Its Not Black Power When Another People Choose Your Leaders. IsrAlien PAC Imposes Rolebot Glenn Ivey on the Black Votary, Spending $6M to Beat Donna Edwards. Spent $2M to Beat Nina Turner in 2021
Last year progressive leader Nina Turner was defeated in the closely-watched Ohio primary for Congress by Black rolebot Shontel Brown. The Democratic Majority for Israel PAC spent a reported $1.9 million to back Brown. The 11th COngressional district in OHIO is 52.5% Black. This year an IsrAlien super PAC spent $6 Million to beat Donna Edwards. [MORE] The uncritical, sleeping Black votary didn’t even notice.
From [HERE] The latest showdown in the pro-Israel primary funding battle took place last week in Maryland’s 4th Congressional District, a suburb of Washington, D.C., where questions of Middle East policy or of the U.S. approach toward Israel are rarely contentious and have not been prominent in the campaign. And yet, as has been the case in several other races across the country this primary season, pro-Israel money played an outsized role—perhaps even a decisive one—in this race.
The 4th district is 51% Black and 17% Latino.
In addition to AIPAC’s $6 million, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a group with similar positions on Israel but which funds only Democratic candidates, put up more than $400,000 in support of Ivey. Edwards, on the other hand, was supported by J Street’s PAC, which spent $700,000 on ads attacking her rival.
With these vast amounts of money spent by Israel-related PACs, you’d expect the Maryland airways to be flooded with ads discussing Ivey’s and Edwards’ views on Israel. But there were none. The pro-Israel dollars were used to run ads questioning Edwards’ record on representing her constituents, or, in the case of J Street, attacking Ivey’s corporate ties.
Ivey won the race handily, and while there is no way of knowing exactly how much is due to spending by pro-Israel PACs, it is clear that the massive infusion of funding from AIPAC and DMFI helped make Ivey competitive against Edwards, who was endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and who had benefited from name recognition as a previous representative of the district.
Following the defeat of Maryland’s Donna Edwards, who is a Black woman, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami attempted a cautious, nuanced yet very clear take on the question of whether AIPAC’s involvement in the 2022 Democratic primaries has a racial tinge to it. “I do not mean to charge organizations or individuals campaigning against certain candidates with racism or misogyny,” Ben-Ami tweeted, but—and there’s always a but—“it’s just true that many of those under attack by AIPAC and others happen to be women of color,” he added. [MORE]