Courtesy of JTA. Photo credit: Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images
Pollster and Democratic strategist Mark Mellman in 2007
(JTA) — The talk was timed just ahead of the Ninth of Av, one of the most mournful dates in the Jewish year, so Mark Mellman came prepared with a drash — a Torah commentary — and delivered it to a rapt room.
That the room at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston was packed with political operatives, not all of them Jewish, did not seem to matter to Mellman, the veteran pollster pro-Israel voice within the Democratic Party whose death was announced Friday by his family.
For Mellman, Jewish values and Democratic values went hand in hand. As soon as he heard the appreciative murmurs of “yashar koach” (roughly, “well done”) marking the end of his drash, he launched into an endorsement of party presidential nominee John Kerry.
“Mark possessed a profound understanding for American and Jewish history.” the Democratic Majority for Israel, the group he founded in 2019, said in a statement. “His unwavering commitment to Democratic values will continue to guide and inspire us.”
Mellman died after a long illness, his family said in announcing his funeral, which will take place on Sunday in Maryland. He was 70 and had battled pancreatic cancer for four years, keeping his illness private so as not to distract from his work.
Mellman joined his first political campaign in 1981, three years after graduating from Princeton and while he was a graduate student at Yale. He successfully managed the congressional campaign of Bruce Morrison, a Connecticut Democrat who unseated a Republican, Larry DeNardis, in the 1982 election.
The upset made Mellman’s reputation and, still in his 20s, he launched a career in Washington as a pollster and a consultant. His company was eventually known as The Mellman Group.
Within a couple of decades he was the go-to pollster, not just for Democrats but for a wide variety of firms, including the NBA’s Washington Wizards, United Airlines and both Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
Mellman made himself accessible to Jewish groups, frequently appearing at events organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and often opposite a Republican counterpart.
The debate was always friendly, with the understanding on both sides that ensuring the full-throated participation of Jewish Americans in the political process outweighed partisan differences.
William Daroff, now the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recalled Mellman’s mentorship crossed party lines, when Daroff was the RJC’s deputy director.
“During my own partisan youth, when I was loudly advocating for President George W. Bush and Mark was working just as energetically on the other side, he never treated me as an adversary,” Daroff told JTA. “He cared more about the Jewish community than about partisan labels and made a point of saying that pro-Israel voices in the GOP mattered.”
Mellman was one of the first to warn fellow Democrats that the distancing was a trend, not an anomaly.
“It is a small problem that could get bigger,” he told The Forward in 2013. The numbers then of progressive Democrats holding negative views of Israel were not large, he said, “but you need to address problems when they are small.”
He was proved correct after the 2018 election, which swept into office four Democrats, known as “The Squad,” who made criticizing Israel their brand. A year later he launched DMFI.
“Our mission at Democratic Majority for Israel is to strengthen the pro-Israel tradition of the Democratic Party, fight for Democratic values and work within the progressive movement to advance policies that ensure a strong U.S.-Israel relationship,” Mellman said then.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid said of Mellman, “He was one of the architects of the 2013 election success,” when Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid, earned 19 seats and a place in the governing coalition, “and of the campaign that led to us forming the government in 2021,” Lapid said on social media.
“Mark embodied a love of the strong, successful, democratic Israel we believe in and worked tirelessly to secure the strategic relationship between Israel and the United States,” Lapid said. “His contribution to the Jewish people is far greater than most people will ever know.”
