Progressives Blame Outside Money as Bowman’s Heated Anti-Israel Rhetoric Comes Back to Bite Him

Hours before vote tallies started trickling in Tuesday evening, Representative Jamaal Bowman’s allies on Capitol Hill had already begun laying blame for his long-anticipated loss on the avalanche of outside spending against him — especially the $15 million spent by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) super PAC.

“It’s hard to battle that type of money,” Representative Maxwell Frost (D., Fla.) told National Review hours before Westchester County executive George Latimer romped to victory in New York’s 16th congressional district. “For me, it’s less of a referendum on any specific issue, but more of a stark reminder of the issue that we see with these large amounts of money coming into our primaries and our elections, and why we need to end Citizens United.”

In 2020, Bowman’s primary victory over longtime representative Eliot Engel was championed by the activist Left as evidence that the progressive movement is a force to be reckoned with in Democratic primaries. Just two terms later, the former Bronx middle-school principal went down in flames Tuesday evening with a 17-point loss to  Latimer, a mainstream Democrat and fixture in the district. 

Bowman will spend his last few months on Capitol Hill wearing a new title — the first member of the far-left “Squad” to be ousted from office since the group’s formation six years ago. And his tenure will be remembered for the controversial antics that ultimately attracted so much outside spending against him: pleading guilty to a misdemeanor for pulling a fire alarm in the U.S. Capitol during a vote to fund the government, calling Hamas’s raping of women and beheading of babies “propaganda” weeks after the October 7 attack, publishing 9/11 truther poetry on a years-old personal blog, and getting into screaming matches with House Republicans inside the U.S. Capitol.

Bowman’s loss comes as welcome news to some Jewish leaders in the district who feel the congressman ignored outreach from the Jewish community after he was elected.

“Very early in his tenure in Congress he made it clear that he was an adversarial figure as far as we were concerned,” says Rabbi Evan Hoffman of Congregation Anshe Sholom in New Rochelle. “The war in Israel has exacerbated the situation, but even before that, he was known as essentially an enemy of our community who would snub us at every turn and say not-nice things.”

Days after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, Bowman reached out to Hoffman personally for the first time ever. He called Hoffman, unsolicited, on his cellphone to ask his opinion as the then-president of the Westchester Board of Rabbis about what the Jewish man on the street is thinking and feeling in the district.

The next day was a planned “Day of Rage” by pro-Palestinian protesters. 

“I told him, ‘Given your political position on the spectrum, you’d be in a good position to make a pronouncement that the Jewish community should not be harmed . . . and if you did that, it would go a long way to mending fences.’” Hoffman recalls Bowman responding, “That’s interesting,” before hanging up the phone. Hoffman never heard from Bowman again.

Bowman allies’ rush to blame the congressman’s loss on pro-Israel spending groups indicates that progressives, known for their confrontational style and far-left views on the war in Gaza, are on the defensive even in deep-blue districts. All eyes are now on Bowman’s fellow Squad member Cori Bush (D., Mo.), who has a tough primary battle of her own in August thanks in part to her far-left views on Israel.

Progressives seem to be on edge. Speaking with reporters outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, Congressional Progressive Caucus chairwoman Pramila Jayapal called outside spending in Bowman’s race “horrific.” 

“We’ve got to get out of this terrible trend of so much money coming in and people trying to buy elections,” she said.

Progressives argue that too much money in elections robs voters of the opportunity to make informed decisions about the candidates. “What we have to do from now until November and beyond is make sure that all voters have the right information that they’re able to make their decisions based on their values based on their principles, based on the very real records that we have,” says Summer Lee (D., Pa.), a progressive who survived a tough primary fight earlier this year despite an influx of cash from outside pro-Israel spending groups. “We all have to stand and fight on our record, but we deserve the right to do that in a balanced playing field.”

Some outside spending groups had the gall to blame Bowman’s loss on Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who endorsed Bowman’s reelection campaign and made some last-minute robocalls in his district in the lead-up to his primary. “The outcome of this election is a reflection on his leadership and whether Hakeem Jeffries stood up to Republican megadonors,” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for the Squad-aligned left-wing group Justice Democrats, told the New York Times.

But this blame game misses a key part of why Bowman lost. A former Bronx middle-school principal, Bowman spent most of his time on the campaign trail catering to that part of his district. “We’re all going to show f***ing AIPAC the power of the motherf***ing South Bronx,” Bowman said at a recent rally. Yet Bowman’s district includes only a sliver of the north Bronx, meaning most of his constituents live in Westchester — home to a large Jewish population who warmed to Latimer over his more mainstream Democratic views on Israel and a host of domestic issues, including Bowman’s opposition to mainstream Democratic infrastructure spending.

“He is considerably to the left of the district, and he just didn’t seem to be interested in moderating his views or trying to reach any kind of consensus with Democrats who were more mainstream,” says Howard Wolfson, a Democratic strategist and political adviser to former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. “Denying the rapes after October 7 — who does that?” Wolfson told NR. “It’s so unnecessarily provocative and nasty.”

Even on-the-ground campaign appearances from well-known progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders didn’t do the trick. “If he had been slightly more moderate, he might have survived,” added Wolfson. “But it seemed as if he was intent on poking his finger in the eye of the average voter in that district.”

Around NR:

• Rich Lowry offers presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump some advice on how to win Thursday’s debate against President Joe Biden:

A CBS/YouGov poll from a couple of weeks ago asked Biden supporters why they were with him, and 54 percent said they opposed Trump and only 27 percent because they liked Biden. The incumbent’s job approval is atrocious, and he’s trailing badly on most of the issues. He can only win if people who disapprove of his job performance — and think he’s too old for a second term — vote for him anyway for fear of something worse.

So it’s in Biden’s interest to make the race about Trump, and it’s Trump the showman’s natural instinct to also make the race about him. For one night, at least, he should play against type.

• Noah Rothman shares some of his insights on the pre-debate expectations game for both candidates:

In the intervening weeks, the Trump team seems to have convinced the former president that it was unwise to raise viewers’ expectations of him while lowering the bar for Biden. More recently, the former president has embarked on a more traditional debate-preparation strategy, in which he casts himself as the underdog staring down insurmountable forces colluding to contrive a rigged process.

• Jeffrey Blehar weighs in on “the fall of Jamaal” after his decisive loss last night:

So while I’ll miss Jamaal Bowman’s search for the truth about aliens and his interest in whether black people really built the pyramids, I’m glad to see him gone. Lamenting his loss merely because I’ll have less fodder to write about in the future feels shamefully flippant. There’s something facile about treating a man like Bowman as mere vicarious entertainment, an embarrassment for the Democratic Party to live and deal with, when in fact the poison he spouted — and his position of media and political influence as a Squad member — affects us all. Cleansing him from Congress is an act of political hygiene, and we don’t have the Democratic Party to thank for it, either.

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