AIPAC’s $100m spend fails twice
AIPAC spent a record $30.6m trying to beat one Senate candidate in Michigan. He won anyway, and so did the next target in Minnesota.
Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan won their primaries after the Israel lobby spent more than $100m trying to stop them, the clearest evidence yet that Israel lobby US elections spending has limits it did not expect to be tested this year. Their wins, a week apart in Michigan and Minnesota, show the lobby’s grip on American politics is not absolute.
The group doing the spending is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its super PAC, United Democracy Project. Between them they have put over $104.3m into the 2026 midterm cycle already, topping $100m for the second cycle running, with $80m more sitting in the bank as of June. None of that money buys adverts about healthcare, housing or wages. It buys adverts about a candidate’s position on Israel, aimed at Democratic primary voters who came to the polls expecting to choose their own senator.
Israel lobby US elections spending set a record but failed to buy the vote In Michigan, United Democracy Project spent $30.6m trying to beat Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic Senate primary, the largest sum the group has ever committed to a single race. El-Sayed’s campaign put the full weight of outside spending against him, from AIPAC and allied dark-money groups combined, at more than $75m. His own campaign spent less than $5m. He won on 5 August by roughly one point, a margin the Associated Press did not call until a 12-hour count had finished.
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, said the wave of advertising had not worked because it was never really about policy. Voters, she said, “did not buy” a campaign built around attacking “an Arab American Muslim man named Abdul” rather than what he stood for. Haley Stevens, the sitting congresswoman AIPAC had backed instead, lost despite the record spend and later endorsed El-Sayed herself. He now faces Republican Mike Rogers in November; a win would make him the first Muslim US senator.
Six days later in Minnesota, the pattern repeated. Peggy Flanagan, the state’s lieutenant governor, beat AIPAC-aligned congresswoman Angie Craig 60% to 40% in the Democratic Senate primary. Flanagan has called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide and pledged to reject AIPAC money outright, branding Craig “AIPAC’s candidate” through the race. Craig, for her part, had tried to distance herself from the spending done in her name, telling a June TV debate she didn’t want AIPAC’s help, even as the group’s cash kept landing on her behalf.
How the lobby got here
None of this is new behaviour, only a newly aggressive version of it. AIPAC spent decades avoiding direct campaign spending, relying instead on relationships and endorsements. That changed in 2021 and 2022, when the group, under then-chief executive Howard Kohr, launched a PAC and United Democracy Project specifically to punish Democrats who criticised Israel and reward those who didn’t. “We wanted to defend our friends,” Kohr has said of the pivot, “and to send a message to detractors that there’s a group of individuals that will oppose them.” It worked immediately: roughly 98% of AIPAC-endorsed candidates won in the 2022 midterms.
The clearest demonstration came in 2024, when AIPAC-aligned super PACs spent record sums, then the most expensive House primaries in American history, to defeat sitting Democratic representatives Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri, both vocal critics of Israel’s war on Gaza. That result told every Democrat weighing what to say about Gaza exactly what the cost of saying it could be. The Michigan and Minnesota results this month are the first sign that the price has stopped guaranteeing the outcome.
Money that hides until after the vote
The lobby’s response to its own falling popularity has not been to spend less, but to spend more quietly. Since spring 2026, reporting has traced how United Democracy Project increasingly routes money through pop-up super PACs with names designed to say nothing: Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now. More than 40% of the group’s primary spending across both parties this cycle has moved through these pass-through vehicles, and in one Illinois race nearly $8m of a $30.66m outlay went through nine shell and partner PACs.
The mechanism is timing as much as naming. Elect Chicago Women registered with federal regulators on 27 January 2026 and delayed its spending until February, a schedule that meant donors would not have to be disclosed until three days after the relevant primary had already been decided. It received a transfer of more than $4m from United Democracy Project on 2 February. Voters in that race chose a candidate without ever knowing, at the time they voted, who had paid for the adverts trying to sway them.
A war chest built to outlast the losses
AIPAC would say none of this is exceptional: unions, corporations and Emily’s List all run PACs, and disclosure timing follows the same federal rules every other group is bound by. Patrick Dorton, United Democracy Project’s spokesperson, made the group’s real argument plain when asked about the strategy: “At the end of the day, we want to make sure that there is the largest possible pro-Israel bipartisan majority in Congress. That’s what we’ve done for three cycles now, and we’re going to continue to do it this cycle and next cycle and six cycles from now.”
That is not the language of a group rattled by two lost primaries. Analysts now expect AIPAC’s win rate to fall from the 98% of 2022 to somewhere between 60% and 70% this cycle, and the group can still call that a majority. With $80m of its war chest largely unspent and more primaries still to come before November, the fight over who gets to run for office as a critic of Israeli policy is not over. It has simply moved to races nobody has voted in yet, funded by donors nobody will be told about until the ballots are already counted.
