Pro-Israel Lobbies Are Backing Winners, Not Creating Them

Both AIPAC and its critics have claimed that its dollars have determined recent Democratic primaries. A closer look at the contests tells a very different story.

Last Tuesday night in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s Eleventh District, Representative Haley Stevens defeated Representative Andy Levin by a decisive margin of 20 percent. For most of the country, these two names mean nothing, and this intra-party contest barely registered. But for a subset of activists focused on Israel, the election has taken on outsize importance. That’s because Levin, a Jewish labor organizer and former synagogue president, is known as one of Israel’s strongest critics in Congress, while Stevens is aligned with the more centrist pro-Israel approach of most Democratic lawmakers today. When redistricting caused the two members to run against each other, dueling Israel-related money followed. A super PAC aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) poured $4 million into the race supporting Stevens. J Street, a liberal Zionist group and staunch ally of Levin, spent $700,000 behind him. In the end, the candidate with the bigger Israel outlay won: Stevens trounced Levin 60 percent to 40 percent.

The story I just told is technically true, but it is mostly misleading. Here’s another one. Consider this hypothetical matchup between two Democrats in Michigan:

Candidate A is a center-left former Obama administration official whose work saving Detroit’s auto industry was publicly praised by the former president. She entered Congress in 2019 after flipping a historically Republican district. As a woman and strong pro-choice advocate, she was endorsed by EMILY’s List, which put $3 million behind her primary campaign at a time when women were turning out in record numbers, even in deep-red Kansas, to oppose anti-abortion measures. Candidate A previously represented 45 percent of the new district she is now running to represent.

Candidate B, a progressive scion of a political family, took over the congressional seat held by his father in 2019. Despite his father representing the district for 36 years—and his uncle serving as Michigan’s senator, also for 36 years—Candidate B only won the primary to succeed his father by 10 points. And that was before he was redistricted into a more conservative area: Candidate B previously represented only 25 percent of the new district he is now running to represent.

In case it’s not obvious, Candidate A is Stevens and Candidate B is Levin. When we zoom out from the tunnel-vision Israel framing, we see that the race was actually decided by more normal, boring factors: candidate quality, issue salience, and political environment. Simply put, Stevens won because she was a better politician who was better suited to the make-up of the district and the current political moment. By contrast, Levin had never really been tested in a competitive election, and was fighting an uphill battle to represent a district filled with former Republican voters who Stevens had previously flipped. (Two-thirds of Levin’s old constituents resided in the neighboring Tenth District, which Levin declined to run in, angering his own party.)

This was not fertile ground for even the most politically talented progressive trailblazer, and Levin is not quite that. And yet, far from moderating his image, Levin tried to run to Stevens’s left, with predictable results. In the end, Stevens won nearly every precinct where big names like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren showed up to personally campaign for Levin.

HuffPost’s Daniel Marans, one of the most astute observers of progressive politics in the Democratic party, reached a similar conclusion while reporting from Michigan before the primary. As he wrote on election night, “Levin’s campaign insisted that leaning into his left-leaning views and associations was a good strategy. His final 10 days featured [former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Mark] Pocan, Warren, [Jane] Fonda, Sanders, and [Representative Rashida] Tlaib. Maybe there was no alternative in a race against Stevens, but this is not a left-wing district.”

None of this has stopped AIPAC from declaring total victory in the race or its critics from darkly intoning that the organization is buying congressional seats. Political lobbies rely on the perception of their power to project influence and are thus incentivized to overstate their sway. Critics of those lobbies are likewise incentivized to oversell the clout of their adversaries, as a way to juice donations and rally supporters against a common enemy. And that’s not to mention the anti-Semitic undercurrent that inevitably surfaces whenever “money” and “Israel” appear in the same sentence.

But sober political observers should not be fooled by this political theater or by conspiracy theories about control of Congress. As newsletter readers know from my discussion with historian Walter Russell Mead, American policy on Israel is determined largely by non-Jewish political concerns, not Jewish or Israeli money or influence. (Indeed, most American Jews are actually more left-wing on Israel than most non-Jews, which is why it should not surprise that Levin was more critical of Israel than his non-Jewish opponent.) Stevens defeated Levin because she was the better candidate for the time and place and ran a better race.

In fact, when one examines the other alleged AIPAC and mainline Israel-lobby victories in recent Democratic primaries from Ohio to Maryland, a similar pattern emerges: They won races by backing the strong horse against a weak one, supporting talented center-left politicians who already agreed with them against flawed progressive opponents. A few examples:

Ohio: Back in December 2020, former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner announced her candidacy for the Eleventh Congressional District. A prominent surrogate for Bernie Sanders and a social-media star, Turner had the benefit of high name recognition and massive online fundraising. But she also had a lot of baggage. To begin with, the district’s politics were more moderate than hers. Indeed, Turner had spent years attacking the Democratic establishment that the district’s Black and Jewish voters had ardently supported. In November 2020, the Eleventh District voted for Biden over Trump by 60 percentage points. In July 2020, Turner likened voting for Biden to eating half “a bowl of shit.” So when Shontel Brown, a talented local politician endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus, declared her candidacy in the Democratic primary, the pro-Israel group Democratic Majority for Israel had a lot to work with. They funded ads filled with Turner’s best anti-Democrat hits, and successfully turned the tide against her. Brown defeated Turner 50–44, and then won a 2022 rematch 66–34. As Vice News put it in their headline, “Turns Out Calling Joe Biden Half ‘a Bowl of Shit’ Doesn’t Help Win a Democratic Primary.” For her part, Turner has continued to blame “evil money” for her loss, even though she and her allies actually outspent Brown and her supporters in 2021.

The only reason to oppose student debt cancelation is that you want people to suffer.

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) August 2, 2022

This style of political argument, which plays well on Twitter, may not have been the most persuasive approach for a more moderate district.

Maryland: This past month, former representative Donna Edwards ran to reclaim her seat in Maryland’s Fourth District. A progressive darling and longtime ally of J Street, which supports pressure on Israel to achieve a two-state solution, Edwards had retired in 2016 to run for the Democratic nomination for senate, which she lost. After her replacement, Anthony Brown, departed to run for Maryland attorney general, Edwards jumped back into the ring.

Her chief opponent in 2022 was Glenn Ivey, a longtime state’s attorney who had won two elections and been runner-up to Brown in the 2016 Democratic primary for the Fourth District seat. Seeking to stop a longtime foe, AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC spent some $6 million backing Ivey, while J Street spent $720,000 on behalf of Edwards. But again, beyond the dollar totals, AIPAC’s candidate had the wind at his back. Ivey had high name recognition from his local political role and his previous congressional run. Polling conducted by Edwards supporters before AIPAC began spending in the race found Ivey leading Edwards by 13 points.

Edwards, on the other hand, had multiple liabilities. Though she had held the seat years ago, she had since lost two consecutive elections for other positions. Throughout those campaigns, she’d been dogged by complaints that her congressional office had been notoriously poor at constituent services. This failing was so apparent that she didn’t even bother denying it on the 2022 campaign trail, saying, “I hear the criticism and all I can say is the commitment that any legislator makes, which is that I’ll do better.” This is one of the cardinal sins of any congressperson. Back in 2014, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was famously unseated by a no-name challenger due to his perceived failure in constituent services. The same failure cost Edwards key endorsements in her failed run for Senate in 2016. Facing a shaky Edwards campaign, the well-known and well-liked Ivey handily won the primary 52–35.

Illinois: In late June, in another member-on-member primary prompted by redistricting, Representative Sean Casten defeated Representative Marie Newman. A one-term congressperson who narrowly beat a sitting conservative Democrat in the 2020 primary, Newman was one of Israel’s sharpest critics in the House, and Democratic Majority for Israel spent $500,000 against her. But she was also ostracized by the entire Democratic party due to unethical conduct alleged by the Office of Congressional Ethics. According to the investigation, Newman had promised a political rival a position in her office if they dropped out of her primary race. Casten, by contrast, had flipped a Republican seat in 2018, and subsequently outraised Newman two-to-one. (He also maintained his own nuanced, critical positions on Israel.) With no Democratic party support for Newman and a scandal hanging over her campaign, Casten unsurprisingly defeated her 68–29.

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Why does any of this matter? Because understanding why politicians win elections is essential for doing effective politics. Whatever a candidate’s positions on Israel, mistaking it for the guiding light of American politics will result in bad political decisions. In the closing weeks of Andy Levin’s doomed campaign, he made a series of media appearances where he talked up his Jewish credentials and understandably attacked AIPAC for its spending against him. Israel/Palestine is an issue of deep moral conviction for Levin, and I count myself closer to his views than to Stevens’s. But emphasizing the subject in this local context was a serious strategic error. Instead of using precious earned media time on outlets like MSNBC to make his case to voters on the issues that mattered most to them, he and many other capable progressive activists chased AIPAC down the Israel rabbit hole while Stevens campaigned on everyday issues like Roe v. Wade and the economy.

Money is not magic, and no amount of funding can transform a bad candidate into a good one. Just ask President Michael Bloomberg—or Representative Nina Turner. In most cases, groups like AIPAC are backing winners, not creating them. While a certain floor of funding is a necessary prerequisite to running a successful campaign, beyond that point, candidate and campaign quality matter. If progressives want to win primaries, in other words, they need to draft more talented candidates who are better suited to their districts. There is no shortcut to learning how to do effective politics, and the sooner people disabuse themselves of the idea that money is the answer, the better they will get at winning elections.