A growing wave of primary election victories by left-wing Democratic candidates critical of Israel has sent shockwaves through Israeli media and pro-Israel advocacy circles, with commentators warning that unwavering backing for Israel can no longer be counted on as a path to political success in U.S. Democratic politics.
The most high-profile of these upset wins came Tuesday in Colorado, where democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term incumbent pro-Israel U.S. Representative Diana DeGette. Kiros’s triumph is not an isolated outlier: it follows a string of similar wins by left-wing candidates who have openly challenged Israel’s outsized influence on American policy, condemned the ongoing military campaign in Gaza, and labeled Israel an apartheid state. Prior to Kiros’s win, three democratic socialist candidates endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed victory in their primaries, alongside one winner in a Philadelphia congressional primary and another in the Democratic primary for Washington, D.C.’s mayoral race.
The Democratic Socialists of America, a left-leaning faction that regularly challenges establishment Democratic candidates in primary contests, has rapidly emerged as a formidable force shaping the direction of the broader American left. For Israeli political and media institutions, however, these results are far more than a footnote in domestic U.S. politics. Israeli outlets have universally framed the upset wins as clear evidence that Israel’s standing among U.S. voters — and particularly among Democratic base voters — is crumbling in the wake of Israel’s concurrent military operations across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
In a Thursday editorial from The Jerusalem Post, a publication whose owner has longstanding close ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, editors warned that the Democratic Party is drifting steadily further from its decades-long bipartisan alignment with Israel. “Who would have thought that we would ever be looking back nostalgically on the days when the anti-Israel ‘Squad’ in the US Congress numbered only four people?” the editorial read.
The Squad, the informal caucus of progressive Democratic lawmakers first formed with four founding members — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — first rose to prominence for pushing the Democratic Party leftward on issues including healthcare, climate justice, racial justice, and Palestinian rights. Nearly all of the newest wave of primary-winning candidates have built their campaign platforms around a shared set of progressive priorities that go beyond domestic policy: alongside calls for universal healthcare, a universal basic income, and publicly operated grocery stores, they demand an end to U.S. military aid to Israel, a halt to what they term the genocide in Gaza, and formal recognition of Israel as an apartheid state.
The Jerusalem Post framed the string of left-wing upsets as a fundamental “Israel problem” for the Democratic Party, arguing that the growing influence of these candidates is already reshaping the party’s core priorities, altering how sitting Democratic politicians engage with the topic of Israel, and rewrites the rules of public debate around the U.S.-Israel relationship. That sense of anxiety is echoed across Israeli media, including another leading outlet, The Times of Israel.
One Times of Israel contributor compared the recent democratic socialist wins in New York to the 1917 Russian Revolution that established the Soviet Union, framing the results as an urgent “cautionary tale” for pro-Israel groups. Another writer at the outlet argued that the resounding primary victories prove a new generation of Democratic voters has fundamentally turned against Israel.
These election results align with a dramatic, well-documented shift in U.S. public opinion toward Israel. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center finds that nearly 80 percent of Democratic and independent voters hold critical views of Israel’s policies. A June 24 survey from Quinnipiac University further underscores this shift: 48 percent of all American voters say the U.S. is “too supportive” of Israel, compared to just 38 percent who say current levels of support are appropriate, and 7 percent who say the U.S. is not supportive enough.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that New York’s recent primary results have felt far more seismic than Mamdani’s own upset win for New York City Hall last November. “Being staunchly anti-Israel is no longer a road block to success in Democratic politics… This is the first time that incumbent congressmen have lost their seats in campaigns in which they were repeatedly attacked for being too supportive of Israel,” the outlet reported. Regardless of the local issues that shaped each individual race, the JTA added, the success of candidates who openly criticized both Israel and the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) sends an unmistakable, transformative message to the party.
The Free Press, a pro-Israel publication founded by Bari Weiss — the current controversial editor-in-chief of CBS News — framed the primary upsets as part of a growing ideological civil war within the Democratic Party, pitting the party’s old, pro-Israel establishment guard against an insurgent grassroots left it describes as “virulently anti-Israel”.
Even among more liberal Israeli outlets, the implications of the shift are clear. In an opinion piece for Haaretz, one writer noted that “The new mayor [Mamdani] has remade his city’s politics, at the expense of pro-Israeli incumbents who were tossed aside”, adding that much of the “political ammunition” used against those incumbents was “Made in Israel” — a reference to growing anger over Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Another analysis in Haaretz argued that the victories of Israel-critical Democrats demanding a break from the long-standing status quo of the U.S.-Israel relationship are “now a feature of Democratic Party demands rather than a bug”. The analysis added that Democratic voters are not only frustrated with the Israeli policies AIPAC defends, but also with AIPAC’s outsized role as an outside spender in Democratic primary races — spending often fueled by mega-donors from the Republican party.