Families return to Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, on Oct. 12, 2025, surveying the widespread destruction in the city and salvaging belongings.
ABDELRAHMAN RASHAD
AFP via Getty
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest wiffle-waffle messaging on Israel is the Democratic Party’s problem in a nutshell: Even while support for the Palestinian people is now at a two-decade high, party leadership simply cannot get in tune with voters.
During a podcast interview earlier this month, Newsom said that some people “are talking about (Israel) appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” referencing a column by New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman, and that “the current leadership in Israel is walking us down that path where I don’t think you have a choice about that consideration,” referencing continued U.S. military presence support.
But in an interview with Politico earlier this week, Newsom said he regretted using those words “in this context,” and said he “revered” and was “proud to support” Israel.
I just rolled my eyes so hard I think I hurt my optic nerves. It shouldn’t be this hard to call a spade a spade — or an apartheid an apartheid, as it were.
The American public is learning how to say it: According to a recent Gallup poll, 41% of Americans now say they sympathize more with the Palestinians, while 36% say they sympathize more with the Israelis.
“The five-percentage-point difference is not statistically significant, but it contrasts with a clear lead for the Israelis only a year ago (46% vs. 33%) and larger leads over the prior 24 years,” Gallup reported.
Among Democratic voters alone, the divide is even more stark: Gallup found that 65% of Democrats say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while just 17% say they sympathize more with the Israelis.
So why are the Democrats struggling to publicly condemn Israel’s military action when support for Palestine is clearly the voters’ will?
Well, if you ask some people, it’s because too many elected Democrats are beholden to AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and their Political Action Committee, which pours millions of dollars in state races to promote moderate Democrats over progressives.
AIPAC spent more than $21 million supporting pro-Israel candidates in the Illinois primary election earlier this month, reported ABC News.
“In this election cycle so far, this strategy seems to be, ‘Let’s go after any candidate who is not blindly pro-Israel,’” Suzanne Chod, a professor at North Central College, told the Chicago ABC affiliate. But final results were mixed: AIPAC-backed candidates in Illinois won in two primaries, and lost in two.
According to a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data, AIPAC was the biggest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democratic primaries in 2024, and “nearly half of AIPAC donors to Democratic candidates …(had) some recent history of giving to Republican campaigns or committees.”
The Democratic Party clings to established, moderate, elderly candidates — the same kind AIPAC loves to support with millions of dollars in campaign funding. But those candidates are the exact same lawmakers who have failed to oppose some of the worst atrocities of the Trump administration, and are failing now to understand that their party base is younger, more liberal and less supportive of Israel than they (or their campaign financiers) are.
Democrats’ refusal to endorse young, progressive candidates — demonstrated neatly by the endorsements doled out at last month’s California Democratic Party state convention — keeps them stuck to a losing status quo, and has led the party into an increasingly-reviled gerontocracy.
Age and ideology is splitting the party in two, at a time when the Democrats can least afford to have a divided base. The party leaders’ reluctance to condemn Israel’s repeated, blatantly evil attacks on Palestinian civilian areas and infrastructure is not only a moral failing, it’s a political failing too, and keeps us stuck in this cycle.
Dem voters can keep hoping our leadership will learn from their mistakes, but, clearly, age is not an indicator of wisdom or skill. The primary election this June will be our best chance to tell the party exactly what we think of any candidate who can’t express clear support for the Palestinian people.
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Robin Epley is an opinion writer for The Sacramento Bee, with a focus on Sacramento County politics. She was born and raised in Sacramento, was a member of the Chico Enterprise-Record’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist team for coverage of the Camp Fire, and is a graduate of Chico State.