Gaza is costing Democratic incumbents their seats

Two years ago, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old sociology graduate student at the City University of New York, was sitting in a tent on Columbia University’s quad as part of the pro-Palestine encampment on its campus. This month, Chevalier, the daughter of a truck driver and a case worker from the Dominican Republic, soundly defeated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat to become the presumptive next member of Congress for New York’s 13th congressional district, where Columbia sits. 

“I kept thinking of all of the folks who have really been let down by a lot of establishment Democrats. I was thinking of my friend Mahmoud [Khalil],” Chevalier said in an interview: the Palestinian campus organizer and recent Columbia masters graduate who became the face of a new, more punitive phase of Donald Trump’s policy of political detainment and deportation when DHS agents kidnapped him from his apartment building last year.

When Khalil was taken, Espaillat sent out a two-sentence statement urging due process: too little, too late, Chevalier said. Khalil was released the same week Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. A year later, with Mamdani’s backing, Chevalier won her own race alongside a slate of New York candidates who championed the Palestinian cause throughout their campaigns—often in ways that, until very recently, constituted a political third rail.

Those relative outsiders—many backed or recruited by groups like Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America, new kingmakers like Mamdani, and influencers like Hasan Piker—are notching upset victories against incumbents with decades of experience.

It echoes the wave that brought challengers like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar to office—and eventually made them icons of the Democrats’ left flank. But those races, close to a decade ago, didn’t feature Israel-Palestine politics in anything like the same way, a door opened in part by Zohran Mamdani’s unusual willingness to engage frankly on the issue, and language, of genocide.

Chevalier’s congressional cohort includes former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide and beat AIPAC-supported Rep. Dan Goldman by a 30-point margin, as well as New York State Assembly member Claire Valdez, who defeated Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso in a race for the House seat now held by retiring Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez, and who regularly joins protests calling for an arms embargo. Both candidates explicitly condemned US military aid to Israel, for decades a bipartisan pillar of US politics, in their campaigns.

“This electoral cycle has truly signified that we can no longer have a progressive-except-for-Palestine dynamic in electoral politics,” said Aber Kawas, a socialist candidate whose June win in a New York State Assembly primary will make her the first Palestinian-American in that body. Pro-Israel money is no longer a boon, Kawas said, but a liability. “The Israeli lobby, AIPAC, they’re still strong influencers in the Democratic Party, but this victory, and the victory of all of our races in this moment is chipping away at that in real substantial ways.”

In June, Army veteran and former combat surgeon Adam Hamawy, won his primary in New Jersey’s suburban, Democratic-leaning 12th congressional district—and he made opposition to AIPAC a cornerstone of his candidacy.

Hamawy, throughout his campaign, talked about his time as a volunteer physician in Gaza, and promised to fight for an arms embargo. “This is what prompted me to run,” Hamawy said to Al Jazeera of his time in Gaza. “I felt I had to go to Washington to fix this myself.”

In Philadelphia in May, self-described democratic socialist Chris Rabb beat two deep-pocketed and well-established candidates to win the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district. Two years earlier, when Temple University students faced trespassing charges for their participation in encampment protests, Rabb, then a state representative, was one of only a few local elected officials to back the students, calling their charges a “cruel and reckless abuse of power.”  

And in a primary taking place Tuesday in Denver, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist who calls herself a “recovering lawyer,” is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, who has held her seat since 1997.

Two years ago, as a new lawyer in New York, Kiros wrote an open letter defending law students who organized for Palestine. “I myself am from the northern region of Ethiopia, where a genocide had also taken place a few years ago,” Kiros, whose parents immigrated to Colorado when she was a baby, said.

Her employer asked her to take the letter down. Kiros refused, was fired, and moved back to Colorado within a week. She took a gig as a barista (“the best job I’ve had”) to make ends meet, and is now running on a familiar progressive platform: Medicare for All, universal childcare, AI regulation, ICE abolition and an arms embargo on Israel. The newcomer is polling well against DeGette, who is in her 15th term: the only available public poll, conducted by the progressive polling firm Data For Progress in June, has Kiros leading by 5 points. 

Dark money groups are all in against Kiros, including a trio of super PACs that have spent at least $1.3 million to oppose her in the final weeks of the race, the Colorado Sun reported. Much of that money has gone to attack ads that claim Kiros is from out of town (“I came here in ‘98!” Kiros said) and critical of Democrats (“So are most Democrats.”) 

AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying organization which has invested heavily in establishment candidates in many such races, has shifted to a diversity of electoral tactics: promoting spoiler candidates, creating new political action committees with names unrelated to Israel, funneling money through pre-existing but unrelated PACs, running ads that don’t talk about Israel at all.

But those efforts have targeted even mainline progressives who, for example, back the Block the Bombs Act, which would suspend arms shipments to Israel. Efforts to paint such candidates as far-left radicals are hard to maintain when only 13 percent of Democrats expressed positive views of Israel as of March—and by brooking no legitimate political opposition to Israel, AIPAC increasingly compels even mainline progressives to treat its wrath as a given.

AIPAC’s open support “is becoming a kiss of death to candidates they support in deep-blue districts, and I think that’s abundantly clear through the means in which they have had to operate throughout this cycle, which is through a network of shell PACs and pop-up PACs that obscures their funding,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros, Valdez and Chevalier.

Those who still take the group’s money are being more circumspect about it, even as those that refuse AIPAC cash trumpet their refusal with pride—much as candidates in the wake of Citizens United and the first Bernie Sanders campaign began advertising their rejection of dark money and emphasizing small donations.

“Money in politics is the issue,” Kiros said. “Every single thing that you care about, from social justice to economic justice to environmental justice, all of these things are intertwined with who has the money and the influence to wield power over our government.”

Voters rarely make their decisions based solely or even primarily on foreign policy, but candidates like Chevalier and Kiros have drawn connections between violence in Palestine and affordability at home.

“Our tax dollars are going towards a war machine that is just insatiable,” Chevalier said shortly after her primary win. “And when I hear from folks directly, they want their tax dollars to be coming back home. This is money that we are working hard for, right? We deserve to reap the benefits of it, to be able to use those resources to live dignified lives.”