Aipac’s nearly $30m bid to defeat El-Sayed was its largest single-race investment
Candidates who rejected Israel’s wars and occupation and backed Palestinian self-determination won races across the 2026 US midterm elections, from Michigan’s Senate contest to House primaries in Colorado and New York, according to an opinion column by Judith Levine, a frequent Guardian contributor. Levine argued the results reversed a long-standing assumption that uncompromising criticism of Israeli policy would doom Democrats’ chances, though she cautioned that whether the issue actually put the winners over the top remained unknown.
Her leading example was Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, a 34-year-old in his first run for elected office, defeated the Republican Mike Rogers by seven points in a contest that had been predicted to be a squeaker and that the column described as hard-fought and often ugly. “You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates,” El-Sayed told a Detroit crowd on Wednesday in declaring victory, the column reported. He campaigned on an affordability platform and championed Medicare for All, which the column characterized as socialist-adjacent.
What was generally believed to make El-Sayed an unlikely winner, Levine wrote, was his uncompromising criticism of Israel’s policies toward Palestine and Palestinians — an assumption that shaped the campaigns of his Democratic primary rival Haley Stevens, described in the column as pro-Zionist, and of Rogers, described as pro-Israel. It was the wager the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac — described in the column as rightwing — placed when it spent nearly $30m, its biggest investment ever in a single race, trying to defeat El-Sayed. “We don’t know yet, but his strong criticism of Israel may have put El-Sayed, and other Democrats, over the top,” Levine wrote, adding that Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “took a beating” in the midterms alongside the Republicans.
Six candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America — which Levine called “a prominent antagonist to rightwing Zionism” — won Congressional races in part by foregrounding their primary opponents’ links to Aipac and their own refusal to take its funds. All ran in districts so heavily Democratic that the winner of the primary was assured of the seat.
In Colorado, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old lawyer, handily defeated the 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette, who was backed by a super PAC with Aipac links. In a New York district taking in parts of upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Adriano Espaillat, who also drew help from a super PAC with ties to the group. City and State New York predicted that Chevalier, a graduate student leader in Columbia University’s anti-Gaza-war encampments, would be “the most pro-Palestine member of Congress.”
In Brooklyn — in an area the column referred to as the “commie corridor” — the former state assembly member and artist Claire Valdez defeated Antonio Reynoso, whom the column described as a principled progressive, in a contest Levine described as tainted by Valdez’s unsubstantiated claims that a political action committee supporting Reynoso was Aipac-funded; the committee was in fact funded by one of New York’s teachers’ unions, the column reported.
In Pennsylvania, Chris Rabb won while drawing pointed notice from the Times of Israel for his endorsement by “far-left online streamer Hasan Piker” — support the column said had also plagued El-Sayed in Michigan. Rabb’s backing was not confined to the left’s edges, Levine wrote: along with the DSA, the Maryland representative Jaimie Raskin, who is Jewish, endorsed him, as did Jewish Voice for Peace. Last week Rabb posted on X: “The Nakba never ended” — a reference, per the column, to the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians to establish a Jewish state on their land. In Michigan, Donavan McKinney labeled the final section of his platform “Palestine.”
The column counted Brad Lander among the winners. A veteran of New York City left-Democratic politics, Lander has maintained his Jewish and progressive bona fides, Levine wrote, by displaying sympathy for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians — though he adheres to no official progressive stance. He launched his primary campaign against the incumbent Dan Goldman — described by Levine as an unwavering Zionist and a recipient of Aipac funds — vowing he would not be “doing Aipac’s bidding,” and challenging Goldman to “call the Gaza war genocide” and to support the Block the Bombs Act, which would limit arms sales to Israel.
Still, Levine wrote, Lander left the DSA after 30 years of membership when, the day after the Hamas-led massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, the organization publicized what she described as a patently pro-Hamas rally. The Working Families party endorsed him.
Levine wrote that the winners’ politics ran from radical to liberal, but that “what all these winners have in common is their rejection of Israel’s wars and occupation and their support of Palestinian self-determination.”
More nuanced positions were also in play, the column noted. In Ohio, the winning Democrat Sherrod Brown and the Republican John Husted each drew pro-Israel support of different kinds: the group J Street, which the column described as liberal Zionist and as critical of Israeli government policies and supportive of a two-state solution, backed Brown, while Aipac stood with Husted. In Georgia, the Jewish Democratic senator Jon Ossoff mapped a position that Levine wrote must have nettled voters on both sides, expressing a commitment to Israel’s security while also valuing “the lives of innocent Palestinians,” and voting in the Senate for some US military aid to Israel while opposing certain weapons transfers. He defeated the Republican Mike Collins 59% to 41%, a rival whom Levine wrote has ties to promoters of white nationalism and antisemitism — a contrast, she suggested, that probably made the choice uncomplicated for Georgia’s Jewish voters.
Levine cautioned that Israel probably had little effect on many of the contests. Even as Israel’s military continues, in the occupied territories, conduct that the United Nations calls crimes against humanity — as the column put it — the country is off the front pages of US newspapers, and voters placed foreign policy low on their lists in poll after poll. Trump, she wrote, may be wrong that “people agree with what [he’s] doing in Iran,” but might be right that the resulting high gas prices are what trouble voters most.
Trump figured in the column’s closing. “I’m at 99% approval rating in Israel – can you believe it?” he said on Fox & Friends, according to the column, which noted that Pew’s polling found his numbers were not even close. “If people get tired of me in the US, I’ll move to Israel and become prime minister,” Trump mused. Before election day, Trump said he would cease sending $4bn annually in aid to Israel — a move Levine read as, perhaps, an effort to ride a wave of cooling American sentiment toward Israel, or to punish Netanyahu, who, she observed, “has not been terribly affectionate lately,” and with whom, she wrote, the president has certainly lost patience.