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AIPAC didn't take down Rep. Jamaal Bowman all by itself [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2024-06-27  

As expected, New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost his seat handily, and as expected, the progressive left is pointing the fingers at AIPAC because that’s a lot easier than facing its own mistakes.

With 88% of the expected vote in, Bowman is losing by about 17 percentage points, standing at 41.6%. Given the outstanding vote, there’s a chance Bowman falls into the 30s since most of that vote is in Westchester County, which has been unfavorable toward him. The primary’s winner, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, is a down-the-line generic Democrat.

As I noted Monday, Bowman’s brand of performative politics has been a poor fit for his district. And he certainly suffered from AIPAC’s proliferate spending against him, in what is now the most expensive House primary campaign in history.

Yet Bowman was also ill served by some members of the leftist base he courted, whose self-destructive tactics served only to hamper the reelection of a candidate sympathetic to their cause. Last weekend, at Bowman’s big reelection rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, protestors from the reactionary left chanted, “AOC, your hands are red. Over 40,000 dead.” There is something fundamentally broken when Sanders and AOC aren’t pure enough for someone.

AIPAC, a right-wing pro-Israel group, can’t defeat Democrats in primaries if the Democrat is popular and in tune with their district’s needs. A poll conducted by the Mellman Group for Democratic Majority for Israel, a group supporting Latimer, was released in March—before much of AIPAC's spending in the race—and it showed Bowman losing to Latimer 52% to 35% ... or by 17 points. (Notably, it was one of only two polls of the race at that time, with the other poll coming from Bowman’s campaign, showing him up by 1 point.)

Though internal polls should be taken with a grain of salt, this one clearly diagnosed an opportunity for AIPAC, which then went all in against Bowman. It saw him as damaged goods, and this way, the pro-Israel lobby could use his loss to instill fear in other pro-Palestinian members of Congress.

But AIPAC’s $14.5 million against Bowman didn’t defeat him all by itself. His campaign’s response to that poll wasn’t to hunker down and work smarter; it was to stick their head in the ground. “[Mellman] doesn’t have an ounce of credibility here, and his junk numbers back that up,” his campaign spokesman told the New York Post.

But if you still want to blame AIPAC alone for Bowman’s defeat, there’s another race to consider. Earlier this year, Pittsburgh-area Rep. Summer Lee also faced an avalanche of right-wing money in her primary, but in late April, she cruised to a relatively easy 61-39 victory. (In 2022, when she first ran for Congress, AIPAC spent millions against her and she still won.)

And how did she manage to win by such a large margin? Despite being a fierce advocate for a Gaza ceasefire and an uncompromising critic of Israel’s right-wing Likud government, she also understood the importance of nuance in such a difficult issue. This column by Adriana E. Ramirez in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gives us an excellent overview of how deftly Lee handled Gaza with the large Jewish constituency in her district:

This Sunday, ground broke in Squirrel Hill on the new sanctuary, memorial, museum and educational space that will replace the current Tree of Life building, the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. For some Pittsburghers, seeing Summer Lee seated prominently in the front row caused some confusion. Wasn’t Lee a member of the Squad and a fervent supporter of Palestine? How could she be at Tree of Life a couple of months after she donned a keffiyeh at the State of the Union address? [...] A cursory look at Lee’s politics—her words and her actions—reveals the accusation to be willfully misplaced. She has consistently and persistently stood with Jewish Pittsburgh, even and especially through disagreement. She was instrumental in securing over a million dollars in funds to benefit the Tree of Life project, including an additional half million in support for all three affected congregations.

Lee also delivered for her district, bringing in $1.2 billion in federal funds, working as a team with her fellow caucus members and eschewing the sort of grandstanding that served Bowman ill, such as when he voted against President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. Furthermore, I couldn’t find any instances of her supposed allies protesting her rallies, not even a rally featuring Ocasio-Cortez.

Commenters on my previous story about Bowman argued that the Within Our Lifetimes protesters that disrupted the Sanders/AOC/Bowman rally are a fringe that doesn’t matter. But of course they matter. Aside from distracting from and undermining the core message of the rally—getting Bowman, a harsh critic of Israel, reelected—they represent unrealized potential.

Imagine if the millions of people who sympathize with Bowman’s attitudes on Gaza had donated to his campaign? What if those protestors had instead signed up for get-out-the-vote shifts, phone-banked, or knocked on doors for him? I’m not going to pretend that they would’ve closed that 17-point gap on their own—Bowman was too flawed a candidate, I think—but the results would’ve been different. And it would’ve provided a foundation for a 2026 comeback bid for Bowman, especially if Latimer is as flawed as his critics claim.

But organizing and winning public support is hard. And many on the left are increasingly uninterested in doing that work. It starts with Bowman himself, who called for “movements in grassroots organizing that leads to American revolutions”—rhetoric that repels a lot of people. As I’ve noted many times, I came of age in the middle of a revolution. People die. Families are shattered. And the results are seldom what people expect. Do you think the right wouldn’t be ready to take advantage of this so-called revolution? They certainly have more guns than we do. I find the whole premise absurd.

Yet these people are now turning on Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, two of our most progressive Congress members. Take this from Bloomberg:

Corbin Trent, the co-founder of the Justice Democrats grassroots organization behind her 2018 victory, described Ocasio-Cortez and fellow progressive Bernie Sanders as “incremental.” “What we wanted was drastic, you know, top-to-bottom change of this system,” Trent, who served as Ocasio-Cortez’s first spokesperson, said. “Are they going anywhere towards that? No.”

Trent, like many in the democratic socialist wing of the left, have a problem with math. Why would anyone expect Sanders, one of 100 senators, and Ocasio-Cortez, one of 435 House members, to be able to deliver “drastic … top-to-bottom change”? Those two are a great start, but that’s what they are: a start. Sanders, AOC, and other like-minded progressives in Congress simply don’t yet have the numbers to create the change America needs. That’s why they are at their most effective when they persuade people.

On Monday, I wrote that the formula needs to be:

If you have public support, do politics. If you don’t have public support, do advocacy to build public support.

Building public support requires persuasion. In fact, let me edit that second bullet to this:

2. If you don’t have public support, persuade.

Disrupting Bowman’s rally—what did that accomplish? It didn’t build public support for anything. To the contrary, it alienated potential allies while hurting established ones.

You cannot change the political system without numbers, and you can’t get numbers until you persuade people. Sometimes it might even take uncomfortable coalitions to do so! Here’s a wild example:

What do you guys think about a law that would cap credit card interest rates at 18%? Credit card interest rates can top 30%, and these high rates function as yet another regressive tax on poorer Americans. It’s a no-brainer, right?

Guess who introduced the only bill in the Senate to accomplish that. It’s not Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Sherrod Brown.

It was insurrectionist Sen. Josh freakin’ Hawley of Missouri. No other senator has signed on as a co-sponsor so far. And that’s embarrassing. It should be our side introducing these bills, and barring that, they should be willing to join as co-sponsors to Hawley’s bill if he could show progress in getting other Republicans to sign on. This would be—gasp!—governing.

Most people are sick of performative politics and just want government to function. Mainstream Democrats generally get this, hence not just Bowman’s defeat, but a similar situation in Colorado, where progressive state Reps. Elisabeth Epps and Tim Hernández lost primaries to more moderate Democrats.

Epps, a first-term incumbent in central and east Denver who’d drawn the ire of party leaders and fellow legislators for her intraparty criticism and disruptions during a November special session, was down nearly 3,400 votes as of 11 p.m., a difficult deficit to overcome. Hernández, like Epps one of the most left-wing members of the General Assembly, was closer to his opponent, [Cecelia] Espenoza, but likewise had significant ground to make up.

Hernández, in particular, seems amazing, but so is his opponent, former immigration judge Cecelia Espenoza, and she explicitly promised pragmatism: “As a pragmatic progressive, I understand that every issue is complicated and I know that solutions come through collaboration and the capacity to listen to all of the stakeholders.”

There are no incompatibilities between progressivism and pragmatism. Indeed, progress requires pragmatism. Performative antics seldom advance the cause and often hinder it. Bowman would seemingly prefer to sound good, but what did that accomplish in the end? And what does attacking AOC accomplish? She is a generational, transcendent talent destined for greatness, but oh no, she endorsed Biden, so she must be excommunicated.

However, AOC won her primary easily, 82% to 18%, because she knows how to do constituent service, be present, and be pragmatically effective. Still, it’s much easier blaming others for that failure, like actress and 2018 candidate for New York governor Cynthia Nixon:

Bowman is the last Congress person of color in a NY district not wholly in NYC. And let’s be clear—the record $20 mill spent against him did not come from Dems in this Dem primary but from anti-abortion, anti-climate justice, anti-worker far-right Republicans. You do the math.

The people who voted Bowman out are not anti-abortion, anti-climate-justice, nor anti-worker. That is just insulting. And Latimer doesn’t appear to be, either. Blaming solely AIPAC for Bowman’s defeat is easy, and it’ll be the dominant narrative in many progressive circles—but it is wrong.

As much as AIPAC benefits from getting the credit for winning the race, head-in-the-ground performative progressives benefit just as well by giving it the credit. This way, they don’t have to face the consequences of their actions. It’s a toxic win-win for two groups that don’t have the broader progressive movement’s interests at heart.

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