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When Israel lost Democratic voters, in 3 charts

A slow decline in Democratic support became a rapid falloff last year.

Among Democratic voters, Israel’s reputation is in tatters.

Polls show Democratic voters have dramatically unfavorable views of Israel. Three incumbent Democrats who’ve supported Israel lost primaries in recent weeks; pro-Israel groups are spending millions of dollars to try to defeat high-profile candidates in other races. And there’s been dwindling Democratic support in Congress for weapons sales and even aid to the Jewish nation.

The basic reason is obvious: the devastation of the Gaza war. Yet though Democrats and especially young voters soured on the war soon after it began, rank-and-file Democrats did not initially turn so sharply against the country of Israel itself.

Indeed, a review of years of polling data shows that, in retrospect, the turning point — the year the bottom fell out — was 2025.

That year, a confluence of events — Donald Trump succeeding Joe Biden as president, Trump’s decision to join Israel’s attack on Iran, and that summer’s intense hunger crisis in Gaza — spurred a shift in which hostility toward Israel was no longer just for the Democratic left. Much of the party’s mainstream began feeling it too.

What’s resulted, pollster and University of Maryland scholar Shibley Telhami argued to me, has been “a paradigm shift.” The young generation of Democrats, Telhami said, quickly came to see Israel as “a genocidal villain” — and then many in the older generations came to a similar conclusion.

That’s not to say that Democrats are now all-out opposed to Israel’s existence. In an email, Jake McClory of the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC pointed to his own group’s polling of Democrats from last October, which found that 75 percent say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland.

But as bad as things are for Israel now, there’s still room to get worse. In one alarming sign for those sympathetic to the country,........

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