With Election Day arriving this week, senior Democratic Party figures are publicly backing candidates whose views on Israel they say they disagree with, raising questions about how the party is managing tension between its establishment and its more progressive wing.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is retiring after 20 terms and roughly 40 years in Congress, told The New York Times that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed do not reflect the Democratic Party’s consensus position on Israel. She said opposition to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is “not just ‘concerning — it’s wrong.'”
Despite that, Pelosi said she still wants both men to succeed. “This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress,” she said of El-Sayed. “But the mayor, bless his heart, I hope he succeeds as mayor. But I don’t agree with some of the things he has said.” On the broader stakes, she added, “We have to win big, so that doesn’t really matter.”
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has taken a similar path with El-Sayed. The Post reported that El-Sayed has criticized Schumer repeatedly and has spoken at Michigan mosques where other speakers called for the end of the Zionist state and the death of Jews. Schumer had endorsed El-Sayed’s primary opponent, but after El-Sayed won the nomination, Schumer endorsed him. Asked to explain the shift, Schumer said Democrats must be “a big tent party” and described his approach as “big tentism,” saying “it’s how you build a majority.”
El-Sayed’s associate Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer, mocked the candidate’s own campaign’s door-knocking efforts in Jewish neighborhoods of Michigan, calling it “the wildest door-knocking operation of all time” and comparing it to “going to that Klan KKK neighborhood for a black candidate who’s running to abolish anti-miscegenation laws.”
In his January inaugural address, Mamdani described his governing philosophy by saying, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Weeks later, 20 homeless New Yorkers froze to death on the city’s streets during a harsh winter.
Hochul’s Shift
In New York’s governor’s race, Kathy Hochul — once seen as a conservative-leaning upstate Democrat when Andrew Cuomo picked her as his running mate in 2014 and 2018 — has aligned herself closely with Mamdani since he took office as mayor. Hochul endorsed Mamdani during his 2025 campaign when many other Democratic officials declined to do so, and has since funded spending and tax proposals associated with his agenda. Mamdani has in turn campaigned alongside her in the closing days of her re-election bid against Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman, with polls favoring Hochul heading into Tuesday’s vote.
Taken together, the moves by Pelosi, Schumer and Hochul illustrate a pattern playing out across the party heading into Election Day: establishment Democrats distancing themselves rhetorically from progressive positions on Israel and government spending while still backing the candidates who hold them, in pursuit of electoral majorities.
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