Both parties at odds with own voters over Middle East policy

President Donald Trump’s joint invasion of Iran with Israel is causing an uproar across the globe, but on Capitol Hill, things are more cohesive than they might seem, with Republicans and some Democrats finding common ground for the president’s new war. This is despite polling showing the vast majority of Americans are opposed to a new war in the Middle East and the yearslong souring view of Israel among the American public. Most public opinion polls indicate that the invasion of Iran is deeply unpopular. Yet neither party is letting public sentiment influence their decision-making.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained Monday that the administration’s decision to attack Iran, is partially a function of Israeli policy, saying that the United States’ junior partner in the Middle East was planning to attack Iran with or without American support, leaving the administration’s hands tied.

“The president made the very wise decision — we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said at a press conference. He later denied making the statement, and later, Trump contradicted him, saying that Iran was planning to strike first.

Rubio’s comments came after Republicans spent the prior weekend falling in line with Trump’s message, despite the fact that the president (and most of his surrogates) explicitly campaigned in 2024 on not launching new wars.

Entanglement in the Middle East comes despite weak support among the American public. A flash Reuters and Ipsos poll found that just 27% of American adults support the war, with 43% disapproving of the war and 30% unsure at this juncture. Other surveys have found simultaneously more support for the war, as well as more opposition to the war, with fewer respondents answering “unsure.”

Regardless, Republicans are rallying around the president, who has earned the distinction of launching more attacks on individual countries than any other commander in chief. So far, Trump has attacked seven countries: Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, alongside a spate of killings of boaters in the Pacific and Caribbean. The U.S. has also this week launched military actions in Ecuador, though details are scarce.

Trump, meanwhile, is signaling that the new war “can be fought ‘forever,’” saying in a recent Truth Social post that “we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons.” Some experts have openly disagreed, saying some weapon stockpiles, particularly of certain missile interceptors, could run low.

Democrats have been more divided on the war, with some opting to oppose it outright and others, including the party’s leaders, opting to object to the process by which the administration decided to go to war.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for example, said in a statement that “The administration has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat.”

“Confronting Iran’s malign regional activities, nuclear ambitions, and harsh oppression of the Iranian people demands American strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity,” Schumer said. “Unfortunately, President Trump’s fitful cycles of lashing out and risking wider conflict are not a viable strategy.”

As recently as February, Schumer boasted that, under his leadership, America has supported Israel more than ever before.

“I’m going to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs. I will continue to fight for it, and we delivered more security assistance to Israel, our ally, under my leadership than ever, ever before,” Schumer said, per a report from The Forward.

More consequentially, Democratic leaders have also been standing by as pro-Israel groups attempt to sway party primaries. When asked by journalist Wajahat Ali whether he would recommend that Democrats stop taking money from AIPAC, Jeffries has said that he plans to continue fundraising as he has been doing and would allow Democrats to fundraise as they see fit.

This comes as pro-Israel networks are creating new groups to influence Democratic Party primaries that don’t have the same name recognition as groups like AIPAC or Democratic Majority for Israel.

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Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim reports that a new committee, the Article One PAC, is helping support the favored pro-Israel candidate in a North Carolina primary. As of Wednesday, the primary was still too close to call and headed for a recount.

The committee had previously supported former Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way, the preferred candidate of the pro-Israel lobby, in a recent New Jersey primary. Now it’s supporting Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., in a North Carolina primary to the tune of $600,000. Foushee had previously said that she would not accept money from AIPAC in the race.

Nida Allam, who ran against Foushee in the primary, told Salon that the reported donor network supporting Foushee shows that the Democratic Party “works overtime for its corporate donors and warmongering lobbies at the expense of everyday people.”

“I would not be surprised if AIPAC was supporting my opponent — she’s taken photo-ops with Netanyahu and refuses to call Israel’s actions a genocide. That’s exactly the type of politicians AIPAC loves to prop up,” Allam said.

Jeffries’s campaign declined to comment for this article. Foushee’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Democratic National Committee has also buried its post-2024 election autopsy, which, per Axios, found that Vice President Kamala Harris lost significant support due to the Biden administration’s unwavering military support for Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel’s response has been widely criticized as going above and beyond retaliation, targeting Palestinian civilians and children in what countless experts call a genocide. While it’s impossible to determine whether a single issue might have cost Harris the election, the report’s conclusion — and its burial — highlights the relative lack of movement within the party on this issue.

This maneuvering from the Democratic leadership is happening as Americans’ sympathies, and especially those of Democrats, shift away from Israel. A recent Gallup poll found that, for the first time, the plurality of Americans sympathizes more with Palestinians than Israelis, 41% to 36%. This is most pronounced among Democrats, with 65% sympathizing more with Palestinians compared to 17% who sympathize more with Israelis.

Similarly, among independents, the plurality sympathizes more with Palestinians for the first time ever, with 41% sympathizing with Palestinians more and 30% sympathizing with Israelis more.

While Republicans have not seen the same magnitude of a shift, there have still been changes: sympathies for Israelis have fallen to 70%, while sympathies with Palestinians have risen to 13%.

Taken together, the Republican support for war and the Democrats’ status quo approach to Israel and Palestine paint a picture of two parties that are out of step with voters when it comes to American policy in the Middle East.

James Zogby, a former member of the DNC and the founder of the Arab American Institute, told Salon that this lack of change is itself typical, at least in his experience with the Democratic Party.

“You’ve got people thinking that, if we just don’t talk about this issue and we just focus on affordability — they’ll pick some aspect of [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s win — forgetting that the real reason Mamdani won had to do with how freaking authentic he was,” Zogby said. “There’s partly a fear of still talking about Israel because of the donors. There’s also a fear because the consultants say, ‘This is a distracting issue. This is a controversial issue. We don’t talk about that. We talk about things that people really care about.’ And they don’t have a clue what people really care about. So there’s this lack of imagination. They’re stuck in a mindset that they can’t get out of.”

At the same time, Zogby said, public support has helped buoy grassroots, outsider candidates in Democratic Primaries, including progressives like Analilia Mejia, who recently won a primary in New Jersey, despite significant spending from pro-Israel groups.

Zogby also noted that, despite increasingly critical perspectives on Israel gaining traction in the GOP, no coalitional organization exists to pressure elected Republicans on this issue. Zogby shared a story from the 1992 presidential primaries, when a Republican insider asked him for help crafting a proposed party plank for the GOP, which would have expressed support for President George H. W. Bush’s efforts to convene the Madrid Peace Conference.

“They would not even allow a second of his amendment in the platform debate; he was crushed. He presented it in dead silence. No one seconded it. End of debate. There’s not a lot of discussion that goes on over there,” Zogby said. “The difference here is that on the Democratic side, there is a real coalition that has been around since ‘84 and it does include my community. It also includes progressive Jews and includes Black voters, Latino voters, Asian voters increasingly and young kids, college kids.”

What’s unclear is whether and to what degree either party will stand to suffer or gain politically from their opponents’ positions in the midterms. While it’s commonly recited that voters don’t normally make their decisions based on a party or candidate’s foreign policy, an unpopular new war in the Middle East, which an ally ostensibly dragged the U.S. into, may push the issue higher in terms of voters’ priorities.

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