Americans Voted Against War. The Democrats Must Not Mistake That For A Mandate

The American political establishment is about to learn a dangerous lesson from the wrong interpretation of a historic election.

On Tuesday night, voters delivered a devastating rebuke to US President Donald Trump and his cronies, handing Democrats control of both chambers of Congress in the process. 

Candidates who challenged the political consensus around Israel, Gaza and Iran achieved victories that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago. 

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), long treated as an almost untouchable force in American electoral politics, watched candidates it opposed prevail, despite extraordinary spending. Association with Aipac and pro-Israel lobbying groups is now a liability. 

And before Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries congratulate themselves, they should understand something: the voters who made these victories possible did not vote for them and their Democratic establishment. In fact, they voted against it.

This was not simply a Democratic wave; it was a revolt against a political order that has made endless war a bipartisan commitment, Palestinian suffering an acceptable cost of doing business in the Middle East, and American taxpayers unwilling financiers of destruction abroad, while their own communities struggle at home with all sorts of avoidable challenges.

The results were not exclusively a referendum on foreign policy. Americans also voted against rising living costs, corruption and an increasingly unpopular president. 

But the Gaza genocide and the Iran war, launched at Israel’s behest, were no longer peripheral issues that candidates could safely avoid. They became part of a larger reckoning over what American power is being used for, who benefits from it, and who is expected to pay the price.

Historic victory

The question now is whether the Democratic Party will recognise that shift, or attempt to absorb the energy of an antiwar movement while preserving the very policies that made such a movement necessary. With the history of the Democratic Party, most of us aren’t holding our breath.

Abdul El-Sayed, who will become the first Muslim elected to the US Senate, defeated Republican Mike Rogers after surviving one of the most aggressive campaigns against a candidate in recent memory.

His victory was historic, of course. But reducing it to a milestone of religious representation would miss its political significance.

According to the Associated Press news agency, Aipac spent nearly $30m opposing him during the Democratic primary. Its preferred candidate, Representative Haley Stevens, lost.

The Democratic establishment cannot credibly present itself as the innocent beneficiary of public outrage. It helped create that outrage

Then, just two days before the election, Stevens endorsed Sayed’s Republican opponent, Rogers. After months of bitter disagreement over Israel and sabotaging her former opponent, she decided that defeating the Democratic nominee was preferable to accepting the direction Michigan voters had chosen.

It was an extraordinary exposure of the priorities operating within the party’s establishment.

Even though Schumer and others in the establishment leadership condemned the latest move by Stevens, and supported Sayed in Tuesday’s election, they had almost all backed Stevens during the primary, and were timid in their acceptance of Sayed even before the Stevens stunt. The establishment ultimately rallied behind the nominee only after voters had rejected its preferred choice.

The party leadership should not be allowed to rewrite the story as though it had enthusiastically nurtured the very movement it initially attempted to defeat.

Michigan voters were told, in effect, that a candidate willing to challenge unconditional support for Israel was too risky, too divisive and too far outside the political mainstream.

They elected him anyway. And Michigan was hardly alone. In Maine, Troy Jackson defeated longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins after openly criticising Israel’s conduct in Gaza and opposing unconditional American military assistance.

In Texas, James Talarico, who has spoken of his opposition to the Gaza slaughter from the perspective of a Christian and former teacher, won a Senate seat that Democrats had been unable to capture for more than three decades.

Framework shattered

Now, I want to say this clearly: I don’t believe any of these candidates have gone nearly as far as they should have in openly calling out Israel’s criminality, without somewhat pandering to the liberal Zionists stuck in the current Democratic ranks. But they have all gone further than what was typically acceptable in the political order.

And these candidates are not ideologically identical, nor did every Democratic victor campaign against Aipac. But their victories demonstrate that unconditional support for Israeli military policy is no longer the prerequisite for political viability that Washington once assumed.

The old threats are losing some of their power.

For decades, American politicians were conditioned to speak about Israel in a narrow vocabulary. Security was legitimate. Palestinian freedom was controversial.

The genocide in Gaza has shattered much of that framework. Americans watched hospitals destroyed, children pulled from rubble, journalists killed, and families displaced repeatedly. They watched their government continue supplying weapons, while insisting that it was working tirelessly for peace.

Under former President Joe Biden, the Democratic administration helped to sustain Israel’s military campaign, even as outrage grew over Palestinian civilian deaths. Under Trump, the Republican administration embraced further military escalation and deepened the regional catastrophe. Same garbage, different pile: that’s how many of us felt.

This is why the Democratic establishment cannot credibly present itself as the innocent beneficiary of public outrage. It helped create that outrage.

And the shift was visible well before election night. Polling reported by Al Jazeera in August showed substantial opposition to continued military aid to Israel among Democratic voters in early presidential primary states.

The distance between the party’s leadership and its voters has become impossible to ignore.

Moral rupture

The Israel lobby’s problem is therefore bigger than a series of electoral defeats. Its political brand has become increasingly associated with a foreign policy that many Americans no longer wish to defend.

That does not mean the organisation has lost its money, access or influence. It means those resources no longer guarantee political obedience.

And that is an important beginning. Gaza was the moral rupture, and the war on Iran widened the political reckoning.

For years, Americans were told that each new military escalation in the Middle East would make them safer. Each intervention came with assurances of strategic necessity, limited objectives and eventual stability.

Yet Americans have watched the same repeated cycle, over and over again: military escalation, civilian suffering, regional instability, enormous public expenditures, and promises that the next use of force will finally deliver security.

The war on Iran just brought that contradiction home, especially for “America Firsters” who felt betrayed.

Voters facing rising prices and economic uncertainty were once again being asked to accept the costs of another foreign war. The administration that promised to put America first was consumed by military confrontation abroad.

Schumer and Jeffries may soon hold extraordinary institutional power. But the Democratic leadership’s record on Israel gives little reason to assume that electoral victory will produce meaningful change in that party.

Opportunities squandered

In April, Schumer was among a small minority of Senate Democrats who opposed resolutions seeking to block certain weapons sales to Israel. In July, Jeffries voted against ending American military aid, even as a substantial portion of his caucus supported the measure.

These were opportunities to use congressional power to challenge the material support sustaining Israeli military operations, and they squandered it again.

The leadership chose continuity, and now it will have fewer excuses. The problem is not that the Democratic Party lacks the means to pursue a different policy. It is that too many of its leaders have lacked the willingness to exercise a moral backbone. 

A true antiwar movement must be willing to support candidates who uphold those commitments, and challenge those who abandon them, no matter what party they come from

The deeper question is whether this election represents a temporary protest against Trump, or the beginning of a lasting transformation of American politics. I hope it is the latter, but I am very sceptical.

The US does not simply need Democrats who are more articulate in condemning Republican wars, while remaining willing to finance wars of their own. It needs a political movement that understands opposition to war as a governing principle, rather than a campaign slogan. That means opposing illegal and unnecessary military interventions, regardless of which party occupies the White House.

It means applying international law consistently, whether the accused government is an American adversary or a so-called ally.

It means challenging the military-industrial complex and the enormous political incentives that make war profitable for some, while catastrophic for millions.

And it means building an economic vision that recognises the connection between militarism abroad and neglected needs at home.

The path forward

A true antiwar movement must be willing to support candidates who uphold those commitments and challenge those who abandon them, no matter what party they come from. It must also refuse to disappear once the election is over.

Because the political establishment has a familiar way of surviving popular revolts. It adopts their language, celebrates their victories, and then quietly restores the policies that produced the revolt in the first place.

The Democrats cannot be permitted to do that with Gaza as it continues to bleed, as the genocide started and was sustained on their watch. They cannot be permitted to do that with this stupid war on Iran and what follows.

There is much to celebrate about Tuesday’s election, with some of the worst actors in modern political history being sent packing.

Candidates who were told they could not win without submitting to the old foreign policy consensus proved otherwise. Communities that had been dismissed as politically expendable demonstrated their electoral power. A lobbying establishment accustomed to intimidating dissent discovered that voters could reject its preferred candidates.

Aipac’s defeats should not become merely another chapter in the Democratic Party’s comeback story. They should mark the beginning of the end of a bipartisan consensus that has wreaked havoc on so many innocent lives with our tax dollars for too many years to count.

If Schumer and Jeffries interpret this election as permission to restore the old order, they will have misunderstood the moment. If the antiwar movement interprets it as proof that its work is finished, it will have misunderstood the struggle. And if they return to business as usual, they should understand that they can lose their own primaries next time around.

The American people have demonstrated that political power can be challenged, even when backed by extraordinary wealth and institutional influence.

The next question is whether that power can be redirected towards peace.

The voters have opened a door that the political establishment spent decades trying to keep shut. Now the US needs an antiwar movement strong enough to make sure it never closes again.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.