In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Last week in Michigan, Democratic primary voters narrowly endorsed Abdul el Sayed, a Senate candidate backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Watching el Sayed’s obsession with Jews, or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Israel, it is more evident than ever that foreign anti-Israel and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories have been imported into American politics in recent years.On the Democratic side, one key pillar of that malignancy has been a revisionist origin myth, claiming that Democrat Kamala Harris lost the presidential election in 2024 in significant part because she supposedly was too supportive of Israel. Revisionist left-wing Democrats, including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and former Obama White House official Ben Rhodes, proclaim that “one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel” and that support for Israel “made Democrats appear weak.”
But, as the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, those narrative-spinners “are entitled to their opinions, but not to their own facts,” which are at odds with the available data. Whatever success they have now had among Democratic primary voters in dishonestly demonizing Israel instead of America’s actual enemies, the Khanna-Rhodes 2024 election myth is wrong.To the contrary, polling done shortly before the 2024 election and soon thereafter showed that Harris’s actual problem was not support for Israel, but that she routinely waffled, trying to oppose Iran and Hamas, while regularly attacking Israel’s measures to win the war that Hamas and Iran started.It now seems forgotten that in the fall of 2024, despite the barrage of anti-Israel messaging, an Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center survey reported that a majority of all voters continued to support Israel, and to view Iran, Hamas, and Gaza very negatively, with 52% also saying that Israel’s response in Gaza had either been “just right” or “not gone far enough”, and only 42% saying it had “gone too far.” Indeed, polling by a Democratic group, Blueprint, confirmed something similar, with 56% taking a favorable view of Israel and only 27% unfavorable.Ignoring the realities of that time, the revisionist myth usually starts with Harris’s loss in Michigan, partly as a swing state and partly due to Dearborn and the state’s Muslim voters, even though they constitute less than 3% of Michigan’s voting population, not much different than the state’s Jewish population.Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks at the 2017 American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference on Tuesday, March 28, 2017, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
