Democrats Have a Gaza Problem. They Don’t Seem to Want to Fix It.

After nearly two years of genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Party’s once-unshakable support for Israel is beginning to fracture. The party’s voters are loudly signaling that criticism of Israel is not only acceptable but needed—a shift seen most prominently in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary victory in New York.

Unfortunately, the Democratic elite—which has played a crucial role in enabling and perpetuating the slaughter in Gaza—is still clinging to the status quo. And nowhere is that more evident than in how Ken Martin, the recently installed chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is handling the issue.

As chair of the organization that oversees the Democratic Party’s national fundraising and election efforts, Martin is an important and visible party leader. His statements and committee decisions shape national perceptions of the party and influence which candidates and voters are valued come election time. But it seems that he is siding with the old guard when it comes to Israel.

In early August, The Intercept reported Martin’s aides pressured 26-year-old pro-Palestine DNC delegate Alice Minnerly to water down a symbolic resolution calling for the party to support an immediate ceasefire and an arms embargo, to suspend military aid and recognize Palestine as a state.

When Minnerly refused, Martin publicly backed a competing resolution that maintains a Biden-era commitment to advancing Israel’s “qualitative military edge.” This resolution was crafted with the input of Democratic Majority for Israel, a group whose super PAC worked to oust former representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.. The countermeasure reportedly has the support of the entire DNC leadership in advance of a vote at the upcoming meeting.

Martin probably wishes the Palestine-Israel issue would disappear. But it clearly won’t—and as the party shifts around him, Martin has an urgent decision to make: Will he continue the committee’s tradition of obedience to AIPAC, the ADL, Democratic Majority for Israel, and other pro-Israel lobbyists, consultants, and donors? Or will the DNC do what is not only morally just but wildly popular with Democrats of all demographics across the country, and embrace anti-genocide politics?

Many groups are pushing Martin to choose the latter path.

Over the last several months, pro-Palestine advocacy organizations, including the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project (IMEU), Justice Democrats, GenZ for Change, and IfNotNow have worked to convince Martin and DNC executive director Roger Lau to move the party toward its own voters on Palestine and acknowledge the Harris campaign’s dire approach to Gaza in the 2024 election.

As one Harris campaign staffer explained to The Nation, a senior official in the Harris campaign informed voter engagement organizers at the beginning of October 2024 that they were to no longer to record voter feedback about Gaza in their internal systems.

This meant that the campaign simply stopped engaging with voters concerned about Gaza in the crucial final weeks leading up to the election, around the same time that Kamala Harris embraced Liz and Dick Cheney and sent Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he alienated the swing state’s Arab and Muslim voters by declaring that Israel had been “forced” to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “The thought process in the campaign with Muslim voters, young voters, with anybody who was concerned about Gaza was, OK, we’ll lose you, but we’ll pick up two somewhere else,” the staffer said. We all know what happened after that.

In a letter from March, these groups cite January polling by YouGov and the IMEU Policy Project that found “ending Israel’s violence in Gaza” was the top concern (29 percent) of those who had voted for President Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024. It notes that this was the case for 38 percent of these voters in Arizona, 32 percent in Michigan, 32 percent in Wisconsin, and 36 percent of voters under 45.

The polling also indicates that 56 percent of Biden 2020 voters who did not vote for Harris say they would prefer to support a candidate who voted to withhold weapons from Israel, while just 16 percent would prefer a candidate who voted against withholding weapons.

The letter was timed to influence the drafting of the DNC’s “post-action” report on the 2024 election, which is due for publication in the coming months. The report, the letter said, must include “an audit and transparent explanation of the protocols that were in place concerning voters who responded to canvassers, texts, and emails voicing concern about violence in Gaza and relevant data collection practices.”

To IMEU Policy Project executive director Margaret DeReus, this report is an opportunity for the DNC to reach out to Democrats repelled by the party over the last two years. “When the Democratic National Committee releases its post-election analysis of what went wrong, it needs to show its voters and the public that it is learning from those mistakes by engaging seriously with the missteps that were made,” she said. “That means recognizing the faults in nominee Harris’s platform pledging to continue sending weapons to Israel during this genocide, and in the campaign’s refusal to engage with voters—especially young people and people of color—whose cries for change went ignored.”

The case for the Democratic Party to align with pro-Palestine voters has only been strengthened by events since the March letter. Not only did Mamdani win the New York City mayoral primary with a pro-Palestine message, but, according to new polling by Data for Progress and the IMEU Policy Project, voters supported him because of this position.

The poll found that 62 percent of Mamdani voters found his support for Palestinian rights to be important and motivated their vote for him—a number that goes up to 83 percent among those who did not vote in the 2021 primary. This was the third-most-motivating reason for a Mamdani vote behind his campaign’s focus on affordability and his plans to tax the wealthy and confront corporations. In addition, it found that 78 percent of primary voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and 79 percent support restricting weapons to Israel. (Martin has zig-zagged when it comes to Mamdani, who is still being kept at arm’s length by the party’s upper echelons. In a PBS interview in July, for instance, he brushed off criticism of Mamdani’s decision not to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” but quickly backtracked after groups like the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC objected.)

According to a person familiar with the matter, the DNC is now in discussions with the IMEU Policy Project regarding the issues raised in the March 2025 letter.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen just how receptive Martin will be to this argument.

In May, Martin declared that support for Israel is a foundational Democratic Party value, telling the Jewish Democratic Council of America conference, “It is so important right now for our party to stand up with the Jewish community, to continue to stand up for Israel, to continue to stand up for humanity and to not forget who we are as Americans.”

This is consistent with his record on Israel while chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, particularly in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.

On October 9, 2023, for example, Martin condemned the Twin Cities DSA’s statement of solidarity with Palestine as “disgusting” for its inclusion of the phrase “from the river to the sea” (calling it “a chant used by extremists to support the destruction of Israel”) and for failing to reference the murders of Israeli and American civilians. An hour later, he returned to X to describe it as a “garbage antisemitic statement.”

A few months later, Martin encouraged pro-Israel activists to get involved in local precinct politics to offset “the extreme voices in our party” who were then organizing for a ceasefire resolution to be passed by the Minneapolis City Council. Martin and his state GOP counterpart joined a January 2024 Zoom call held by the Minnesota and the Dakotas Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)—which calls itself the “public affairs voice of the Jewish community” and had vigorously opposed the resolution. The JCRC has opposed the description of Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide, claiming that it inverts both history and reality and leads to the demonization of Jews around the world. The JCRC has also declared that Israel cannot be an apartheid state because minorities live within its borders.

During the call, Martin referenced these efforts in Minneapolis and told the attendees, “We need to all collectively stand up and reject what we’re seeing here and make our voices heard.… we just really implore all of you to participate, we need more sane voices in this process right now.”

In the spring and summer of 2024, Martin then presided over the country’s largest Uncommitted movement delegation.

Conversations with delegates, including Minnesota Uncommitted chair Asma Mohammed, Democratic Socialist Caucus chair Samuel Doten, and trade unionist Dan Engelhardt, indicate that their relationship with Martin was largely by the book and therefore better than the poor relationships other delegations had with their own state parties. For example, Martin did not fail to accurately record their votes, and did not try to prevent them from speaking to the press.

However, according to the delegates, the DFL repeatedly attempted to reduce the visibility of Uncommitted in the lead-up to, and during, the convention.

“As we got closer and closer, we could tell that Ken was concerned about Minnesota’s image because of [Minnesota governor and vice-presidential candidate] Tim Walz,” explained Mohammed.

Knowing that the camera was going to be on the Minnesota delegation, the decision was made to minimize the visibility of the state’s 11 Uncommitted delegates. “We were in the very back. Not only did we have the back row, we had security guards on both sides of our row,” Mohammed said.

In a prior incident confirmed by Mohammed, Doten, and Engelhardt, the DFL removed all references to Palestine from biographies and photos in the DFL’s 2024 DNC booklet provided to the press.

According to Engelhardt, his initial biographical entry discussed how he went from avoiding the topic of Palestine because the issue was complicated and he did not want to appear antisemitic to becoming an Uncommitted delegate and speaking openly about the genocide in Gaza. He felt his story would help move others like him. This was changed by the DFL to say that he was “passionate about foreign affairs.” Engelhardt objected to the edit, and his bio was ultimately left blank.

Martin’s short tenure as DNC chair has already been rocked by an embarrassing public feud, leaks about fundraising shortfalls, and hit pieces on his ability to unify the party. Perpetuating the Democratic establishment’s immoral and unpopular support for Israel is unlikely to help.

Longtime DNC member and founder of the Arab-American Institute James Zogby doesn’t expect Martin to become an advocate for Palestine, nor does he expect the DNC to take a position on Gaza. (When Zogby tried to get the committee to condemn the Iraq War in February 2003, the resolution was shut down by the chair.) He pointed to another problem: the overwhelming influence of consultants and big money create the structural conditions for pro-Israel groups to shape the party.

“Does anybody want to take the risk of supporting something that stops the $10 million donor from coming through? Does somebody want to support something if it’s going to cut the budget of the three major consulting groups while people who are in these consulting groups sit on committees? They become the in-house protectors of this culture,” Zogby explained.

Take the SKDK PR group. In March 2025, Sludge reported that this influential Democratic PR firm officially registered with the Department of Justice as an agent for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, allowing it to freely promote Israel to all major news networks and social media companies.

The agency’s ties with the Democratic Party run deep: CEO Doug Thornell is a former DNC senior adviser, while its cofounder Anita Dunn was an adviser to Joe Biden through July 2024, to name only a few connections.

SKDK received tens of millions of dollars to perform PR services for the Democrats during the 2024 election. Per Open Secrets, the DNC itself paid SKDK over $400,000 during September and October 2024, while the state Democratic parties of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin paid a combined $35 million to the firm between August and October. These were all swing states that the Democrats lost.

Fortunately, doing away with such firms aligns with Martin’s campaign promise to end “lucrative contracts to rich DC consultants who aren’t innovating with new strategies to reach, communicate with, and win over voters.” After his election, a DNC spokesperson reiterated this promise, stating that the DNC intends to go through consultant contracts “line by line.” Time will tell if Martin actually follows through—or is, at the very least, transparent about who exactly the DNC has been paying—or whether he punts.

Campaign finance is another area that Martin must address.

In the March 2025 letter, the IMEU Policy Project explicitly pushes for the DNC to support a ban on super PAC spending in Democratic primaries, “including Republican-backed super PACs like AIPAC’s United Democracy Project that spend millions of dollars to defeat Democratic candidates whose views align with the majority of Democratic voters.”

This demand is consistent with a recent letter sent to Martin and Senator Chuck Schumer from a group of progressive senators led by Bernie Sanders. The senators call on the party to “begin cleaning our own house” by banning super PACs and dark money from party primaries.

Martin appears somewhat receptive to this issue. Ahead of the same upcoming August DNC meeting for which he is opposing a ceasefire resolution, he intends to introduce a resolution that calls on the DNC to commit to “eliminating unlimited corporate and dark money in our presidential nominating process in the current 2028 presidential cycle,” to encourage Democratic officeholders at all levels to reduce the influence of corporate and dark money by rejecting such donations, and for a DNC committee to produce a report on how to do this by summer 2026.

As David Moore notes, the proposal does not mention super PACs and is light on details about enforcement. Notably, a more robust resolution against dark money and super PACs proposed by Zogby and former Nevada Democratic Party chair Judith Whitmer was quashed by the DNC Resolutions Committee in 2022.g. At the same time, any potential ban on dark money by the DNC would not impact primaries or state and local elections, which are governed by state parties.

While several states have recently taken steps on their own to enact campaign finance reform, DNC member and Our Revolution cofounder Larry Cohen has argued that the DNC should help facilitate this process by funding research into the ways that state parties can amend their charters to enforce such restrictions.

Unfortunately, it is not surprising that the DNC leadership would put forward an anti–dark money resolution and at the same time consult an organization that runs a prominent pro-Israel super PAC on a resolution for the same meeting.

As he said in his first address as DNC chair, “When I talk about the state of the Democratic Party, I often speak about the impact of perceptions—what voters see, feel, and sense.”

Right now, voters see, feel, and sense a party that more aggressively opposes its own anti-genocide voters and a new wave of progressive, pro-Palestine politicians than the authoritarian regime in Washington. Martin and the DNC are part of the problem. It’s in their interest to change that.

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