Mo’ Money, No Problems

First, the Israel First lobby failed to prove in New York that its massive spending advantage inevitably swings elections. Andrew Cuomo was backed by the most well-funded Super PAC in New York City election history, funded by donations from pro-Israel billionaires like Trump donor Bill Ackman (who gave $500,000), hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb (who gave $250,000 and also served as a fundraiser), and former mayor Michael Bloomberg, a staunch supporter of Israel and its war in Gaza (who contributed a staggering $8 million).

The Super PAC they funded, Fix the City, spent more than $22 million on the mayoral race and the mayoral race only. It ended up being responsible for effectively half (49.5 percent) of all the outside spending in every single race, in a year with dozens of candidates and all fifty-one city council seats on the ballot. Another pro-Israel super PAC, Sensible City, Inc., spent more than $100,000 opposing Zohran Mamdani. All told, pro-Cuomo forces raised a staggering combined total of $35 million, making the pro-Mamdani side’s $9 million look measly.

Yet Cuomo lost by 7 points anyway, such a wide margin that he didn’t even bother waiting for the ranked votes to be counted to concede.

It was just as grim for the lobby downballot, where the sums were far smaller but had similar potential to affect the race. Solidarity PAC, a kind of municipal-level AIPAC, endorsed and directed thousands of dollars’ worth of pro-Israel donations to the challengers of two pro-Palestine socialist city council incumbents, Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif, that made up at least 14 and 25 percent of their challengers’ private donation hauls, respectively. The two socialist incumbents also faced down the intervention of outside spending group Brooklyn BridgeBuilders, a pro-Israel PAC that Israel First congressman Ritchie Torres fundraised for, and which spent more than $33,000 opposing Hanif and more than $3,000 backing Avilés’s challenger.

As Solidarity PAC’s treasurer Sara Forman explained, because state- and local-level elections are so cheap by comparison, the idea here was that pouring money into these races could let Israel Firsters “stave off the wave of extremist anti-Israel lawmakers” and “for a fraction of the campaign cost,” reorienting the overall ideological direction of the Democratic Party.

That’s not quite how it worked out. Instead, Avilés and Hanif obliterated their challengers by margins of more than 40 points.

Attacks Fall Flat

But it wasn’t just that the result showed that the money didn’t work. It also showed that a lot of the lobby’s arguments for unconditional fealty to Israel, and the political manipulation tactics used to enforce them, have lost their potency with Democratic voters.

No one hugged Israel tighter than Cuomo. As he prepared to make his comeback, he had already announced he was going to make unquestioning support for Israel a litmus test for Democrats, charging that “you can’t denounce antisemitism but waver on Israel’s right to exist and defend itself.” He declared himself a “hyperaggressive supporter of Israel and proud of it,” called campus protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza “criminal acts,” joined the legal team to defend Netanyahu from criminal charges, attacked one of his opponents for not visiting the country, and called antisemitism, which he explicitly defined as criticism of Israel, not just “the most serious and the most important issue” of the campaign, but that faced the city and country.

Using this warped definition, Cuomo, who is not Jewish, at one point seemed to accuse even his Jewish rival, city comptroller Brad Lander, of antisemitism, criticizing him for divesting city pension funds from Israeli government bonds before charging that his entire slate of opponents had aligned with “forces of antisemitism” and were “aiding and supporting the most aggressive anti-Israel policies.” (“Andrew Cuomo doesn’t get to tell me how to be Jewish,” an outraged Lander responded.)

Meanwhile, Mamdani had done everything to anger the lobby. He (accurately) labeled Israel’s war a “genocide,” took part in protests and a hunger strike against the war, didn’t sign on to a resolution backing Israel this year, and has long backed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement aimed at what even Israeli former officials and its premier human rights organization call its policy of apartheid. The last week of the election saw an (ongoing) controversy about his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

As a result, Mamdani was repeatedly smeared as an antisemite, not just by Cuomo, but by the press. Media outlets repeatedly demanded to know, even as he said he backed Israel’s “right to exist,” why he wouldn’t support its right to exist specifically as a Jewish ethnostate. Stephen Colbert gave him the kind of grilling he hasn’t given any Democratic politician in at least a decade. Some, like the New York Post editorial board, skipped merely implying it and explicitly called him “a babyfaced socialist antisemite.”

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait published a piece, seemingly drafted on a napkin, charging that Mamdani’s defense of the “intifada” slogan was “very telling,” paired with a sinister-looking picture of the mayoral candidate bathed in shadow and smiling malevolently. Pro-Cuomo super PACs spent more than $80,000 in the last two weeks of the race alone on mailers, digital ads, and even an airplane banner highlighting a combination of smears over the issue.

The conventional thinking in establishment circles holds that all of this should have sunk Mamdani, and especially in New York. After all, this is the city with the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and American Jews, we’re told, unquestioningly support everything Israel does, including its current, heinous behavior.

And yet they didn’t. In fact, multiple polls showed Mamdani was the second-most popular choice of New York’s Jewish voters after Cuomo, and precinct data suggests that the city’s non-Orthodox Jews split their vote between him, Cuomo, and Lander. This is no surprise, since American Jews have been some of the most outspoken critics of Israel and have led and populated the current protest movement against its wars.

This does not suggest, as AIPAC likes to insist, that unequivocal support for the foreign government of Israel is “good politics.” Given Cuomo’s failure — and Israel’s collapsing approval among a Democratic base that is increasingly more sympathetic to the Palestinians — we might ask if Cuomo’s bear hug of the country, as it carried out a nearly two-year-long campaign of mass slaughter and stood on the brink of pulling the United States into a Middle East war, instead proved a political liability for him.

Cuomo’s wasn’t the only race last Tuesday where these kinds of attacks fell flat. City Council Progressive Caucus chair Hanif’s opponents similarly tried to make her reelection a referendum on Israel and its war. Hanif had been arrested at a pro-cease-fire protest weeks into the war, had at one point tweeted that the “illegal, immoral, and unjust occupation of the Palestinian people” was the “root cause” of the violence in the Middle East, and her opponent had criticized her for having “prioritized” the matter of a Gaza cease-fire on the city council. One super PAC, Stand Up NYC, spent more than $20,000 on mailers attacking Hanif for supporting the “uncommitted” movement to try and stop the war, and being “arrested at a radical, anti-semitic rally where she encouraged acts of violence against the Jewish community.”

And yet Hanif ultimately prevailed by a winning margin about six times the size of Mamdani’s.

A Record of Failure

The New York City races this past week aren’t the first time the Israel First lobby has flopped. Groups like AIPAC have touted the high-profile scalps they’ve claimed by intervening in Democratic primaries over the past four years to scare politicians into acquiescence, most recently the two members of the “Squad” it knocked off in 2024.

Former New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman “faced record-shattering spending by political groups furious over his criticism of Israel,” the New York Times reported at the time, and his defeat showed that “many of the left’s candidates are no longer gaining ground in major races,” and that “the center is regaining power.”

But this claim didn’t really hold up if you looked a little closer at that particular election cycle. Bowman and Cori Bush’s defeats were no doubt major losses, but they had come as a result of a number of other factors besides AIPAC money, including, in Bowman’s case, redistricting that removed a large chunk of his voter base in the Bronx. In reality, the majority of the Squad cruised to reelection despite taking positions on the Gaza war that the lobby claimed were electoral suicide and despite rounds of attacks from the press and their own party — including, in Rashida Tlaib’s case, being absurdly censured by Congress for using the phrase “from the river to the sea.”

That included Summer Lee, whose congressional run had nearly been smothered in 2022 by an eleventh-hour landslide of AIPAC money, but who saw the organization preemptively bow out of challenging her reelection two years later because they couldn’t find anyone who dared run against her. AIPAC likewise couldn’t get two different people to run against Tlaib despite offering them $20 million each, and stayed out entirely from the reelection race of another left-wing foe, Ilhan Omar. They even fell on their face trying to unseat non-lefty members of Congress, including, most spectacularly, setting $4.6 million on fire trying to defeat centrist Democrat Dave Min over some mild criticisms of Israeli policy.

So how does the lobby keep claiming a near-100-percent track record of success? Simple: they overwhelmingly back candidates that are going to win or lose their races regardless — candidates running unopposed and in noncompetitive races, or in Kina Collins’s case, pitching money into a race against a candidate who wasn’t a serious contender — and meekly back out of races where they’re likely to lose, to avoid putting a blemish on their record.

That way, they can trumpet an intimidating list of mostly meaningless victories they’ve racked up, and stop you from thinking about all the times they’ve embarrassed themselves.

Wake-Up Call

The lobby’s weakness doesn’t mean left-wing candidates and activists should now take positions at odds with a basic, universal commitment to human rights or feel free to be undisciplined. No one is going to get far winning over the US public if they’re giving the thumbs up to violence or illiberal, undemocratic forces and Democratic voters’ inherent, commonsense disgust with Israel’s ghastly conduct in Gaza and elsewhere doesn’t mean they’ll tolerate support for the same crimes being done by someone else. Mamdani and others like him have succeeded precisely because they rejected this kind of performative radicalism.

But what the New York primaries suggest is that being unconditionally pro-Israel — refusing to criticize its crimes or demand accountability for them and insisting on endlessly sending it weapons as it commits them — is decidedly not good policy or good politics in 2025. And that seems especially true in New York, with the largest Muslim population in the country and where many Jewish voters agree with Mamdani’s stance on Israel. The question is when the rest of the political class will wake up to it.