What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Politics of Israel
It's not just Democrats who've shifted — independents have too. That changes the math on moderation.
Are moderate candidates more electable?
That is the proposition at the center of the increasingly contentious Michigan Senate primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Congresswoman Haley Stevens. This primary has become a proxy for a lot of the fights inside the Democratic Party — the establishment vs. the Bernie left, AIPAC vs. those who want to cut off aid to Israel, moderates vs. leftists. And it is very much a depressing preview of how the question of electability will play out in the 2028 Democratic primary.
Chuck Schumer, the DSCC, and much of the establishment infrastructure support Stevens. They argue that El-Sayed is far more likely to lose to Republican Mike Rogers in a state Trump has won in two of the last three elections, because he is too liberal for it. Stevens, they say, gives Democrats a better shot in a must-win state precisely because she is a moderate.
El-Sayed is a proud supporter of Medicare for All, campaigned with Hasan Piker, and made some statements about defunding the police in 2020.
Stevens is more moderate than El-Sayed. She is not associated with the Sanders wing, doesn’t support Medicare for All, and belongs to “moderate” groups like the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. But Stevens is not a moderate in the mold of Jared Golden or Joe Manchin. At the risk of oversimplifying, she is a mainstream Democrat who voted with Joe Biden nearly 100% of the time and against Trump nearly 100% of the time. She is a moderate in persona, and certainly in comparison to El-Sayed — except on one major issue.
Israel.
El-Sayed calls Israel an apartheid state, decries the genocide in Gaza, and wants to end all aid to Israel. Stevens has criticized Netanyahu, but supports aid to Israel without conditions, won’t refer to what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide, and AIPAC is spending tens of millions of dollars to support her.
Israel is the one issue where Stevens is swimming against the current in the Democratic Party.
You are rarely going to win elections if voters think you are too far left or too far right. This has been a problem for Democrats in recent cycles, including 2024, when voters saw us as more extreme than Trump (imagine that!). In the recent New York Times/Siena poll of the Senate battlegrounds, 53% of voters said the Democratic Party is too far to the left, while only 47% said the same of the Republicans.
So in some races, Democrats do need candidates who appear more moderate than the party’s image. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t spent much time working in red or purple states — or is wearing some pretty significant blinders.
But moderation for moderation’s sake is a miserable strategy. How you moderate matters. If you want to break with your party, you have to do it on issues where voters think the party is out of the mainstream. There are many such issues for Democrats. Israel is not one of them. It has all of the downside of angering the base with little of the upside of appealing to actual moderates.
