Six in ten young US Jewish voters view Israel's Gaza war as genocide, J Street poll finds

Jewish American voters ranked the future of democracy as their leading concern in the 2026 midterm elections, with antisemitism placing third, according to a national survey released Thursday by J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group.

The poll, conducted by GBAO Strategies among 800 Jewish voters nationwide from October 28 to November 3, found that 44% of respondents identified the future of democracy as a key issue. The cost of living came second at 34%, followed by antisemitism at 21%, while Israel ranked fifth at 14%.

The partisan breakdown mirrored previous elections, with 72% of respondents supporting Democratic congressional candidates and disapproving of President Donald Trump. Orthodox voters leaned more Republican and more favorably toward Trump than the broader sample.

"This is a constituency that knows what it thinks in their political beliefs, political values," Jim Gerstein, founding partner of GBAO Strategies, said of the national Jewish community during a press briefing.

The survey focused on voters nationwide and did not specifically poll Michigan, where Democratic senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, a critic of Israel who supports a total ban on weapons sales to the country, drew considerable unease among Jewish voters. J Street did not formally endorse El-Sayed. Gerstein said Republican attempts to appeal to Jewish voters unsettled by El-Sayed, along with similar GOP outreach in other states, appeared to have little impact because of the party's poor standing with the community. "It's really not relevant when you look at how unpopular the Republican Party is," he said. "They are not going to be making any traction with Jewish voters as long as this is the perception of them."

The poll found that 31% of respondents supported ending all military aid to Israel and would agree with rhetoric from some left-wing candidates describing the country's conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Among Jewish voters under 35, that share rose sharply to 60%.

Asked whether defense aid to Israel should continue, 39% said it should with conditions attached, a position aligned with J Street's policy, while 30% said it should continue without conditions. Trump announced on the morning of Election Day that he intended to end the $3.8 billion in defense assistance to Israel before the end of the year, in part because the aid had become unpopular.

The survey also recorded broad backing for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at 65%. Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street's founder and president, told reporters that the results, together with the election or re-election of at least 180 House candidates the group supported, demonstrated that "the things that we stand for are, in fact, politically supported, and they reflect the majority of opinion right now in the American Jewish community."