The Shift: Presidential hopeful Josh Shapiro is out of step with Dem voters on Israel

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before but, a new poll indicates that Israel’s reputation continues to collapse among Americans, particularly Democrats.

The NBC News poll shows that just 32% of registered voters view Israel positively – down from 47% in 2023. A mere 13% of Democrats view the country positively, and nearly 60% of them view it negatively.

These findings come just weeks after an annual Gallup poll showing that, for the first time in 25 years, a majority of Americans sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis.

Into this climate steps Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has presidential aspirations. In a recent installment of The Shift, I wrote about California Governor Gavin Newsom, another presidential hopeful, who has begun altering his public rhetoric on Israel in response to the prevailing political winds. Up to this point, Newsom has been a dyed-in-the-wool Israel supporter, but now he says the country looks like an apartheid state and that the U.S. needs to condition military aid to the country.

So far, it appears that Shapiro is going in the opposite direction.

Shapiro has a new memoir, as potential presidential candidates so often do. In the book, Where We Keep the Light, he talks about being vetted as Kamala Harris’ potential running mate, a spot that ultimately went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Shapiro had refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and had criticized the protests opposing the genocide. He claims that Harris asked him to apologize for the protest comments, and he refused.

This alleged exchange generated some headlines when the book was published in January, but its worth reexamining as we know that the Democratic National Committee is working on a report that shows that the Biden administration’s policy in Gaza hurt Harris at the polls.

This puts Shapiro in a potentially perilous position with the Democratic base, especially because he’ll probably be running against candidates to the left of him in the primary. “Anyone documenting the evolution of Democratic Party politics over the last few years can see the red flags,” acknowledges the pro-Israel Jewish Insider.

“The governor’s positioning reflects a deeper rift within the Democratic Party — a tug-of-war between an increasingly vocal progressive wing and a broader but less animated moderate core,” notes The Hill. “While Harris herself maintained a traditionally pro-Israel stance during the 2024 campaign, activists say Shapiro’s outspoken tone could cloud the way some see him.”

Shapiro isn’t wavering on his position, despite all the polling. He recently rejected calls to condition military aid to Israel and, in an interview with Pod Save America, he took Newsom to task over the apartheid comments.

“If we really want peace, and I believe you want that, then we’ve also got to be acknowledging that language matters here, that words matter,” said Shapiro, who didn’t refer to Newsom by name. “And that we’ve got to use words that are actually rooted in reality and are able to bring the temperature down to create a space for that peace.”

As the U.S./Israel war on Iran spins out of control, it’s pretty clear that Democrats would benefit from turning the temperature up.

Joe Kent

National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent has quit his position, saying he can’t support the war on Iran in good conscience.

In his resignation letter Kent implied that Trump had lied about Iran posing an “imminent” threat, and said Israel had pulled the United States into a war that “serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

Despite this move, Kent doesn’t exactly come off as the most principled of people. Beyond a variety of wackjob, right-wing opinions that are irrelevant to the current discussion, he also worked for the CIA’s Special Activities Center, and defended the pardon of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who fatally stabbed a 17-year-old prisoner and photographed himself with the corpse. His resignation letter openly reveals that he has no qualms about lethal force, as it praises Trump for killing Qasem Soleimani and imagines that his military strikes have defeated ISIS.

Like many Trump supporters, he’s a true believer. He thinks that Trump was a legitimate antiwar president and an “America First” politician before being duped by Netanyahu and other pro-war forces. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you,” he writes, to the most powerful person in the world.

However, none of the details about his personal views really matter very much. The fact Kent is an unrepentant Trump supporter just further underscores the fact that Israel is creating major rifts within the Republican party. This was already happening among voters, but the Kent resignation is a major moment because these disagreements are beginning to bubble over at the top. We’ve already seen prominent right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly criticize the war. Even Laura Ingraham took the administration to task for hitting the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab.

“It’s a dynamic we haven’t really seen before — arguably not even with the Jeffrey Epstein files (where the criticism was more of Trump’s administration than him personally),” notes CNN. “And those influencers can give others the permission structure to take similar positions. Elite opinion can filter down to the base.”

Media members and pro-Israel groups have dismissed Kent as antisemitic because he suggests that the United States went to war for Israel. There’s a certain amount of available fodder when you’re talking about someone with Kent’s politics. He’s promoted conspiracy theories regarding COVID, the 2020 election, the January 6th insurrection, and Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but how can anyone still claim that Israel’s connection to U.S. foreign policy is a conspiracy?

Over the last couple weeks, Rubio, Hegseth, and even Trump have all essentially admitted that Israel was the major reason that the United States is currently bogged down in a widening war and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to justify to the American public. One can argue over how thoroughly Trump was “deceived,” but the reason for the war seems pretty clear.