AIPACs Strategy Backfires In Its First Big Swing of the 2026 Election Season

The Democratic primary in New Jersey this week saw AIPAC suffer a decisive defeat as its strategy of trying to promote most extreme pro-Israel candidate backfired. This is a trend, not a one-off.

Feb 07, 2026

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Let’s be blunt: AIPAC is political poison.

That’s never been clearer than today, as we watch the results of the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 11^th district. AIPAC’s political action committee—the deceptively named “United for Democracy” pumped $2 million into this primary race.

Most of that cash went to attack ads targeting former Rep. Tom Malinowski. He lost his congressional seat in 2022, largely due to redistricting, and he was the favorite in this race. But in the neck-and-neck race, as of midnight on February 7, Malinowski has been trailing for hours and, though he still might win, that is no longer the likely outcome.

So, AIPAC won? Not at all.

AIPAC pumped all that money into this race to flex its muscles and clear out a moderate pro-Israel candidate in favor of a more extreme one. That would have been either Tahesha Way or Brendan Gill, both of whom finished well behind Malinowski and the likely winner, progressive candidate Analilia Mejia.

Malinowski is a pro-Israel candidate but he’s not pro-Israel enough for the radicals at AIPAC. The Overton window has shifted within the Democratic party, and now many of those in the center of the party are willing to set some conditions on the ongoing flood of taxpayer-funded weaponry to Israel. Malinowski is among them.

But Mejia, who has the support of Bernie Sanders (she is his former political director), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, and other relative progressives in Congress, is an unabashedly progressive, left-populist candidate. She ran an outstanding campaign that focused on health care, benefits for workers, canceling student debt, housing, and similar issues that actually matter to voters.

Mejia hasn’t paid a lot of attention to foreign affairs, but she has stated the obvious truth that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. So AIPAC certainly didn’t want to see her win.

But AIPAC miscalculated and believed she could not win the primary, a race which is, in effect, almost certain to be the real general election in the heavily Democratic district. They believed Malinowski represented the only realistic “left” candidacy for the Democratic nomination. They were dead wrong.

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Democrats shifting away from bought-and-paid-for politicians

Democratic voters are increasingly realizing that the party centrists like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris, and, yes, Tom Malinowski are not the people who are going to defeat Trump and keep authoritarianism from coming back. Rather, Democrats need to push forward popular initiatives that voters are behind even if their major donors hate them.

Democrats need to do better than saying “We are not Trump.” Schumer and Jeffries do not understand that and are playing by the old rulebook. The outrage over Trump’s economic failures and ICE disaster is so great that, as in 2020, the Democrats might score a momentary victory.

But it will be short-lived if change that does a lot more than the infinitesimal and temporary measures that we saw during Joe Biden’s four years are all Democrats offer. And, indeed, that is all the Democratic old guard does offer.

Voters want more than that. And, beyond that point, voters also realize that if that’s what they get in 2026 and 2028, Republican authoritarianism will come back again. Only this time, they will be smarter, better prepared, and even more ruthless, just as they have been this term as compared to the first Trump debacle.

The old guard Democrats are proving it again, as they are angry at AIPAC for, as one Democratic strategist put it, “one of the greatest own-goals in American political history.”

That’s not entirely fair either. AIPAC was certainly foolish and displayed a real lack of understanding the politics of the moment. But Democrat advisers are, once again, underestimating the appetite of moderate liberals for real change to counter Republican faux populism. The shift in the public mood is real.

That same shift also means support for Israel is steamrolling toward a tiny minority in the Democratic party. Indeed, AIPAC has now become the symbol for the political corruption of the American political system. It is the icon of a special interest that works for its own ends to the detriment of most Americans and to the world.

While Israel has now firmly established itself as a right-wing cause, AIPAC has convinced people that it is just as radical. And the more Democrats who find out that AIPAC, for all its claims to bipartisanship, is a funnel for Republican money to interfere in Democratic elections, the farther AIPAC’s standing will sink.

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A serious miscalculation

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, AIPAC was a politically savvy body with few peers. But these days, it has lost much of its sophistication and, like the foreign country it works for, has come to rely much more on brute force and less on strategy and intelligence than ever before.

New Jersey-11 was just the latest example. It was an extreme miscalculation. The two more extreme pro-Israel candidates were far out of step with Democratic voters, on Israel and on other issues. By ripping Malinowski and doing so by implying he was hawkish on immigration (which isn’t true), they gave Mejia a boost that all the campaign donations in the world couldn’t have bought her.

That happened because it was clear to people that the election was being bought by a PAC that had its own, narrow interest at heart. That’s why Mejia trailed in early and mail-in voting but stunned the district with a massive show of strength on Election Day.

This was a powerful reminder: the idea that whoever spends the most wins the election is a myth.

Of course money helps. But it’s only worth as much as the votes it can get you, and that depends on the message people are getting from the amplification the dollars buy. And AIPAC’s involvement makes every vote it can buy far more expensive. That’s why a seat in a northern New Jersey solid Blue district required a massive infusion of $2 million—an enormous amount for one special interest PAC to spend in a suburban primary—for AIPAC to have any effect at all.

Mejia ran a campaign that resonates with voters. That should not and must not be diminished. She spoke to what people wanted to hear, her message resonating even in a relatively affluent district like this one.

Few American voters, even Jewish ones (and the 11^th district has a significant Jewish community) vote based on Israel, and few vote based on foreign policy. But AIPAC has become so odious that people are turned off by hearing of their involvement.

It’s true that genocide and apartheid are not likely to win many votes in the U.S. But AIPAC is not just the lobby for Israel in many Americans’ minds. It is the symbol of the rot in American politics.

Supporting Israel, now that its genocidal and apartheid nature have been so horrifyingly revealed, is bad policy and bad politics. Yet even so, AIPAC itself might be even worse politically. And we must ensure that its reputation gets worse until it matches the group’s destructive and hateful behavior.

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AIPACs Strategy Backfires In Its First Big Swing of the 2026 Election Season

The Democratic primary in New Jersey this week saw AIPAC suffer a decisive defeat as its strategy of trying to promote most extreme pro-Israel candidate backfired. This is a trend, not a one-off.

My Recent Articles and Media

News Roundup

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?