For a mayoral race in New York City.

The job is the MTA, the NYPD, the schools, the rent, the rats, the parking, and the snow. There is no Israel desk or foreign policy portfolio for that matter. And yet, on the issue with the least to do with the job, two of every three voters had taken a position and acted on it.

Eight months later, on June 23, 2026, three candidates aligned with Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in New York. Unlike the mayoral race, these elections matter for Israel. As members of Congress, the candidates will cast votes on aid, sanctions, and resolutions. We do not yet know whether their position on Israel decided any of the races, as they differed by district, opponent, constituency, and local terrain. What we do know is that each winning campaign treated opposing Israel as politically advantageous; each winning candidate had charged their opponent with enabling Israel’s “genocide” against Palestinians.

Israel policy is the subject of ongoing disagreement among Democrats, and more recently Republicans. The debates draw on specifics, such as how much military aid, on what conditions, with what oversight; whether to recognize a Palestinian state and when; how to position the United States toward settlement expansion. A congressional candidate running against an incumbent on Israel could have addressed any of these positions, but none of the winning candidates did. Instead, they insisted their opponents enabled “genocide.”

The question is: why?

The charge converted a matter of foreign policy into a matter of local moral standing. Political economists call this “expressive voting”: a choice whose value lies in the act and its audience rather than its result, and which, as Alan Hamlin and Colin Jennings observe, comes to dominate wherever the action itself is inconsequential and the price of taking the position is low. A vote on Israel cast in a New York primary changes little in Gaza and much in the eyes of the voter’s own coalition.

The records of the defeated tell the story better than the charge did. Adriano Espaillat, ousted in the 13th, was a five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a champion of affordable housing, immigrant rights, and labor — the very issues his opponents claimed to run on. Dan Goldman backed reproductive rights, a higher minimum wage, universal childcare, and paid family leave. What separated them from the candidates who beat them was Israel. As the writer Elissa Wald put it, the incumbents’ fatal mistake was being pro-Israel, “and it would seem that nothing else mattered.”

When the Vote Becomes a Moral Signal

In a mayoral election, when voters cast ballots on questions the office cannot meaningfully address, the vote’s political function exceeds its practical effect. The voter may experience herself as responding to Gaza, and she may be responding sincerely; an expressive choice can be a heartfelt one. In New York, this response functions as a declaration of identity. It signals by telling other people — the electorate, her peers,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)