Republicans over the age of 50 still overwhelmingly view Israel favorably — while younger GOP voters and Democrats of all age groups do not.
Sixty percent of U.S. adults have a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel, including 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 41% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, according to a Pew Research poll released Tuesday. However, while a majority of Republicans still see the U.S. ally in a positive light, the GOP is starkly divided on age lines, with now a majority — 57% — of Republicans age 18 to 49 viewing Israel unfavorably while only 24% of Republicans over 50 share that view.
Among Democrats, there was large parity between voters’ stances on Israel across the two age cohorts, with 84% of Democrats 49 and younger and 76% of Democrats 50 and older saying they had a negative view of Israel. The poll did not feature a separate category for independents and instead grouped independent voters along with the party they leaned towards.
The survey’s release comes one day after The New York Times (NYT) published a bombshell report claiming that Israeli leaders cajoled President Donald Trump into attacking Iran on Feb. 28 by laying out a plan his own CIA director dubbed “farcical.”
Republican strategist and former Trump White House official Mike McKenna told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the survey results are “not terribly surprising.”
“We are now 80 years and three generations away from the plucky new nation-state of Israel and the constant threats to its very existence,” McKenna told the DCNF. “They are now a nuclear power and the most formidable regional military power in their neighborhood. It is difficult to root for the biggest, baddest, most well-connected kid on the block.”
“It doesn’t help that there does not seem to be any moderating influence. Israel seems to have dragged the United States into the conflict with Iran, and I suspect that most Americans believe that the reason why we have been tangled in Middle East conflicts for 40 years now is direct related to Israel,” he added.
Weeks before the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran to begin the war, Trump-appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine told fellow administration officials that Israelis’ “standard operating procedure” is to “oversell,” according to the NYT’s Tuesday report. Secretary of State Marco Rubio added at the time that Israel’s assertion to the U.S. that the two countries can pull off an Iranian regime change was “bullshit.”
“It is no mystery about the skepticism among the young,” McKenna continued. “They have watched us at war in the Middle East for most of their lives. What have we gotten for it? Not much.”
Similarly, 58% of Republicans age 18 to 49 said they had either “not too much” confidence or “none at all” in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” according to the Pew poll released Tuesday.
On the other hand, 66% of Republican respondents 50 and over had either “some” or “a lot” of confidence in the 76-year-old foreign leader. Only 10% of Democrats age 18-49 and 15% of Democrats 50 and older agreed.
When Pew asked respondents to share their views on Israel in March 2025, 53% of all U.S. adults polled had a favorable view of the country while 45% had an unfavorable view. However, in March 2022 — a year and a half before Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attack on Israel — a majority of U.S. adults (55%) said they saw the Jewish-majority country in a favorable light, according to Pew’s poll that year.
Only 53% of Democrats had told Pew in 2022 they had a negative view of Israel — a difference of 27 percentage points from four years later.
Research firm SSRS surveyed its American Trends Panel (ATP) of 3,507 randomly selected adults across the U.S. from March 23 to 29. Of the respondents, 3,377 were surveyed online and the remaining 130 over the phone. The poll includes a weighted-back oversample of Muslim, Jewish and non-Hispanic Asian respondents. Pew’s 2026 survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points.
Fifty-one percent of likely Republicans and 74% of Democrats indicated that Israel has “too much influence over American foreign policy,” according to a Democracy Institute poll of U.S. likely voters released in late March.
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