The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC seeded two anonymous groups that spent more than $14 million to influence pivotal House Democratic primaries in Illinois on Tuesday — marking a new salvo in the battle over policy on Israel within the Democratic Party.
United Democracy Project, a super PAC aligned with AIPAC that receives tens of millions of dollars from the group, openly spent another $5 million to boost Chicago Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin in her unsuccessful campaign for the state’s 7th Congressional District. But its involvement in the two other groups — Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now! — had not been officially confirmed until Friday, when newly filed federal fundraising reports showed that UDP contributed $5.3 million of the $14.1 million the groups raised.
Donors who had previously contributed to UDP gave the groups millions more.
Altogether, the three super PACs accounted for 60% of all of the outside spending in Illinois House primaries this year. And while progressives had accused the pro-Israel group of being behind the spending, those direct ties were not confirmed until days after voters went to the polls.
“UDP was happy to support these local committees, along with Chicago donors, to make sure pro-Israel voices would have their voices heard,” Patrick Dorton, a UDP spokesman, told NBC News on Friday. “Like many other groups, we are using a number of different tools to engage in races this cycle,”
“At the end of the day, AIPAC is focused on making sure we have the largest, bipartisan pro-Israel majority in Congress,” Dorton continued, later adding: “By any measure the Chicago delegation is more pro-Israel today than it was before the primary election.”
The shielded spending and recent election results come amid a sea change in how American voters — especially Democratic voters — view Israel. Recent NBC News polling found two-thirds of Democrats say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians than Israelis, and a majority of Democrats have a negative view of Israel broadly.
The combined pro-Israel effort was victorious in two races Tuesday, with former Rep. Melissa Bean and Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller winning a pair of crowded primaries. Both Democratic fields included progressives who had taken more critical approaches to U.S. policy toward Israel.
The AIPAC-backed effort failed in two other districts, with state Rep. La Shawn Ford narrowly defeating Conyears-Ervin in one primary, while Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss won the highest-profile and most contentious of the races, which exposed deep Democratic divisions on the issue.
Elect Chicago Women spent more than $5 million in that race, first to support state Sen. Laura Fine and then to attack Biss, who is Jewish, has criticized the Israeli government and calls himself a “progressive Zionist.”
When Biss proved to be a durable opponent, the spending against him ultimately stopped. A different group, Chicago Progressive Partnership, began trying to cut down a surging progressive candidate, Kat Abughazaleh, and then boosting another low-polling progressive, Bushra Amiwala, in an apparent attempt to split the progressive vote. Both Abughazaleh and Amiwala have been deeply critical of Israel and have referred to Israel’s conduct in Gaza as “genocide.”
Chicago Progressive Partnership had not yet filed its February campaign finance report as of late Friday.
Biss specifically raised the issue of Israel policy in his victory speech, arguing that his campaign understood the “nuance and complexity” of the complicated issues around Israel and pushed back on pressure from groups like AIPAC.
“AIPAC found out the hard way: The 9th District is not for sale,” Biss said.
Usamah Andrabi, the communications director at the progressive group Justice Democrats, joined a parade of progressives celebrating Biss and Ford’s victories and framing them as a repudiation of AIPAC’s tactics and views.
“If ‘being pro-Israel was good politics or policy’, like AIPAC says, they wouldn’t have to completely avoid mentioning Israel in $21 million of ads and using shell PACs to hide their spending,” Andrabi said in a statement.
Dorton, the UDP spokesman, pushed back against that framing. He argued that “no candidate who made AIPAC or Israel a centerpiece of their campaign won in Chicago, with the exception of Biss,” whom Dorton cast as acceptable — despite the AIPAC groups’ massive spending to try to cut him down weeks ago.
“Obviously we have our differences with Daniel Biss but at least he’s a Zionist — and he’s far better than Kat Abughazaleh,” Dorton said.
“We are going to use every tool in the toolbox to try to get the best possible, pro-Israel results,” Dorton continued. “Sometimes it means we’ll have an extremely pro-Israel candidate, but in these multi-candidate fields, sometimes it’ll be a pretty good candidate that we can live with.”
The split decision has left both sides emboldened as primary season continues to develop. But new polling shows Israel’s standing among Democrats has slipped dramatically in recent years, and criticism of AIPAC spending is surfacing in primaries across the country — including those where pro-Israel groups are not playing.
Meanwhile, many prominent Democratic politicians are getting more comfortable distancing themselves from AIPAC or questioning America’s aid to Israel.
During an appearance on a “Crooked Media” podcast earlier this month, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governance is “walking us down that path where I don’t think you have a choice” but to rethink U.S. military support for the country. This week, Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who is Jewish, told The Associated Press that he sees AIPAC as “an organization that was supporting Donald Trump,” adding “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”
Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a think tank aligned with Democratic moderates, told NBC News that AIPAC’s involvement in a special House election in New Jersey earlier this year was a “watershed moment” for centrist Democrats like him who believe AIPAC spending directly led to the election of “someone far to the left on every issue.”
In that race, the AIPAC super PAC attacked former Rep. Tom Malinowski for considering conditions on aid to Israel, which helped progressive activist Analilia Mejia, who is far more critical of Israel, win the Democratic primary.
“There’s this rift that’s been growing for a while, but what happens when there’s one election on one day, instead of November when there are elections all across the country, this New Jersey race was a real, crystalizing moment that their influence is unhelpful,” Kessler said, adding that AIPAC is “maneuvering themselves out of the Democratic Party” given the organization’s alignment with the pro-Trump Netanyahu government.
“The existence of Israel, the safety of the Jewish people, is not helped when the main lobbying group for the country is seen as against one party,” he said.
Asked about that criticism of AIPAC from Democrats of different stripes, Dorton said that while he wouldn’t respond to individual criticism: “We represent millions of pro-Israel Democrats, we are undeterred,” he said. “We are going to continue to use all the tools at our disposal to make sure a pro-Israel Democratic voice is represented.”
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