada” came just days before the Primary election, in what felt like a major political gamble at the time. Since the election, Mamdani has met with prominent Jewish leaders and de-emphasized his “Intifada” comments, but remains committed to his stance against Israel, just days ago pledging to have the NYPD arrest Benjamin Netanyahu under an ICC warrant if he pays a visit to New York during his time as Mayor. 

Conversely, Cuomo made every attempt to paint himself as THE pro-Israeli candidate in the race. More than six months before even announcing his candidacy, the former Governor set up his own pro-Israel PAC which did little more than run a couple of ads condemning pro-Palestinian protesters, and establish an expanded donor base that Cuomo would later utilize for his primary campaign. As Governor, he issued an Executive Order punishing the financial supporters of the BDS movement. As a candidate, he said that he did not consider pro-Palestinian protesters to be part of Democratic Party, and accused both Mamdani and Jewish candidate Brad Lander of blatant antisemitism for their stances. 

To say the least, this strategy did not work. Mamdani decisively won the primary for far more reasons than his stance on Israel/Palestine, but it only takes looking at polling data among Jewish voters to see that Mamdani’s commitments did not hamper him. While Cuomo crushed Mamdani in majority Orthodox communities by 8 or even 9 to 1, polls conducted before the primary paint a different picture of the broader Jewish community in New York. A Marist poll from May found Cuomo only garnering 26% support from Jewish voters – another poll had Cuomo at 31, and Mamdani comparatively not that far behind at 20. Since the June primary, the rolling criticism of Mamdani from pro-Israeli groups has not slowed, but a July poll from Zenith Research shows a strong plurality (43%) of Jewish voters now backing Mamdani in the General Election (17 points ahead of Cuomo), including 67% of Jews aged 18-44. A newly released gold-standard NYTimes/Siena shows that 43% of General Election voters prefer Mamdani’s approach on Israel over a combined 35% from his three main opponents. It is not difficult to make the case that Andrew Cuomo’s staunch support for Israel, which would have been seen as routine in prior elections) hurt him more than it helped him in this race. 

Jewish voters are supportive of, and were never fundamentally opposed to Mamdani's candidacy

Two polls of Democratic Jewish voters in the primary found mixed results, Cuomo with a lead, and Mamdani not far behind. A Zenith Research poll of likely general election voters now shows Mamdani with a decisive lead among Jews.

Of course, New York Democrats are typically more left-wing on a whole host of issues than the average Democrat. There are clear reasons why the Democratic Socialists of America have found a foothold in the city where they could not elsewhere. However, if you believe the data, the median Democratic voter is now not dissimilar from those in New York on the issue of the War in Gaza. Gallup polling shows 59% of Democrats now hold more sympathy towards Palestine than Israel. This is a total inverse of the same numbers just 10 years ago, and the shift has caught more candidates and officials than just Andrew Cuomo off guard. 

In an August interview with Pod Save, 2028-hopeful Pete Buttigieg answered a routine question on Israel with a familiar line – referring to the US-Israel relationship as if it were a personal friendship, claiming America’s response to the ongoing genocide should be to “put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on and talk about what we’re prepared to do together”. This statement was met with almost universal pushback from the party’s base and prominent strategists, which forced Buttigieg to pivot almost instantly, and publicly endorse a halt to arms sales. Many in the potential 2028 field have been reluctant to engage at all on any questions about the conflict. Even moderate Democratic officials have begun to change their tone ever-so-slightly, with well-known ardent Zionist Ritchie Torres now saying that the War in Gaza has “poorly defined strategic objectives”. It is of course hard to predict where these shifts will eventually lead the bulk of elected officials within the party, and whether the national tone on this issue will truly flip as Democrats head into a very uncertain midterm cycle. 

But, if you want a preview of one possible future, look at Mamdani – who appears to be far more in-line with the median Democrat on the issue now than the vast majority of his peers.