The American public’s outrage over Gaza just decided Tuesday’s midterms. Democrats have now won control of both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate, taking them from a belligerently defensive Republican Party that not only did the bidding of Israel and its allies in America’s foreign policy commentariat, but went out of its way to smear and shame those who opposed that deeply unpopular choice. To take as a sample the nation’s most hotly contested and watched election, what we saw in Michigan was the defeat of a candidate who disregarded that public outrage by a candidate who sympathised with and substantially addressed it.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed beat out Republican Mike Rogers there. And this was a victory that really showed just how committed voters now are to ridding themselves of the influence of apologists for the tragedy of Gaza. Before the US Senate vote in Michigan, El-Sayed was targeted for defeat with a record-breaking amount of political spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group that has made it its business to play surrogate to the regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even as his government’s violent campaigns in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and the West Bank draw mounting international condemnation.
In fact, not only did AIPAC and its affiliates spend nearly $30m to defeat El-Sayed in the Democratic primary by backing self-proclaimed “Zionist Democrat” Haley Stevens – their largest-ever investment in a single race – but AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC, an organisation in the US allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money for political advertising, continued spending against El-Sayed after the primary, benefitting Rogers. And finally Stevens, explicitly citing El-Sayed’s campaign messaging against Israel’s military actions and US taxpayer funding for it, baffled her own party by endorsing his Republican rival just days before the election. Vice President JD Vance himself acknowledged the morning after the elections that the same coalition that voted President Donald Trump and himself into office in 2024 had just decided the results of 2026.
Citing his own best advisers, Vance said voters were motivated by four priorities: “Our voters showed up,” the vice president said. Donald Trump Jr, the president’s own son, publicly endorsed Vance’s admission of the GOP’s failures. Hours later, President Trump himself called Vance’s analysis “good” although he stood by the disastrous war nonetheless.
That’s because it is impossible to obscure or erase the impression the whole drama of this year’s elections leaves us with. The impression of a hostile faction embedded in our political class whose commitment to Israel-right-or-wrong is directly, undemocratically and contemptuously opposed to the growing consensus of the American people. It is also impossible to miss, however, that the American people this year showed themselves willing and able to oust that faction.
And it is impossible to miss why. To paraphrase the immortal maxim of Democratic political strategist James Carville: It’s Gaza, stupid. As I’ve argued repeatedly over the past few years, the scandal of the Gaza genocide itself has profoundly reshaped Americans’ attitudes towards foreign policy, war and military aid – particularly when it comes to the Netanyahu regime.
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