A majority of the 47 Democrats in the Senate, including a handful of potential 2028 presidential candidates, backed two resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) blocking arms and equipment sales to Israel.
Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Jon Ossoff (Ga.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), and Raphael Warnock (Ga.) all voted in favor of both resolutions on Wednesday. One would have prohibited the United States from selling Caterpillar bulldozers to the Jewish state, while the other would have barred the U.S. government from selling Israel a shipment of thousand-pound bombs.
After the vote failed, Sanders boasted that "Democrats are beginning to listen to the average American who is sick and tired of spending billions of dollars to support Netanyahu's horrific wars."
But some of the senators who voted alongside Sanders may have more political considerations. While Ossoff and Warnock—both of whom have been mentioned as potential contenders for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2028—have mixed records on U.S. arms sales for Israel since Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the votes on the Sanders resolutions mark a significant shift for the others.
Booker, who said last month that he is "definitely not ruling out" a second presidential run after his 2020 bid ended before primary voting began, consistently opposed measures to block arms sales to Israel after Oct. 7. He voted against three Sanders resolutions to prevent the United States from selling tank munitions, bomb guidance kits, and mortar rounds in November 2024; opposed two April 2025 resolutions aiming to block the sale of bombs and guidance kits; and voted against two July 2025 attempts to halt the transfer of rifles and other munitions.
Kelly, who has said he is "undecided" on a run, likewise voted against the November 2024 and April 2025 resolutions, but opted not to vote either way on the two from July. Like Booker, the Wednesday vote was his first in favor of preventing the United States from selling arms to Israel.
Gallego, who has openly mulled a run for president, has a similar history to Booker. After entering the Senate in January 2025, he voted against both of the Sanders resolutions that April and did not vote on the July attempts to block arms sales.
Slotkin, a fellow member of the Senate class of 2024 who has said she might run for president, has the same exact voting history as Gallego.
The 40 and 36 Democrats—including Sanders and Angus King (Maine), who are independents but caucus with the Democrats—who respectively voted for the resolutions against selling bulldozers and bombs to Israel mark the highest number of the party's senators to support such a move in history. It comes as polling suggests more Democrats hold negative views of Israel than ever. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats surveyed told NBC News pollsters that their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, up from 18 percent in 2013. Fifty-seven percent of Democratic respondents said they hold a negative view of Israel, as opposed to 35 percent who said the same in 2023.
Other notable Democrats have been more vocal in their anti-Israel rhetoric of late. California governor Gavin Newsom said on a podcast last month that Israel is "sort of an apartheid state." He later walked back that remark, but added that he "deeply, deeply oppose[s] Bibi Netanyahu's leadership."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) has accused Israel of engaging in "genocide" in Gaza and said earlier this month that she will oppose all U.S. military aid to Israel, including defensive aid.
Some Democrats running for lower-level offices have embraced even more extreme rhetoric. The left-wing candidate vying for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, campaigned with pro-terror streamer Hasan Piker earlier this month. Piker, in addition to saying that "America deserved 9/11," has asserted that "it doesn’t matter" if Hamas raped Israeli women on Oct. 7 because "the Palestinian resistance is not perfect" and called Orthodox Jews "inbred."
