In recent months, multiple new public opinion surveys have illustrated the extent to which Israel has lost Americans’ support. In early April, a poll from the Pew Research Center attracted widespread attention when it revealed that more than half of U.S. adults now express an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli state — an increase of over 10 percent since March 2023. And this month, after Israel launched a new military operation to occupy the entire Gaza Strip, a new poll from Data for Progress showed that 76 percent of U.S. voters support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and 51 percent think that U.S. President Donald Trump should demand one.

These dramatic shifts come alongside several recent polls demonstrating that Gaza played a definitive role in the Democrats’ loss in the November U.S. presidential election. In February, a YouGov poll from the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project found that the genocide was the leading reason cited by former Democratic voters who did not cast a ballot for former Vice President Kamala Harris.

And beyond those “single issue” anti-genocide voters, new data analysis suggests that Democrats lost a larger population of voters — whose top concerns were rising inflation, the state of the economy, and other domestic issues — due to the demobilization effects of the Democrats’ failure on Gaza. In other words, more than by a rightward shift among Democratic voters, the November election was shaped by the fact that many of them simply sat it out.

These findings add to the evidence not only that support for Palestinian rights and a Palestinian state are far higher than many within the political establishment have been willing to acknowledge, but that Democrats’ refusal to take these issues seriously has become a severe political liability.

Yet over four months into the Trump presidency, even as it positions itself as the party defending democracy, the Democratic establishment has failed to respond to public sentiment and signal any serious shift in its support for Israel.

At the beginning of April, for instance, Senator Cory Booker broke Congressional records with an over 25-hour speech on the Senate floor in April to protest the Trump Administration and “defend democracy”; two days later, he voted against two resolutions that would block billions of dollars in new weapons sales to Israel, shortly after it violated the ceasefire with renewed attacks on Gaza.

Meanwhile, in the battleground state of Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel is fashioning herself as a leader in the anti-Trump democratic resistance. But she is drawing from Trump’s playbook when it comes to the Palestinian rights movement, even working against the actions of local law enforcement to target and intimidate pro-Palestine activists on college campuses.

At an institutional level, too, the Democratic party has demonstrated no meaningful plans to change its position on Israel-Palestine — illustrated recently by the election of the new Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair in February. Several pro-Palestinian advocacy groups pushed for a chairperson who would treat the November election as an indictment of the Democrats’ policy failures on Palestine, press the party to reconsider its unconditional support for Israel, and implement a plan to regain the trust of Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian voters. 

Top DNC Chair candidates Ken Martin, Martin O’Malley, and Ben Wickler were hard to distinguish on this issue, despite two of them having expressed some regret over the barring a Palestinian speaker at the 2024 Democratic national convention. But Ken Martin, who was elected as the new chair, has a notable history of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian positions, including condemning widespread chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as “extremist” and “disgusting.”

While Martin may have other progressive political alignments as a former labor organizer, his “progressive except on Palestine” stances make clear that Democrats are still not reading the room. And as Democratic strategists gear up for a fight to take back a majority in Congress in 2026, this imperviousness to new data may have serious consequences.

A ‘couchward’ shift

There are a few ways to look at the drop in support for Democrats in the November election. To be sure, Democrats lost votes to the right and to left-leaning third party candidates, such as Jill Stein, as well as potentially to conservative third-party candidates. But evidence suggests the rightward shift was less significant than the “couchward” one: It turns out many Democratic voters simply did not vote or could not conscience a vote for the party’s status-quo candidate.

Nationwide U.S. vote tallies show a 2.5 percent decrease in voter turnout, representing some 6.6 million fewer eligible voters participating in the election compared to 2020.  Of those 6.6 million, roughly 40 percent were in strongly Democratic states, which represent the largest numbers of electoral college votes based on population. These states saw 2.6 million fewer votes for Harris in 2024 than for former U.S. President Joe Biden in 2020, only 690,000 of which are accounted for by votes for left-leaning third-party candidates. That drop is a sign of serious demobilization on the left — not a rightward shift.

In swing states, most reports agree that Republicans primarily gained votes within Republican strongholds and suburban areas, but had largely stable turnout compared to 2020. However, most urban areas of swing states, which are Democratic strongholds, saw notable decreases in voter turnout. This includes Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta — the largest cities in four key swing states.

So while many have bemoaned the suburban Democrats who were moved by misleading media or ambiguous anti-incumbent sentiment related to the economy, the Democrats that felt demotivated most by a choice-less election were those in swing state urban areas, where support for and awareness of the Palestinian rights movement is strongest — and far more widespread than many polls captured.

According to screening parameters in the YouGov-Underpin poll conducted right before the election, opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza was actually a top-four voting issue for 24 percent of swing state independent and Democratic voters. A Swayable randomized control trial related to Gaza also showed that reminding voters of the issue only depressed voter motivation in swing states. With repeated exposure to images of Palestinian children dismembered and slaughtered in the weeks before the election — even as such news was suppressedacross outlets and social platforms — many voters simply refused the flawed dichotomy they were presented between Harris and Trump, and sat the election out.

Palestine as a bellwether

The degree to which Gaza was an intensifying issue on top of existing discontent cannot be underestimated. Several policy issues with the vast majority of Americans’ support, not only overwhelming Democratic support, had been left unresolved or stagnant under Biden. When Democrats held majorities across the legislative and executive branches, they failed to pass popular policies — securing common-sense gun control and universal background checks, passing universal paid leave and pre-K education, expanding the Supreme Court, cancelling student debt, or codifying reproductive rights — all while warning of the threat that Republicans posed to American democracy.

Even when Harris became the Democratic standard-bearer, voters were counterintuitively told to expect more from a leader who simply promised more of the same. When considering the major role of anti-incumbent sentiment related to inflation in this election — and the overlap with strongly pro-Palestine sentiment — polling suggests a population as large as 8.4 percent of Democrats and independents in swing states were likely demobilized as they witnessed no deescalation in the genocide.

Democrats needed a different candidate, at best, but more importantly, they needed to change policy on Gaza. This was not only a significant issue for voters, it was one of the few policies the Democratic administration had the executive power to change before election day. Now, as the new administration grows more authoritarian by the day, shifting public opinion on Israel and its imperviousness to U.S. or international law becomes a tell-tale sign of weakened democratic institutions. The inability of the opposition Democratic party to embrace a holistic critique of that attack on both democratic and international norms will only mar its ability to respond to and utilize social movements to counter an oligarchic, technocratic, and authoritarian future.

Still, some Democrats are paving a way forward on support for Palestinian rights within a broader pro-democracy agenda. Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee, another outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, overwhelmingly defeated her opponent with almost 1.4 percent more votes than Kamala Harris in her blue district. In New York City’s mayoral race, State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s popularity among progressive voters has raised him unprecedented funds as a candidate that openly supports Palestinian rights and opposes suppression of pro-Palestinian activism. 

Palestinian-American elected officials have also continued to maintain widespread support in their districts as they have pushed for legislation favoring a ceasefire in Gaza and acknowledging the repeated massacres of Palestinians — State Senator Iman Jodeh of Colorado and Representative Rashida Tlaib among them.

With polls revealing significant declines in Americans’ support for the Israeli state, more Democrats may be emboldened to take similarly strong stands against the genocide in Gaza. Indeed, as pro-Palestinian free speech is used as a flashpoint for anti-immigrant suppression and the erosion of U.S. constitutional rights, the issue of Palestinian rights will continue to be a bellwether of the American political establishments’ ability to combat growing authoritarianism — and respond to American public opinion.