YouGov: Dems Rush to Embrace the 20% Position on Israel

One of the remarkable effects of Donald Trump’s victory and subsequent rapid ascent in popularity has been the lessons that Democrats have taken from it. Or perhaps better put, their refusal to take any lesson from it at all. Having spent the last eight years positioning their party on the reflexive gainsay of whatever Trump says or does, the party has marched themselves right into the fringe of the American electorate. 

YouGov gives us a clear case in point in its latest poll. Some commentators have suggested that Trump built this momentum by seizing the 80% position of 80/20 issues with voters, such as on immigration, corruption, government spending, and so forth. But that doesn’t give enough credit to Democrats, who seem to be going out of their way to seize the 20% position on their own. That’s literally true with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza, in which Democrats have taken the 20% side in the American electorate:

Democrats side more with the Palestinians than at any point since at least late 2017.

(h/t @dhmontgomery) pic.twitter.com/edWEl0ZUPB

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) February 13, 2025

Please note the timing on this transformation. It took place almost entirely after the Gazans led by Hamas conducted the largest massacre of Jews since World War II — over 1200, most of them civilians and many of them women and children. It’s not a seven-year window or progression, but a sharp reversal in November 2023. In fact, one of the more remarkable trendlines in the chart shows that Democrats actually moved away from support of the Palestinians after Hamas’ attempt to start an all-out war in 2021, which got papered over by the Biden administration’s pressure on Israel for concessions.

What happened in 2023? Hamas slaughtered and raped their way through southern Israel, and Israel had the temerity to treat an act of genocidal war as … an act of genocidal war. Joe Biden and his team decided to place the blame on Israelis after a few weeks for refusing to play along with the previous script of offering concessions to terrorists to get another “permanent” cease-fire, and Democrats lost their minds. And when Trump criticized Biden for his policies, Democrats went all-in on the Palestinians, to the point where only 9% now support Israel while terrorists try to annihilate them.

And this is where we come to the 80/20 argument. Harvard-Harris CAPS has run a series of polls on this issue with American voters, and the results have consistently shown that 80% of Americans side with Israel. That was true a year ago:

And it was true a month ago:

The American electorate hasn’t moved on this point for the past 18 months. Democrats, however, have shifted rapidly and radically to abandon a liberal democracy while it is under attack by a terrorist network funded by Iran that aims to annihilate Israel and Jews all around the world. They have abandoned the vast majority of the American electorate, seemingly without any other principle than to express knee-jerk opposition to Trump and Republicans.

Note that the latest cease-fire framework is also quite popular, even if it is doomed to fail in the end, just as all Hamas cease-fires fail. Democrats have rushed to give credit to that agreement to Joe Biden, but the electorate isn’t buying it. In the same poll last month, 57% of Americans credit Trump’s intervention with the successful conclusion of the agreement, including 60% of independent voters. 

In other words, Democrats are racing to the fringe under the impression that they are leading some kind of movement. They still believe that they can promote themselves simply by opposing anything Trump says, does, or is, without any other guiding principle. In reality, they’re running off a political cliff and looking more and more like moral idiots as well as idiots of the more mundane variety. 

Today’s Democrat Party has become a freak show, a collection of incompetent weirdoes who seem to have learned their craft at Monty Python’s Argument Clinic. This was much more enjoyable as satire fifty years ago than the reality of Democrat politics today.