Loss for progressive Democrats: Last night, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a far-left Democrat who represents the outskirts of New York City (Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, and parts of the Bronx), lost his seat in Congress to George Latimer, the Westchester County executive.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) showed up and rallied for Bowman, and Ocasio-Cortez even helped him with door-knocking in Mount Vernon over the weekend.
Israel was front and center in this election.
While Bowman was accusing Israel of genocide, Latimer was positioning himself as an ardent supporter of Israel and (rightly) calling Hamas a terrorist group.
Bowman's beliefs were seemingly informed by a trip to Israel in 2021, where he observed that "there was no political will at the top of the Israeli government to pursue a two-state solution or engage in any sort of sustainable peace process—and that America's willingness to send significant aid to Israel without any conditions attached was therefore unwise," reports Politico. "After the trip, Bowman changed from a relatively mainstream Democrat on Israel into one of the country's chief antagonists in Congress." And being an Israel-antagonist didn't play well with voters in his heavily Jewish district.
"Left-leaning groups like Justice Democrats, who once played the role of conquering insurgents, found themselves running a desperate rescue operation in an overwhelmingly Democratic district. They depleted bank accounts and redirected staff to the race full-time," reports The New York Times in a postmortem that claims Justice Democrats' favored candidates "could not compete with the other side's vast resources" (seemingly meaning the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other parts of the pro-Israel lobby).
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent at least $14.5 million on anti-Bowman ads. "The number is gross…I don't like it," one House Democrat told Axios. Other Democratic lawmakers raised concerns that AIPAC's aggressive intervention here might make elected representatives think twice before criticizing Israel.
But framing his loss mostly as a function of the funding competition misses the possibility that voters simply don't want what Bowman is offering. It might be that far-left progressivism is unpopular following a spike in felony assaults and subway-system crimes in New York City (and broad concern about public disorder that are somewhat detached from the statistics), and that New York's voters are not persuaded that Bowman's course of action on Israel is the right one.
Still, the "AIPAC did it" argument is what Bowman has gone with, too. "We should be outraged when a Super PAC of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn't true," he said in his concession speech.
Get ready for these tensions on the left—on Israel, on progressive approaches to crime, on progressives' prescriptions for the economy—to reach a boiling point in more of this year's elections; for AIPAC to be blamed on electoral outcomes; and possibly, for a broader discourse about PAC and super PAC influence in politics.
Other outcomes: In Colorado, Beetlejuice appreciator (and current representative) Lauren Boebert (R) won reelection after having switched districts, despite a crowded primary; Utah's Republican primary saw Gov. Spencer Cox stay in power, fending off a challenger from his right. Utah saw some other wins for moderate Republicans, too, who successfully thwarted Trump-backed candidates' plans to take over.
Scenes from New York: Churches in New York are seriously out here going hard for Pride Month, but it's not always clear what the, uh, theological basis for such slogans is or what exactly they mean. "Jesus was the queerest of us all" feels like hollow activist language that will become dated in a few years, not something actually worth mulling.
QUICK HITS
- Have you ever found yourself scratching your head and wondering what happened to the Libertarian Party? Who these Mises Caucus guys are and what do they want? Whether their "takeover" two years ago was successful? Look no further. I wrote a feature on what went wrong within the L.P. (and a lot of the Mises Caucus folks are super mad at me as a result).
- A thread about how China's tech scene has changed over the last decade. ("What does the internet look like without the web?")
- "The day after Emmanuel Macron stunned France by calling a snap election, an uncomfortable truth emerged at an emergency meeting of top government press officials: they had to manage a deeply unpopular president in what had effectively become a referendum on his leadership," reports Bloomberg.
- "An EU country in fully good standing around the world, on the basis of ethnicity, denies a significant portion of its longstanding residents the right to vote," writes Tyler Cowen about Estonia.
- Does the surgeon general actually mean to say that "17 percent [of adults] have witnessed someone being shot" and that this is nationally representative? This just does not strike me as anywhere close to true.
- Julian Assange's flight has landed. He is finally free:
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