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Zohran Mamdani’s staunch support for Palestinian rights was a major boon to his campaign and served as one of the top motivations for voters to cast their ballot for him, new polling finds, providing evidence that opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a winning position as establishment Democrats scratch their heads over Mamdani’s historic campaign and popularity.
Polling out Tuesday by the IMEU Policy Project and Data for Progress found that 62 percent of voters who cast a ballot for Mamdani said that his support for Palestinian rights swayed their vote. This includes a whopping 83 percent of new voters who said as such, the poll found.
This made Palestinian rights the third-most important reason to back Mamdani among those who voted for him, only ranking behind his proposals to lower costs for everyday Americans and to tax the wealthy and take on corporations.
The polling additionally found that New York primary voters overwhelmingly oppose Israel’s assault, with 78 percent saying that Israel is committing a genocide; 79 percent saying that they support restricting weapons shipments to Israel; and 63 percent saying that they would support the mayor arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits the city, as Mamdani has pledged to do.
The poll results vastly undercut claims by establishment Democrats that Israel’s genocide in Gaza doesn’t matter to the electorate, or that supporting Palestinian rights would be unpopular. Since Mamdani’s win, establishment New York Democrats have refused to endorse Mamdani, instead trying and failing to drum up controversy over the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which he never said.
Democrats, who have spent millions on trying to rehabilitate their image, are flailing in trying to come up with any explanation but Mamdani’s democratic socialist stances for his win. Just on Monday, for instance, Pete Buttigieg — a potential contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee — said that it wasn’t Mamdani’s ideology, but rather his campaign strategies that delivered his win.
“I think if my party wants to learn lessons from Mamdani’s success that are portable to a place like Michigan, where I live, it’s less about the ideology and more about the message discipline of focusing on what people care about,” Buttigieg said.
The polling shows that Buttigieg is flat-out wrong, with voters ranking Mamdani’s social media presence, ads, and canvassing campaign the lowest among their reasons for voting for him. Many critics of the party on the left have noted that the Democratic Party’s cratering popularity is, in large part, caused by the instinct of people like Buttigieg to oppose the left, even if it means losing or teaming up with the far right.
Ignoring Gaza specifically has been shown, in fact, to be a losing position for Democrats. A YouGov poll found earlier this year that the Gaza genocide was the top reason for not voting in the 2024 presidential election among those who didn’t cast a ballot, proving a major contribution to Kamala Harris’s embarrassing loss to Donald Trump.
Some conservatives have tried to dismiss Mamdani’s win as a fluke, only possible in a heavily blue place like New York City. But the lesson on the popularity of pro-Palestine stances is relevant nationwide as well, other polling has shown.
New polling released Tuesday by Gallup finds that support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has hit a new low in the U.S., with now less than a third of Americans, 32 percent, saying they back it. This is a 10 point drop since the last time Gallup polled this question in September. In fact, now, a majority of voters say they disapprove, at 60 percent — with disapproval winning out by a 28-point margin.
This poll was largely conducted before Israel’s starvation campaign made headlines last week, meaning that the difference could be even starker now.
Democrats seeking higher turnout or more support should take note, with Gallup finding that now only 8 percent of Democratic voters support the genocide, down from 36 percent in October 2023.
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