Big Money Is Back
A preview to this year’s congressional primary season kicks off, unusually, on Thursday. Former Rep. Mikie Sherrill won a landslide to become New Jersey’s governor last year, and a crowded primary to replace her in the state’s 11th Congressional District is being held tomorrow. It’s a light-blue district, but the winner of the 11-candidate Democratic primary is expected to easily prevail in the general election in early April.
That’s brought a familiar face out of the shadows to help determine the outcome: AIPAC.
Though some reports indicated that the pro-Israel PAC was pulling back on electoral spending, it has thrown down nearly $2.3 million in television ads through its subsidiary United Democracy Project (UDP), and $1.83 million more in direct mail and phone banks, to block former Rep. Tom Malinowski from winning the seat. As is typical for single-issue groups, the ads are 100 percent pretextual. One uses a 2019 omnibus funding bill to dubiously claim that Malinowski supports increasing funding on ICE; the other somewhat cleaner hit involves Malinowski’s failure to disclose stock trades during the pandemic. (Malinowski has consistently called this lack of disclosure a mistake.)
The target here is rather unusual. In the past, Malinowski has received money from AIPAC’s PAC directly, and during prior campaigns he took over $399,000 from pro-Israel interests. He has responded to the latest attacks by pointing out that AIPAC’s current funders include right-wing donors, which is true. But paradoxically, the biggest beneficiary of the attack-ad campaign could be a candidate who’s far more opposed to AIPAC’s interests.
The four front-runners in the primary are Malinowski, former Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way, Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill, and Analilia Mejia, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy and a former campaign political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Mejia has a host of national endorsements, from Sens. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA).
AIPAC is seemingly seeking to boost the relatively conservative Way, who has also received outside support from the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association (placed by the same firm as the anti-Malinowski ads from UDP) and a shadowy group with no donor information. (There’s a pro-Gill and anti-Malinowski PAC out there as well.) But given the anti-ICE message in the ads, the beneficiary could be Mejia. Way and Gill are messaging against ICE in their communications, but Mejia is clearly the most aggressive on the issue, leading chants to abolish ICE at a recent rally and holding ICE Watch trainings during her campaign.
“The irony would be rich: AIPAC defeats a supporter of Israel, and puts another Squad member in the House instead.”
Mejia also happens to be the candidate who is the most critical of the Israeli government and the genocide in Gaza. Malinowski caught AIPAC’s ire for daring to say that foreign military aid to Israel should not be completely unconditional; he worked in President Obama’s State Department and is a more mainstream Democrat on foreign affairs. But stepping even slightly out of AIPAC’s rigid lines on Israel is enough to get a money cannon pointed at you, even as Mejia is the kind of candidate AIPAC typically spends heavily against.
As Jay Michaelson points out in the Forward, if you’re anti-ICE and you see AIPAC’s anti-Malinowski ads, you may gravitate to the most anti-ICE candidate. If you don’t like AIPAC’s big-money attempts to dictate elections, you might gravitate to the most vociferous candidate on the destruction of Gaza. Those are the same candidate: Mejia. “The irony would be rich: AIPAC defeats a supporter of Israel, and puts another Squad member in the House instead,” Michaelson wrote. “Talk about instant karma.”
Mejia told the Prospect in an interview that she denounced the anti-Malinowski ads immediately, while expressing confusion about AIPAC attacking someone who once had earned their support. “This is the most recent episode of The Leopard Ate My Face,” Mejia said. “I’ll quote Tom, what is desired is blind absolute submission … Until our representatives aren’t dancing for these dark-money interests, the people will not actually control their own government.”
THE 2022 AND 2024 PRIMARY SEASONS were notable not just for the presence of big money, but for the breadth of it. “In the last presidential election, donations from people giving $5 million or more went up exponentially,” said Daniel Weiner, a campaign finance expert with the Brennan Center. “It seems like we’re on track to see that again.”
The 2022 campaign saw AIPAC’s first major investments in partisan primaries. The crypto industry also dabbled in races in 2022, but that exploded in 2024. Its major PAC spent big money in 48 races; their candidate won 47. The crypto PAC Fairshake has raised a record $193 million for the election campaign; AIPAC has a war chest of $95 million.
Meta recently dropped $65 million into an account that will spend on state-level races in California. Even gambling apps FanDuel and DraftKings have given millions to a newly created super PAC called Win for America.
The idea is that these industries can get massive returns by buying government outright. And it often works. The crypto industry was able to get legislation called the GENIUS Act through Congress that could translate into billions of dollars in gains for them, dwarfing the industry’s relatively modest investment in politics. “We’re living through a period where politics has become explicitly transactional,” Weiner said. “An industry all about not being controlled by the government is trying to get subsidized by it.”
Another new entry this year is an AI-focused PAC that has raised $125 million to date, a pittance compared to the hundreds of billions being spent on AI infrastructure like data centers, but a ton of money for campaigns. The donors, leadership, and approach of the AI industry’s primary PAC Leading the Future bears a striking resemblance to Fairshake. Zac Moffatt and Josh Vlasto are running Leading the Future; Vlasto is also lead spokesperson for Fairshake. Donors like the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have given heavily to both PACs. And both are following the AIPAC strategy of attack ads on unrelated subjects to take down its foes.
Leading the Future’s first target is Alex Bores, a New York assemblymember running in Manhattan to replace Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who is retiring. Bores wrote the AI safety bill that Gov. Kathy Hochul first tried to rewrite but then passed in New York. At first, Leading the Future (through its Think Big PAC) knocked Bores for writing a bill that will “crush innovation” and create a patchwork of state AI laws, but then it seemingly realized that nobody cares about a patchwork of state AI laws, and released a new ad, hitting Bores for working for Palantir and “selling the tech for ICE,” another signal that the research from the big-money PACs finds that anti-ICE rhetoric plays well.
Bores has said he never worked on any ICE contracts while at Palantir, and he’s recently called to abolish ICE. But the hypocrisy for this one goes even further, since Palantir’s co-founder Joe Lonsdale is a funder of Leading the Future. Vlasto has claimed elsewhere that Lonsdale gave to the Republican affiliate of Leading the Future, not the Democratic one, which is such a thin distinction you can barely see it. (Leading the Future did not respond to a request for comment.)
But Bores also has some wind at his back from a different, pro-AI safety PAC coalition called Public First, which has pledged $50 million to support candidates who favor AI regulation. “That is the nature of some of these things, you’ve got wealthy interests on both sides,” Weiner said. “It reflects in part that on tech issues in particular, they are up for grabs within each party’s coalition.”
THE RECENT ERA OF BIG MONEY flooding into Democratic primaries coincided with the success of progressive campaign groups like Justice Democrats, which was able to pick up a handful of seats in 2018 and 2020 by primarying establishment incumbents and finding candidates for safely blue seats. “We have always been a threat to the interests of the wealthy elite,” said Usamah Andrabi with Justice Democrats.
AIPAC and crypto interests held the line first in an open seat in Ohio in 2022, setting a strategy for future spending. In 2024, former Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO) absorbed $30 million in outside spending between their two seats and were ousted by more moderate challengers. But others, like Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), were able to survive.
Andrabi said that Justice Democrats has been playing a long game to try to educate voters about the outside attacks, including research that AIPAC was the largest source of Republican donor spending in Democratic primaries. “What the last three cycles have proven is that some of our work happens in particular campaigns and those fights, and sometimes they are multi-cycle fights,” he said. “We did a lot of work to spread the word about AIPAC, sharing messaging and research, getting the media to cover it. That doesn’t always seep in right away.”
Over time, Andrabi feels that voters are responding to this message, helped along on AIPAC by the genocide in Gaza and the demands for unconditional support for Israel. “We are now more clearly being able to call out AIPAC, call out crypto, and voters are doing it too,” he said, highlighting town hall meetings where constituents have addressed the topic. After Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC) was challenged on taking AIPAC funds, she said she would reject that support in the future. However, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) recently designated Foushee to lead a new commission on artificial intelligence, raising the possibility of her skipping from one big-money patron to another. (Justice Democrats has endorsed a primary challenger for Foushee, Nida Allam.)
Andrabi said that the polling he has seen shows deep unpopularity for AIPAC and corporate PAC spending in deep-blue districts. That matches public surveys across all districts showing an enormous rejection of big-money politics, with 77 percent saying that it represents a threat to democracy, and 72 percent believing government should limit such spending (including 69 percent of Republicans).
With the brand tarnished, big-money PACs have been a bit more circumspect. In Illinois, Laura Fine, who is running in the Ninth District seat being vacated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), claimed that AIPAC wasn’t supporting her, and there has been no formal endorsement. But the president of AIPAC’s board, Michael Tuchin, held a private fundraiser for Fine. In the nearby Seventh District, AIPAC donors held fundraisers for Jason Friedman despite the organization not formally endorsing.
The attacks on Malinowski in New Jersey’s 11th could signal branching out to more moderate districts that may not have heard the big-money message as loudly. “They did go all out scorched earth on progressives,” Andrabi said. “Now progressives are like, ‘Watch out for this.’ They have not really done that on moderates, and have more leeway there to spend that money.”
The choice of Malinowski, Andrabi said, was really telling. “AIPAC’s first spend of the cycle is someone they literally used to endorse,” Andrabi said. “That shows how far-right of a lobby it really is … AIPAC spends not only to win elections but to remind elected officials that they have that money to spend and will spend it if you step out of line.”
Mejia thinks that this will backfire. “It’s a demand for subverting the will of the voters … that’s not where the people in New Jersey’s 11th District are,” she told the Prospect. “Folks are appalled. I think AIPAC is doing itself, thankfully, a massive disservice and is proving the point.”
IT IS HARD TO SEE WHERE this all ends however, as long as it remains successful. People may hate money in politics, but it continues to flow because it works.
There are some limits, however. The crypto industry thought it bought Congress but has yet to get its top priority, a bill changing the regulatory market structure, through the Senate, after the Trumpian corruption in part fueled by all that campaign spending became too much to bear. Meanwhile, money is no guarantee of victory: Democrat Taylor Rehmet was outspent 10-to-1 in a state Senate race in the Fort Worth, Texas, area over the weekend, but easily flipped a seat that went for Trump by 17 points.
“There’s a greater understanding of how much voters dislike the current system, and how much it’s fueling a broader lack of faith in institutions,” Weiner said. “That’s a reason why politics is so volatile right now.” But that doesn’t mean that unilateral disarmament in the campaign spending wars is on the horizon.
Mejia, who has had to try to get her message across amid millions being spent by outside groups, thinks money in politics is a threshold issue. “The biggest problem we face is the stranglehold of big money on our economy and our democracy,” she said. “They use power to buy elections and silence the opposition. We need to send more representatives to Congress who are unwilling to play ball, and who will be free to bar them from strangling democracy.”
The post Big Money Is Back appeared first on The American Prospect.