By Jonathan S. Tobin
It doesn’t take a degree in political science or a job as a talking head on a cable news network to understand the 2026 midterm elections. As is usually the case, the results were a referendum on the incumbent administration. Though the reasons for it can be disputed, there is no denying that the blue wave that swept the Democratic Party into control of both houses of Congress was a rebuke to U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republicans.
But there is one aspect of the voting that remains a puzzle for some. How is it that so many Jews in Michigan, indeed a reported majority of early voters according to one survey, voted for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed?
National midterms exit polling suggested that 68% of those who identify as Jews voted for Democrats. That’s not all that much different from the surveys of the 2024 election. Two years ago, an AP/Fox News poll showed that 66% of Jews backed Democrats, while one conducted by the liberal Jewish Electoral Institute put the number at 71%.
Some observers believed that Jewish support for El-Sayed would be far lower than those numbers. Given his record of open antisemitism, that seemed a reasonable assumption. How could a candidate gain any appreciable Jewish support when he rationalized a terrorist attack on a synagogue and Jewish preschool in West Bloomfield, Mich., opposed Israel’s existence, had credible ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and waged a campaign that hinged on demonizing the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby and driving Jews from the public square, while employing tropes of Jew-hatred that resembled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
A majority of Jewish votes went to El-Sayed
The evidence appears to be that the percentage of Jews who voted for him wasn’t all that much lower than those who favored the average Democrat. While one should always take exit polls with a grain of salt, one survey of those who voted early in Michigan showed that a large majority of those who identify as Jewish—57%—voted for El-Sayed.
If that result is even remotely accurate how can that be explained? And what does that say about the state of American Jewry in 2026, especially considering that it took place amid a global surge of antisemitism that began with the Hamas-led, Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023?
El-Sayed was just one of many Democrats who benefited from the general dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, and he is just one of many opponents of Israel that will be part of the large freshman class of Democrats in the House and Senate in the next Congress.
The list includes such notable additions as Darializa Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who led a pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City’s Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 and will soon represent Northern Manhattan in the House of Representatives.
Other DSA members who oppose the existence of the Jewish state, who will be joining the already expanded left-wing congressional “Squad,” include Claire Valdez, also of New York City, Philadelphia’s Chris Rabb, Denver’s Melat Kiros and Los Angeles’s Angela Gonzales-Torres.
And that’s not even noting the many others, whose anti-Israel stances, including those who repeat the blood libel that Israel committed “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, make them indistinguishable from DSA members.
It’s not about Netanyahu
Many Democrats claim to still support Israel. But the list of those who are willing to emphatically refute the antisemitic lies about the Gaza war or the conflict with the Palestinians in general that have been normalized in public discourse, are now few and far between.
Few oppose restrictions or bans on military aid to Israel in wartime or sanctions against Jews in Judea and Samaria, who have been demonized by the false narrative of “settler violence.” Indeed, once you get past Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), there aren’t many Democrats in Congress who fit that description.
Moreover, the notion that the Democratic Party’s turn against Israel can be explained by being alienated by the policies and statements of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a myth.
Pro-Israel Jewish Democrats claim that Netanyahu has destroyed Democratic support for the Jewish state by favoring Republicans, especially Trump. But this is false. In the last two decades, it is the Democrats who have turned on Israel, not just Netanyahu, by embracing appeasement of Iran and clinging to the two-state solution and “land for peace” formulas that most Israelis rightly understand as merely a recipe for more Oct. 7-style terror atrocities, not an end to the conflict.
If anyone still doubts that, they need to read the exchange on X between Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and Brad Lander, the Democrat who was just elected to Congress from New York City.
Lander, a former city comptroller, won his seat by defeating Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), a man with impeccable liberal and anti-Trump credentials and a critic of Netanyahu, who wouldn’t disavow support for Israel, in a Democratic primary.
Lander is Jewish and claims to not oppose Israel’s existence, but he accused it of “genocide” during the campaign and demanded that Goldman do the same. Lander responded with scorn to Lapid’s expectation that a change in power in Jerusalem and more outreach from Israeli leaders like him, who are eager to be friends with the Democrats, would change things. He made it clear that Democrats like him, who are allied with the antisemitic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and even others who are not that extreme, aren’t interested in mainstream Israeli opinion, even when it comes from liberals who want to be his allies.
Lander, who campaigned for Mamdani after losing to him in the mayoral primary, wants Israel to show “respect for international law and human rights.” While that comment is rooted in lies about both international law and Israaeli conduct, we know what it means. At a minimum, he’s demanding withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and the creation of a Palestinian state, likely run by Hamas, that would pose a deadly threat to Israel’s existence. That’s something that not even the left-leaning “anyone but Bibi” coalition that seeks to replace Netanyahu couldn’t possibly accept.
This perspective, which is where many of those Americans—who, like Lander, style themselves “liberal Zionists” as opposed to the anti-Zionists of the DSA—is a partial reason why Jews continue to vote for Democrats.
Yet even that doesn’t fully explain why nearly three in five Michigan Jews may have voted for a person like El-Sayed, who is far more hostile to Jewish national existence than Lander. Indeed, not without reason, the Republican Jewish Coalition called El-Sayed the most antisemitic Senate candidate in America.
Politics flow from demography
In order to fully understand why the majority of Jews remain among the most loyal supporters of the Democrats, one needs to comprehend the cultural shift among Americans in general when it comes to politics. It is now axiomatic that in this hyper-partisan era, in which most Americans are thoroughly secular, politics now plays the role in their lives that was once played by religion.
That is even more the case for the overwhelming majority of Jews, who are non-Orthodox and politically liberal.
For this dominant sector of U.S. Jewish demography, liberal political stands—a list of beliefs that can shift with changing political fashions on the left—and devotion to the Democrats is their religion. Indeed, the positions taken by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the policy arm of the largest U.S. Jewish denomination, are more or less those of most Democrats on a host of issues, many of which are not specifically Jewish in scope.
There has been a lot of talk about some movement toward the Republicans among Jews in recent years. Many Jewish liberals have been deeply shocked by the reaction to Oct. 7 from the American political left, especially as they saw their children targeted by pro-Hamas mobs on campuses. But it is yet to be proved that a significant percentage have drawn conclusions from this and are ready to change how they vote.
There was some reason to believe that in states like Florida, Jews were more likely to vote for candidates from a GOP that had become a lockstep supporter of the Jewish state. Trump’s efforts to combat antisemitism on college campuses also gave them a reason to switch sides. And some prominent Jews, like retired Harvard University legal scholar and longtime liberal advocate Alan Dershowitz, have done so.
But as the 2024 and 2026 elections showed, Jewish loyalty to the Democrats has continued even as they have largely transitioned into being the country’s anti-Israel party, Those who agree with Dershowitz appear to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
Part of the explanation comes not so much from ideology as it does from demography. As surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center have shown, the fastest growing sector of the American Jewish population is characterized by demographers as “Jews of no religion.”
That doesn’t just mean that they don’t practice Judaism. It encompasses a broad shift away from traditional ideas about what it means to be Jewish with devotion to religious faith, Jewish law and tradition and, above all, a sense of Jewish peoplehood being discarded. That has led to significant numbers of those who may identify as Jewish in some way but have no real connection to organized Jewish life, including synagogues, community centers and organizations that represent and serve Jews.
This is a function of the assimilation and intermarriage rates in the vicinity of 70% for non-Orthodox Jews, not critiques of Israeli policies or Netanyahu.
Giving a pass to Jew-hatred
It also means that many of them have increasingly fewer ties to the half of the world’s Jewish population that lives in Israel. That doesn’t just mean that they have a poor understanding or none at all about why Israeli Jews think as they do. They have little idea why Israelis are prepared to fight to defend their homes and families against Palestinian foes, whose national existence is inextricably linked to a century-old genocidal war on Zionism, for which the atrocities of Oct. 7 was just the trailer.
But they also don’t seem to understand that devotion to the land of Israel is central to Jewish identity, as Jews have understood it for the past 3,000 years. Many liberal Jews have rejected the widely-accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, because they want one that allows opposition to Israel’s existence, and not just criticism of it. without being accused of hating Jews.
Once you grasp that, it’s easier to comprehend why a not-inconsiderable number of Jews are willing to believe that someone like El-Sayed, who is in favor of the destruction of the Jewish state—something that would inevitably require the genocide of half of the Jews currently alive—but claims to love Jews, isn’t an antisemite or a threat to them.
The stances of “liberal Zionists” like the cynical Lander are likely the product of his knowing that liberal Democrats have been largely indoctrinated in the toxic doctrines of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism and, therefore, falsely define Israel and the Jews as “white oppressors.”
That is why Democrats like him are becoming difficult to distinguish from open DSA opponents of Israel, or even antisemites like El-Sayed. Even those who merely think Israel should be more amenable to territorial withdrawals have little sympathy for the majority of Jewish Israelis who are religious or nationalist. Such American Jews haven’t paid attention to the way Palestinians have consistently rejected peace offers, because the only solution they desire is one in which Israel no longer exists.
Defining Jewish identity
For those whose Jewish identity is still firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, a vote for someone like El-Sayed is hard to justify even if they are loyal Democrats.
Perhaps few would, like Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, think that adding another member to the Democratic Senate caucus is more important than Israel’s survival or that of the Jewish people. But in the current political atmosphere, it is likely that some of them might have done so simply because they hate Trump and the Republicans more than they love Israel.
It is arguable that those with such a negligible sense of their identity as Jews are unlikely to maintain themselves as a separate community or one with any coherence. Indeed, that may already be the case, as the number of those Jews of no religion continues to multiply. Part of the problem with surveys that measure Jewish opinion or votes is that a growing number of those who say they are Jewish have few actual ties to Jewish life.
If one were to only count those Jews who have such connections or beliefs, the statistics about their voting habits and their beliefs might be very different from those that show that the Jewish population is as liberal and loyal to the Democrats as they ever were.
Even if that is true, it is still a measure of the ignorance and the lack of identification with the ongoing struggle for Jewish survival in an age of growing antisemitism that so many Jews vote for the likes of El-Sayed, Chevalier, Mamdani and even Lander. It is a sign of a community that has lost its way.
With so much of the mainstream liberal media—upon which most Jews depend for information about the Middle East and the battle against antisemitism— mainstreaming misinformation and blood libels about Israel, it’s not that surprising that they aren’t questioning knee-jerk support for Jew-hating Democrats.
But it must motivate those who understand just how wrongheaded such stances are to redouble their efforts to promote Jewish education and connection to the Jewish state as well as in telling the truth about the war against Israel.
The only way to combat the Jewish illiteracy that leads so many to vote for antisemites out of partisan loyalty is to spread the truth about Jewish life and Israel.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.
