Left-wing insurgent campaigns have hoped that while getting into Congress might be extraordinarily hard, once in, they could rely on the benefit of being incumbents to hang onto their seats and stay in Congress. Last night’s Democratic primary race for New York’s 16th congressional district, which saw Squad member and two-term representative Jamaal Bowman fall to Westchester County executive George Latimer by nearly 20 points, shows this is no longer a safe bet.

Last night’s result will be a boon for the Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which, through its super PAC United Democracy Project (UDP), poured nearly $15 million into the race to unseat Bowman. It is arguably the crowning achievement of a strategy that pro-Israel groups first pioneered three years ago to deny Bernie Sanders’s campaign surrogate Nina Turner a safe congressional seat in Ohio she was set to easily win.

Bowman’s loss will soon be used — in fact, it already is and was before the polls even closed — by AIPAC and other pro-war forces to scare less courageous candidates and members of Congress into line. Pro-Israel groups have framed the race as a referendum on Bowman’s and the rest of the Squad’s stance on the Gaza war and US-Israel policy and argued that these positions are out of step with a more centrist Democratic electorate. They have been assisted by much of the press, which you will soon see helpfully spreading AIPAC’s preferred narrative in coverage of Latimer’s victory.