Groups aligned with AIPAC are likely to shower next year’s Democratic primaries with campaign cash. One key target: Representative Ilhan Omar.
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From left, Tim Peterson, Sarah Gad and Don Samuels, all of whom are planning to challenge Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota in next year’s primary election.
Tim Peterson, a bald and burly Air Force veteran running for Congress in Minnesota’s Fifth District, wants to discuss the “existential” problem that Minneapolis faces with mass retirements of police officers looming on the horizon. But he has to state something else first: Hamas is fascist.
Sarah Gad, a youthful criminal defense lawyer running for the same seat, is passionate about criminal justice reform, but, she acknowledged, everyone wants to know her feelings about the conflict in Gaza.
Don Samuels, another candidate, has a lifetime of public service to promote as a retired city councilman from North Minneapolis. But, he noted, “there is, of course, the international issue” hanging over the race: Israel and Palestine.
All three are challenging Representative Ilhan Omar, one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress, in next August’s Democratic primary. But only one of them is likely to be the beneficiary of a tidal wave of campaign cash from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its super PAC and other pro-Israel allies incensed by the Democratic left’s criticism of the Jewish state after Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Eight months before Democratic voters decide, a pre-primary primary has begun. Call it the AIPAC primary, with each of Ms. Omar’s opponents making a case for why they deserve a boost.
ImageMs. Omar has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
“Four million would be more than enough for us to do what we need to do,” Joe Radinovich, the Democratic operative running Mr. Samuels’s campaign, suggested.
It’s unclear just how much AIPAC, its super PAC the United Democracy Project, or another pro-Israel group, the Democratic Majority for Israel, will spend in this race or nationally. The United Democracy Project spent nearly $36 million in 2022, with D.M.F.I. raising $9 million. Liberal groups like Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party have bandied about the figure $100 million in their counter-fund-raising campaigns.
AIPAC and its allies refuse to put out a number but say the total will most likely dwarf previous cycles.
Haim Saban, one of the Democrats’ largest donors, said Thursday that the band of Israel critics in his party were “small and loud” but it would be “a dangerous development, and against the U.S. security interest, for the Democratic Party to allow more members” of that group in.
“God bless AIPAC for taking this initiative,” he said.
Ms. Omar responded, “We know that organized people beat organized money. And I am confident that I will once again earn the confidence my constituents have bestowed upon me.”
AIPAC’s other likely targets in Congress are not a secret. At the top are Representative Cori Bush, an activist voice from St. Louis, whose Democratic challenger, Wesley Bell, investigated the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting of Michael Brown and has already garnered Jewish support in the city. Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York will face the Westchester County executive George Latimer, who was recruited by the pro-Israel groups.
Representative Summer Lee in Pittsburgh, a freshman, is also high on the target list. Two candidates have emerged in Detroit to say they were offered $20 million to challenge Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress and one of two Muslim women.
ImageMs. Gad, a criminal defense lawyer, said that voters wanted to know her feelings about the conflict in Gaza.Credit…Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
Ms. Omar, the other Muslim woman in the House, will be difficult to unseat, but she is too tempting a target to be left off the list. Donors have requested her by name, and her challengers have been open about their quest for that cash. Ms. Gad, an Egyptian American Muslim, said she had two interlocutors, including an Israeli filmmaker, Jonathan Baruch, pressing her case with AIPAC.
Mr. Samuels, who came within two percentage points of beating Ms. Omar in the 2022 primary, was in New York on Thursday for a fund-raiser organized by the hedge fund manager Brian Eizenstat, son of Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former diplomat and deputy Treasury secretary.
Mr. Peterson, a gym owner and former deep-sea captain, made the case that he has the stamina to knock on doors in every quadrant of the district.
Pro-Israel groups “should be very careful to give that money to someone who is going to be here and get the work done,” he said in a dingy campaign office in an emptying apartment block in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood.
The group’s push into Democratic primaries has not gone unnoticed.
“Wherever AIPAC’s Republican billionaires can find a warm body to regurgitate their right-wing talking points and primary progressive Democrats, they will,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for the Justice Democrats, which was formed to encourage Democratic primary challenges from the left.
AIPAC critics argue that its unconditional support of the Israeli government and its willingness to spend against detractors in Congress can take the focus off critical domestic issues.
ImageMr. Peterson is making the case that he has the stamina to knock on doors in every quadrant of the district.Credit…Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
“It is not what most American voters are showing up to the polls voting on,” said Tali deGroot, who runs the political action committee for J Street, a pro-Israeli group that is critical of Israel’s government. J Street has endorsed some of AIPAC’s targets, including Ms. Lee.
AIPAC and its affiliate organizations support many Democrats, including centrists like Representative Abigail Spanberger, who is now running for governor in Virginia, and Representative Jared Golden of Maine, who recently called for gun restrictions after a mass shooting in his district. But AIPAC’s skeptics note that the organization’s single-minded focus has led it to back more than 100 members of Congress who objected to certifying the 2020 election results.
Even more galling to critics is that much of AIPAC’s own funding comes from Republicans.
So far this cycle, the United Democracy Project has received $1 million from Bernard Marcus, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot who primarily supports Republican candidates and groups. It received $500,000 from Michael Leffell, an investor who also supports Republicans. Past donors have included the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, who gave the group $2 million in 2022, and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, who gave $1 million that year.
Jews in Greater Minneapolis are sensitive to the charge that outside money will influence a race with particular local dynamics. Avi Olitzky, a former rabbi at one of the largest synagogues in the region, rejected the “AIPAC primary” label as a “red herring.”
“This race should not be about money or financing or backing,” he said, adding, “We need a member of Congress in this district who represents the pro-Israel mainstream as represented by President Biden.”
ImageMr. Samuels came within two percentage points of beating Ms. Omar in the 2022 primary.Credit…Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
But Jewish leaders say the divide over Ms. Omar has supercharged interest in the primary.
After the Oct. 7 massacre, Rabbi Alexander Davis, of Beth El Synagogue in the heavily Jewish suburb of St. Louis Park, said Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and Nadia Mohamed, a Muslim just elected to be St. Louis Park’s next mayor, reached out in sympathy. Ms. Omar has not. A solidarity service on Oct. 10 drew more than 2,000 people, including Mr. Walz and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Ms. Omar was not one of them. (An aide said she had votes in Washington that night.)
“She is an extreme figure, far outside the mainstream of the Jewish community,” Rabbi Davis said.
Ms. Omar pushed back on the suggestion that she has been disengaged.
“Amid the horrifying carnage in Israel and Gaza, we have worked day and night to secure the evacuation of multiple constituents out of Israel and the Gaza Strip,” she said in a statement. “We have worked with regional partners to press for the release of all hostages and are leading an international parliamentary push for a cease-fire.”
She has her Jewish supporters, especially in the extremely liberal city of Minneapolis, which last month voted into power a left-wing majority on the City Council, led by a slate from the Democratic Socialists of America. David Brauer, a journalist in Minneapolis for 30 years and a Jewish member of Ms. Omar’s informal “kitchen cabinet,” said the congresswoman is taking the primary fight seriously.
Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, who leads a flock of what she calls “anti-Zionist and non-Zionist” Jews in the city, has had plenty of personal contact with Ms. Omar since Oct. 7. “Her leadership for a cease-fire has made me so proud that she represents me,” she said over an oat-milk latte at a vegan cafe.
ImageRabbi Jessica Rosenberg has been in personal contact with Ms. Omar since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.Credit…Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
The coming primary season will be intense, not only for the district’s Jews but for its Palestinian, Somali and broader Muslim population, said Steve Hunegs, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Ms. Omar, who came to the country as a Somali refugee, is probably the most popular and most reviled Democrat in the state, he said, adored by many, deeply opposed by many, with few Minnesotans indifferent.
“We’re going to see activism at all levels,” Mr. Hunegs said.
Jonathan Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic and labor policy. He is based in Chicago. More about Jonathan Weisman
Kate Kelly covers money, policy and influence for The Times. More about Kate Kelly
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Source: nytimes.com
