Arya News - The midterms showed that challenging support for Israel can win votes. But changing US foreign policy may be harder.
As the midterm votes trickled in on Tuesday and Democrats locked up majorities in both chambers of the United States Congress, Republicans began pointing fingers at the Trump administration’s increasingly unpopular foreign policies.
“The real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” Vice President JD Vance said on X, blaming the war on Iran, which has triggered soaring fuel prices and a $47bn bill, for souring voters on the Republican Party. Many, already appalled at US-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza and the occupation of southern Lebanon, also view the Trump administration as having been convinced to launch strikes on Iran on February 28 by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu government, which insisted without evidence that Iran was “close” to developing a nuclear weapon.
An unnamed pollster, Vance said, had asked voters who had switched parties for this election what would bring them back. Summing up the causes for their displeasure with Trump’s government, they said they wanted an end to the war on Iran, action on the cost of living, a return to “America First” and a fundamental change in Washington’s relationship with Israel.
All of it, voters say, went directly against Trump’s campaign promises to end the US involvement in foreign wars and to bring down the cost of living.
About six in 10 voters surveyed by The Associated Press said that going to war with Iran was the wrong decision. Even more called the cost of living key to their decision about how to vote in the midterm elections. “Voters may not have been thinking about the specific details of the conflict, but they connected the war with the rise of the cost of living in the United States, and punished Republicans for it,” Andrew Payne of the Chatham House think tank told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile in Detroit, Michigan’s Democratic senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed had called for an end to US military assistance to Israel, a position that experts say echoed the “America First” message on which many Republicans had won previous midterm races. He won his contest despite a vigorous campaign by the Republicans, and funded by the deep-pocketed, pro-Israel AIPAC lobby group. Although El-Sayed’s campaign focused primarily on healthcare and the cost of living, it may have been anger towards Israel that propelled the first Muslim into the US Senate.
“We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid or genocide or war,” El-Sayed told supporters from the podium, where he also took a jab at Vance. The two politicians sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but Vance’s diagnosis signals, at the very least, a rift in the Republican alliance with Netanyahu.
Payne said he believes a broader Republican realignment remains unlikely at this stage. But with Democrats winning so handily and criticism of Israel front and centre in some of their biggest swing-state upsets, he said that “the party could be emboldened to take an even tougher line moving forward.”
“There are very few issues on which we’ll see such a stark partisan contrast, making it one of the most likely to cut through in the presidential campaign in 2028,” Payne said.
Where AIPAC lost ground
On Wednesday night, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major US pro-Israel lobby which raises funds in support of pro-Israel political candidates , claimed more than “234 candidates” supported by its members had won their seats.
The group’s post on X congratulated Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the two Democratic leaders, as a swift reminder that it maintains support from both parties.
But the picture looks worse for AIPAC when measured by where its money went. A Responsible Statecraft report has found that AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP), and several other political committees spent $84.1m on races. Of that, $55.3m went on races where their preferred candidate lost. In 2022 and 2024, by comparison, 69 percent and 87 percent of UDP’s spending went to races where its preferred candidates won.
It was Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan race that proved to be the Israeli lobby’s most expensive setback. Responsible Statecraft put UDP’s spending on efforts to defeat El-Sayed at $31.47m across the primary and general election campaign periods. El-Sayed won both, and for Democrats weighing whether to challenge the party’s position on Israel, his victory establishes a strong precedent in which a candidate called for an end to military aid to Israel, withstood heavy outside donor spending and still won a statewide race in a swing state that Trump won in 2024.
Trump himself had already signalled that he understood the political cost. On election day, he said Washington would end annual military aid to Israel after this year, taking away what he called a “bad talking point” for Democrats. The existing agreement provides for $3.8bn a year through September 2028. Trump offered few details about how he would bring an early end to the funding and said the US would keep selling Israel weapons, prompting scepticism from observers.
What, if anything, could change for Gaza now?
Once Democrats take control of both houses, they are likely to use committee hearings and investigations to probe what both the Biden and Trump administrations knew about how Israel was using US weapons in Gaza, and why weapon transfers continued amid allegations of grave violations of international law, experts told Al Jazeera. Lawmakers can also seek conditions for future military funding and force votes on individual sales.
The appetite for such votes has grown over time. In January 2024, 11 senators backed an effort by Senator Bernie Sanders to require the US Department of State to report on Israel’s human rights record. A motion to advance a measure blocking a weapons sale drew 27 in July 2025. In April this year, 40 senators voted to advance a measure opposing a sale of military bulldozers to Israel, and 36 backed a similar move on 1,000-pound bombs.
A Democratic majority could possibly tip the balance in favour of some sort of partial ban on weapons sales. But Daniel Levy, president of the US/ Middle East Project (USMEP) and a former Israeli peace negotiator, told Al Jazeera that would likely be upended by Trump’s use of the presidential veto. On Tuesday, Trump told Fox News he plans to use the veto to block “insane” Democratic policies in Congress. Overriding a veto requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, which the Democrats are unlikely to be able to secure.
“I would not underestimate the extent to which executive privilege can be deployed in the ways this administration has deployed it, approaching and crossing lines that the US system of checks and balances should have enforced, but hasn’t,” Levy said.
Congress can put US support for Israel under greater scrutiny, but analysts say unpicking the security ties that bind the two countries will be a lot trickier.
“We might start to see a tougher line, but there are deeper structural issues at play that transcend Congress,” said Simon Mabon, a professor of international politics at Lancaster University. “They are tied to US institutions and other parts of the government, including military collaboration.”
“Democrats might start to capitalise on waning public support for Israel, but there are limits to what they can do,” Mabon said.
Rebuilding support for Israel
Since the Republican defeat this week, AIPAC has told its members it is “determined to expand political activism in the cycles ahead”.
Levy said that “the Israel lobby can still spend enough to keep lawmakers on board, and if ties in technology, AI, military AI and the wider economy hold, Israel may be able to ride out much of the pressure for change.”
He added that much of the lobby may also present dwindling support for Israel as a problem with Netanyahu or with far-right figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, rather than the Israeli state’s almost cross-party support for the war with Iran and strikes on Gaza.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid attempted a version of that argument on X on Wednesday. “These people aren’t against Israel. They’re against extremist ministers who say crazy things. They’re against settler violence; they’re against a government they don’t understand; they’re mainly against Netanyahu – for them, anything connected to him is toxic.”
He also faulted Netanyahu for openly siding with Republicans and urged the next Israeli government to meet both parties in Congress and hear their criticisms. He hopes a new, more liberal, government in Israel could reopen the closing doors with Washington’s lawmakers.
But the harder task would be persuading voters who object to US support for the genocide in Gaza and the Iran war, that changing Israel’s leadership would change those policies.
“Many voters believe the [Iran] war took place at Israel’s behest and would not have happened without Israel dragging the United States into it,” Levy said.
Analysts say it is unclear whether this will translate into policies that materially change the course of Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza. What is clear is that this has been a bad election for Israel, as criticism of the country gains ground and moves into mainstream US political debate.
“For many voters, particularly Democrats, it also comes after several years of what they see as US complicity in the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza,” Levy added.