New York City Democratic voters — especially Jewish New York City Democrat voters, a not-insignificant part of that city’s electorate — were supposed to be the bread and butter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s demographic.
He is one of them, after all — a Jewish man born in New York City, who represented it in the House, then his state in the Senate, and later became the first Jewish leader of the upper chamber of Congress.
What does it say, then, that he’s not only losing in a primary poll among NYC Democrats, but NYC Jewish Democrats — to a woman who calls Israel’s war against Hamas “genocide” and is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which supports the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel?
According to the New York Post, while a primary for Schumer’s Senate seat is a year and change off, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beats him 54 percent to 33 percent among all New York City Democratic voters, while she leads 45 percent to 38 percent among Jewish voters, the outlet reported Sunday.
That comes from a poll conducted by the Honan Strategy Group for the Jewish Voters Action Network. Twelve percent of Democrats as a whole are undecided, while 17 percent of Jewish Democrats are.
🔵 New – Senate primary poll – New York
🔵 AOC 54%
🔵 Schumer 33%Jewish voters – AOC +7
Honan #C – 5/18
— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) May 25, 2025
The poll was conducted between May 15-18 among 1,136 Democrats with a margin of error of +/- 2.89 percentage points — and represents landslide numbers for an incumbent with as much power as the minority leader.
“This is a massive wake-up call for Schumer,” said Maury Litwack, one of the co-founders of the Jewish Voters Action Network. “He’s not only bleeding support in the Democratic Party overall but also in the Jewish community.”
Who is the bigger threat to America – AOC or Schumer?
The pending AOC challenge to Schumer is pretty much a fait accompli unless something changes dramatically, and soon.
After Schumer — long an opponent of government shutdowns forced by the Republican Party in the House when a Democrat was in the White House by using the budget as a negotiating tool — was forced to eat his own rhetoric and cave on GOP budgetary demands now that they control both houses of Congress, left-leaning Democrats were livid and quickly began talking about shoving Schumer aside.
Schumer, by the way, actually wasn’t wrong (for once); history has shown that, for all the bluster and good intentions Republican-led shutdowns during the Clinton and Obama years, the cost to government for them was generally higher — by a significant amount — than the amount saved over the long term, and it’s questionable whether even a fraction of the political goals the party set out to accomplish were reached.
But saving money has never really been the point of the Democratic Party, and there wasn’t really any actionable goal — aside from, just do something. Anything! It doesn’t have to make sense. This Isn’t Normal™. Whatever happened to #TheResistance?! Whatever happened to the pink knit hats?! Huh?
Absent as anything that would qualify as a plan — or even as a manic “straightforward from here” Sally Kohn-esque fever-dream — to reorganize after November and present a unified front to achieve pragmatic goals and set the party up for the midterms and then for 2028, the goal then became to primary Schumer.
The most obvious candidate is Rep. Alexandria “Fighting Oligarchy” Ocasio-Cortez, who is obviously readying herself for a 2028 presidential run and realizes that, historically, it’s almost impossible to make the jump from the House to the White House. (Only one man has done it, James Garfield; he lasted seven months in office after succumbing to an assassin’s wound, so it’s hard to assess how a representative would do in the Oval Office, particularly when Garfield was elected in the era where the first telephones were even more of a technological leap to the American populace than ChatGPT has been for us DoorDashers.)
And she has a chance, at least as long as the anger level remains high. An April survey from Data for Progress showed her ahead statewide by a 55 to 36 percent margin. Now, a month and a half later, we have this poll.
Both could theoretically be dismissed if you wanted to dismiss them. Data for Progress, as the name itself might tip you off to, is a left-leaning organization and was taken while the non-shutdown wound was still fresh. The latest poll, which shows that the anger lingers, still only polls New York City — inarguably the biggest wellspring of hard-left voters in the state, but also the source of 8.4 million of the state’s 19.8 million residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
And it’s worth noting that as early as March, when Schumer caved, reports were crawling in about party insiders “talking a big game about supporting AOC,” according to one Democratic source that talked to Axios.
One senior House Democrat said this about the Senate Minority Leader: “His popularity is hovering somewhere between Elon Musk and the Ebola virus.”
And, to be fair, at least Musk and Ebola get stuff done. But it’s hard to picture AOC being any better — particularly for New York’s Jewish community, who doesn’t need a radical-enabler representing their state. The terrorist attack that claimed the lives of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., last week proves there’s just too much to lose here.
Then again, as Litwack noted, it’s not as if Schumer used the moment to battle the rising anti-Semitic tide in his party — including from the AOC “squad” caucus — in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks.
“The leading Jewish elected official in the nation did not step up in a moment of rising anti-Semitism — and the poll reflects that,” Litwack said.
This polling double whammy proves just one thing: To paraphrase the inimitable Jeremiah Wright, former President Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Democrats’ chickens are comin’ home to roost. Enjoy Sen. AOC, because that’s where you’re headed, New York.
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