North Carolina Congressional Race Shows Perils of Big-Money Support
When Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee was asked last August at a town hall in Carrboro, North Carolina, whether she regretted benefiting from millions of dollars in AIPAC funding that helped elect her to Congress in 2022, she stiffened. “You all know that I took the money from AIPAC, but check to see how much I’ve taken since that time, and check my voting record to see how I have voted and what I have voted for as it relates to the people of Gaza,” Foushee said. Her campaign subsequently announced that she hadn’t received AIPAC funds since 2024 and would not accept them in her 2026 campaign. She even signed on as a co-sponsor of the “Block the Bombs” legislation that seeks to deny certain offensive weapon sales to Israel.
We’ve seen countless recent examples of candidates swearing off “AIPAC funding” and then receiving it in some clandestine form, like through coordinated donors or vaguely named shell super PACs. But this rare rebuke from an incumbent member of Congress has thus far stuck, largely due to grassroots organizing in the Durham-area Fourth Congressional District. Rep. Foushee is in a tough primary fight against Nida Allam, a local official who finished second to her in 2022. And surprisingly, with just a couple of weeks to go until the March 3 primary, it’s Allam who is benefiting from independent expenditures, this time by a factor of more than 10-to-1, according to campaign finance data.
PACs that have gotten behind Allam, a member of the Durham County Board of Commissioners and the first Muslim elected official in the history of North Carolina, include the progressive campaign organization Justice Democrats, the young candidate PAC Leaders We Deserve, and American Priorities, a new PAC that my colleague Whitney Wimbish reports is committing to spending several million dollars to counter AIPAC in select congressional primaries.
Now, there might be more money to come. A poll currently in the field in the district, which has been seen by the Prospect, asks voters about artificial intelligence. This could be a prelude to significant Big Tech super PAC support for Foushee, whom House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) appointed to co-chair a new commission on “AI and the innovation economy.” However, like the pro-Israel funding, support from Big Tech firms would also carry hazards in the district, where residents are fighting the building of a new data center amid fears about job losses from AI and rising energy prices.
A grassroots open letter from hundreds of constituents in the district has asked all candidates in the race to reject AI funding in the primary. Foushee has not yet agreed to those terms; Allam has. “The same folks building data centers are also funding and lifting up MAGA Republicans and spending hundreds of millions of dollars,” Allam said in an interview with the Prospect. “If Democrats in the safest blue seats aren’t willing to take a stand, then who will?”
Foushee’s campaign has not yet responded to several questions from the Prospect.
ALLAM ENTERED PUBLIC SERVICE after three of her friends were tragically shot and killed by a neighbor in what was charged as an anti-Muslim hate crime. Her friends regularly volunteered to help serve homeless people, and she was supposed to be with them on the day they were gunned down. Allam has carried their legacy of serving the poor into her position on the Durham County Board of Commissioners. In 2022, she took another step by running for Congress, and was well positioned to win—until big money came in.
Foushee, a longtime county commissioner and state legislator, was a leading challenger for the open seat vacated by Rep. David Price. Near the end of the campaign, over $3 million came pouring in: $2.1 million from AIPAC’s designated super PAC United Democracy Fund, and a little over $1 million from Protect Our Future PAC, a crypto super PAC tied to since-disgraced and jailed financier Sam Bankman-Fried. This represented 90 percent of the total super PAC spending in the primary, which was the most expensive in North Carolina history. There were also reports of push polling in the district asserting unnamed ties between Allam and “radical anti-Israel activists.” Allam had been critical of the Israeli government and the blockade in Gaza.
This dark-money surge generated backlash; Foushee was even removed from the Progressive Caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party over AIPAC’s support. But ultimately, Foushee won the race with about 47 percent of the vote, compared to 37 percent for Allam. An analysis provided by the Allam campaign shows that, once outside spending was taken into account, Allam and her allies spent $28.59 per vote, while Foushee and her allies spent $94.94 per vote.
We’ve seen countless recent examples of candidates swearing off “AIPAC funding” and then receiving it in some clandestine form.
Months after Foushee entered Congress, the October 7 terror attacks happened, followed by Israel’s counterattack, which many have labeled a genocide. Support for the Israeli government’s actions has plummeted among Democrats, particularly in dark-blue districts like this. (The Fourth District is the most Democratic in the state and actually got bluer after North Carolina redrew its congressional maps in 2023, removing pockets of Foushee support.) And Foushee not only benefited from immense AIPAC support; she also joined a 2024 congressional delegation to Israel that met with Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu. As a result, she has come under increasingly heated criticism from grassroots Democrats in her district.
Eventually, she rejected AIPAC funding, of any sort. Even behind the scenes, Foushee has prevented AIPAC from organizing unbranded fundraisers for her, while maintaining vocal opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
“I attribute that to a lot of grassroots organizing from community members who are sick of seeing taxpayer dollars used to fund the genocide,” Allam said. “The state of North Carolina is the lowest-rated in school funding, and our Medicaid expansion is being clawed back. But we have enough money to bomb hospitals and schools [in Gaza].”
In December, Allam announced her campaign rematch, with endorsements from Justice Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who recently joined Allam at a campaign rally. “We’re supporting Nida to take this district back from the claws of corporate PACs and return it back to everyday North Carolinians,” said Usamah Andrabi of Justice Democrats, citing her efforts raising wages of city employees in Durham and investing in public education. “Nida has shown this district that you can build a bold, progressive agenda that serves working-class communities and actually deliver on it.”
According to the most recent campaign finance data from the end of 2025, Foushee and Allam have raised roughly similar amounts for their official campaigns ($361,920 for Foushee, $334,740 for Allam) and Allam has more cash on hand by a 3-to-2 margin. (A third candidate in the primary, Mary Patterson, hasn’t raised any money.) But the outside spending is firmly in Allam’s favor thus far.
Foushee’s only outside support is $100,000 from the Rolling Sea Action Fund, which is the super PAC of the Congressional Black Caucus, or CBC. (Foushee is Black.) That could certainly be a pass-through for other special interests, but it’s a relatively small amount of money. Allam, meanwhile, is benefiting from $16,000 from North Carolina Asian Americans Together in Action, $23,000 from the human rights–focused Unity & Justice Fund, $50,000 from legal social justice group the Impact Fund, $228,000 from Justice Democrats, $276,000 from David Hogg’s Gen Z group Leaders We Deserve, and $550,000 from American Priorities.
That last one was organized just a week ago, and its treasurer is a past Zohran Mamdani donor named Mark Hanna who once sat on the board of an electoral organization that was a precursor to Mamdani’s rise in New York City. Sources describe American Priorities as having millions to spend on primary candidates this cycle who offer a foreign-policy perspective more aligned with Democratic voters than AIPAC’s unconditional support for the Israeli government’s actions.
Asked about this level of outside support for her, Allam emphasized that she supports changing the campaign finance system to bar corporate money from influencing elections; Foushee has taken some corporate PAC money in her congressional career. “I believe the next generation should have a livable planet, I believe health care should be a human right,” she said. “I’m accepting support from folks aligned with those values and opposing support from folks who lobby against those values.”
Foushee is exposed at the moment, after rejecting AIPAC support and seeing her crypto patron Bankman-Fried go to prison, and time is running out before the primary. It’s notable that someone AIPAC worked so hard to defeat in 2022 now has such a pronounced outside spending advantage in 2026, and other corporate interests that backed Foushee in the past have stayed away as well. Yet Foushee still has an incumbency advantage. Both current Gov. Josh Stein and former Gov. Roy Cooper (now running for Senate) have endorsed her, along with the CBC and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, where she is a member. And she remains a well-respected Black public official with a record of electoral success, in a district with a significant concentration of African American voters.
Ironically, Foushee has been the one speaking up about outside group spending this time. “Why is this PAC running ads against me funded by billionaires,” she said in a recent campaign video, referring to Leaders We Deserve, which received some funds from wealthy venture capitalist Ron Conway in 2024, but not this year. The Leaders We Deserve ad for Allam actually hits Foushee for taking corporate PAC money, which includes weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and tech firms Meta and Google.
Foushee has said in the past that corporations supporting her have interests in her district, which includes the tech- and biopharma-heavy Research Triangle, and that none of those donations influence her votes. She has criticized the Citizens United decision and supported reforming campaign finance.
IN THIS RACE, ONE SUPER PAC shoe has yet to drop.
The Prospect has reviewed screenshots of a poll currently in the field in the district from Public Policy Polling, a North Carolina–based pollster. The poll asks basic questions about approval of state and national politicians and surveys the Foushee-Allam race. But it also asks, “How concerned are you that artificial intelligence or AI could replace or reduce jobs in your community”; “Do you think artificial intelligence will mostly help people like you, mostly hurt people like you, or have a mix of benefits and harms”; and “If a candidate for office supported strong safeguards for AI to protect people from harm and mitigate major risks, would that make you much more likely, somewhat more likely, somewhat less likely, or much less likely to vote for them?”
It’s unclear whether this poll will be publicly released or who is funding it; a request for comment to Public Policy Polling was not returned. But it appears that some group with AI interests is polling the district and may make investments depending on the answers.
The money could come in on the pro-regulatory or anti-regulatory side, supporting either Allam or Foushee. Anthropic, the AI modeling firm that is slightly more regulation-friendly and is in a battle with OpenAI for market share, recently donated $20 million to a super PAC effort meant to counter Leading the Future, the PAC with a $125 million war chest supported by much of the rest of the industry, which is interested in backing more laissez-faire candidates. Leading the Future is supporting candidates in Illinois and attacking a candidate running for Congress in New York.
Around the same time that Allam entered the race, House Democratic Leader Jeffries appointed Foushee to the AI commission. That’s potentially a good perch from which to collect industry contributions. Foushee thus far has released a report on AI and jobs that asked for “clarity” from industry leaders, and did a roundtable discussion in the district in late January. (She was also criticized for reposting a fake privacy meme on Facebook.)
And Foushee is fishing for super PAC support: Her campaign website has a “red box” section that candidates typically put up to coordinate messages with outside groups. The red box message, which has recently changed, now says that primary voters “need to see IMMEDIATELY” that ads supporting Allam, like the Leaders We Deserve ad, are “false,” and that Allam is “backed by more than a million dollars in dark money spending.” So Foushee is asking for dark-money spending to counter the dark-money spending.
But support from the AI industry in particular, if it’s coming to Foushee, may be perilous in the district, which has been roiled by fights over AI data centers.
An LLC called Natelli Investments has planned to use 190 acres of farmland near the small community of New Hill, about 20 miles from Durham, for a hyperscale data center called the Digital Campus. “My house is about two miles from the site,” said Bill Dam, a retired environmental scientist. “I was open-minded about it at first, but after the federal, state, and local promotion of data centers, I got opposed to it.”
The Digital Campus, composed of four large buildings, would consume about 300 megawatts of electricity, which Dam said is three times as much power as the surrounding communities of New Hill and Apex use on an annual basis; it’s also close to one-third of the total power supply of the nearby Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant. In addition, the data center would maintain backup power from 100 diesel generators, which critics fear could be regularly employed to stabilize the energy grid during times of high demand, leading to toxic pollution, according to Dam.
Local officials would have to rezone the property as “light industrial” from the current residential designation to enable the data center. And regional utility Duke Energy has announced that it would extend the life of a coal-fired power plant in the area to deal with the expanded energy demand. The state is exempting sales and use taxes for data centers, and the city of Apex covets the property taxes. “But that’s not nearly enough to cover damages to the air and water and land,” Dam said.
Dam has joined a number of residents at town council meetings in protesting the data center, which has not revealed which Big Tech companies it has signed to use the facility. Activists raise concerns about rising electricity costs, pollutants from the diesel generators, and downstream effects of AI on job losses in a multitude of fields. This aligns with other local fights; Chatham County, which is part of the district, imposed a 12-month moratorium on data centers and crypto mining just last week.
About 250 voters sent an open letter to Fourth District candidates in recent days, asking them to oppose the Digital Campus projects and any other data centers in the area. It also called on candidates to “reject any donations or Super PAC support from the big tech lobby, especially AI executives and companies.” It cites the support Bankman-Fried’s PAC gave to Foushee in 2022.
“We must feel confident that our Congressmember—regardless of party or ideology—will put our community’s interests above those of corporations or billionaires,” the letter reads.
Foushee has not yet responded to the letter, though she has said that residents’ concerns are “serious” and “demand rigorous analysis and transparency.” Dam said that he has approached Foushee’s office about the issue and they “haven’t responded in a way that satisfies me at all … Anybody supporting AI companies, making it easier for a few billionaires to become richer, they don’t represent the people.”
Meanwhile, Allam affirmed her opposition to the data center project and rejection of Big Tech super PAC support. That would appear to include any support from Anthropic’s super PAC on the subject of AI safety, if that’s what the polling is presaging.
“I’ve been hearing from hundreds of residents across this district with concerns about AI data centers,” Allam said. “I am proud to have rejected donations from the AI lobby and the tech industry. People will know that I’m working for them.”
As a result of all this, any late investment from AI companies supporting Foushee could trigger a backlash. “If AI super PACs spend in this election, it will be a clear sign to voters that the incumbent is more aligned with AI’s Big Tech billionaires than her own constituents,” said Andrabi, of Justice Democrats. His organization released a poll conducted by Data for Progress in January showing that 63 percent of likely primary voters in the district believe that “AI data centers generally hurt our community by raising utility costs and harming the environment,” while only 15 percent believe they “help our community by creating jobs and supporting economic growth.”
The late-January town hall on AI provided an example of this. At the event, a group of local high school students asked Foushee to pledge to “not accept money from the AI lobby.” Organizers of the town hall censored the question and claimed that Foushee and fellow AI commission member Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) couldn’t answer anything because they had a flight to catch. In reality, they were holding a fundraiser in the district the following morning.
One high school student approached Foushee as she was leaving, and again asked her about the pledge. “I haven’t pledged anything,” she said. “My only pledge is to my citizens.” The student also cited the data center in New Hill. “I want to know that you’re listening to us and not these big corporations like Meta,” the student said while chasing Foushee.
She got into a nearby car and left.
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