Aipac over affordability: Democratic candidates come under fire for support of Israel

At a campaign event in the Bronx last month, a congressional candidate quizzed a cheering crowd: “What do you think would happen if the US ended all aid to Israel?” At a Thanksgiving gathering with voters, another candidate in the same race fielded questions about affordability – but also about “moral leadership” when it came to Israel’s war in Gaza. A third candidate vying for the same seat devoted much of his campaign’s launch video to lambasting the current member of Congress representing the district over the funding he’s received from the pro-Israel lobby.

The incumbent in question – congressman Ritchie Torres – is one of the most staunchly pro-Israel advocates in Congress. Dalourny Nemorin, one of his challengers for the Democratic nomination to represent the district calls him the “poster boy” for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac. “Ritchie Torres cares more about Bibi than he does about the Bronx,” Michael Blake, another challenger, said in the launch video.

Torres’s seat is not likely to be in danger – he is widely popular in his district, which spans a vast swath of the Bronx. But the messaging of his several challengers for the Democratic nomination to represent the district – five candidates have entered the race so far – underscore how major shifts in Americans’ views of Israel are beginning to seep into political campaigns. Public perceptions of Israel have soured after two years of its war on Gaza, and the historic election of Zohran Mamdani has proved that reflexive support for Israel – once viewed as a prerequisite for political viability – may no longer be a safe bet.

Across the country, candidates who are openly critical of Israel – including a record number who are of Palestinian descent – are entering local, state and federal races, donning keffiyehs and denouncing “genocide” in campaign materials. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate bid seeks to replicate Mamdani’s insurgent campaign; in Georgia, Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian-American elected to state-level office, is running for governor a year after being denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.

In New York City, which holds primaries in June, voters said they preferred Mamdani’s approach to Gaza over that of his challengers. Several incumbent Democrats – including Daniel Goldman and Adriano Espaillat – are on the defensive over their pro-Israel stances. The race to replace Torres has put a particular spotlight on the changing calculus, with most other candidates in the race denouncing Israel’s actions as “genocide” and running aggressively against his record – even when that has meant walking back their own past support for Israel.

Former state lawmaker Michael Blake in front of Union Grove Missionary Baptist church in the Bronx, New York, on 23 November 2025. Photograph: Lev Radin/Shutterstock

Torres, who declined an interview request, has repeatedly questioned the Gaza war’s death toll, and labeled the global movement for Palestinian rights a “social contagion“. He has also dismissed his opponents and accused one of them – Blake – of fomenting “Jew hatred” for including in his campaign video a clip of social media influencer Guy Christensen, whom he said “glorified” the killings of two Israel embassy staffers earlier this year. (Blake told the Guardian that including Christensen in the video was “a miss” but did not remove the clip.)

“We are witnessing a new crop of cynical candidates who treat antisemitism not as a crisis for our civilization but as an opportunity for their own personal aggrandizement,” Torres wrote in a social media post.

His opponents are betting voters can distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.

“Ritchie Torres’s unwavering support for Israel is no longer the mainstream opinion; it is the fringe opinion,” Andre Easton, a public school teacher running as an independent candidate, told the Guardian in an interview. He cited recent polls that show 77% of Democrats believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. “This is something that we’ve never seen before.”

Torres’s district – New York’s 15th – is regularly tagged “the poorest congressional district in the country”. Home to large Latino, Black, and immigrant communities, it fares poorly by most metrics and foreign policy does not usually rank at the top of voter concerns. In a viral interview with Adam Friedland, a Jewish comedian, last summer, Torres said that most of his constituents “are not talking about Israel, people are talking about how to put food on the table”.

Some candidates took offense to that. “What it suggests is that we are not able to walk and chew gum, that we are not able to recognize the humanity of other people,” said Easton.

Israel’s war in Gaza played an outsized role in the New York City mayoral election. While he did not back down on his pro-Palestinian stance even as it offered a frequent attack line against him, Mamdani ran a campaign that focused primarily on affordability. Candidates looking to tap into his momentum are trying to emulate that focus while also connecting cost of living issues with the US government’s massive funding of Israel.

Adriano Espaillat speaks in Washington DC on 12 November 2025. Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/UPI/Shutterstock

Mamdani served as a “barometer” for the temperature around the question of Palestine, said Nemorin, a public defender and member of Democratic Socialists of America who is also challenging Torres. The more than $21bn the US sent to Israel since October 2023 alone offer a way to link the issue to voters’ material interests. “There’s a conversation about where our tax dollars go,” she said. “The federal government is funding wars that lead to genocide”.

Despite the messaging, Torres remains the clear favorite. His campaign is awash in cash including $1.6m he has received from pro-Israel lobby groups, according to Track Aipac, a project that tracks the lobby’s funding of US politicians. That funding has become a talking point against him as a large number of New Yorkers hold unfavorable views of the pro-Israel lobby.

Torres’s opponents say he focuses on Israel to the detriment of his voters. In an interview with the Guardian, Blake, a former assemblymember who lost to Torres five years ago, cited an analysis that found Torres mentioned Israel “236% more” than he did “poverty” and repeatedly called out Torres’s Aipac funding.

But Blake himself spoke at Aipac events in the past and traveled to Israel on a trip sponsored by the group. He has since scrubbed old social media posts referring to Aipac and now says Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to “genocide” after previously rejecting the term.

“I would hope you would want to have a leader who can see new information and make a change,” Blake said, to explain his turnaround. “I might have been in a particular place before, but I’m not there now.”