Bowman lost because he's a fucking idiot, not because of AIPAC
I too am an anti-AIPAC progressive. I beg us to please stop whining and learn from this shit
Yesterday, Rep. Jamaal Bowman got primaried by challenger George Latimer. This essay is not about my thoughts on either candidate, or which one is better. I think both are terrible, and I have for long written that Democrats need to create a better minor league to foster talent. This essay is also not about that. The below graphic I made reflects everything you need to know about my views on this primary’s candidate quality.
When I saw the news, I thought to myself, makes sense. He really didn’t play any of his cards right. And I thought others would share this rather reasonable view. Elections require strategy, and anyone who’s kept up with the race knows Bowman seemed to have none. Simply put, and being super nice to his team, they had none of the makings of a successful campaign. Every metric, even prior to AIPAC involvement in the race, had him as a probable loser.
But when I looked to virtually all the discussion surrounding the race, no one seemed to acknowledge this fact. On my social media feeds, which are generally filled with fellow social sciences students at Harvard and beyond, I hadn’t seen a single take criticizing Bowman’s organizing. I did see, however, dozens of reposts lamenting how AIPAC had crushed the progressive movement. Woe is us! Dark money wins again! Israel’s influence is huge! How dare the system fail us!
And then I saw the progressive apparatus’s backlash. The Guardian noted today that:
“In a letter to the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, more than a dozen progressive organizations said they had “dire concerns” over the party’s continued association with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), “the future of the Democratic Party, the future of our multiracial democracy, and the future of our planet”.
The signatories included the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, New York Communities for Change and New York City Democratic Socialists of America.
In the letter, they said that in the run-up to the vote, an Aipac-affiliated political fund, United Democracy Project, had flooded the Westchester county–northern Bronx district with nearly $20m in mailers and ads ‘funded largely by Republican billionaires, to drown out Jamaal Bowman’s message of humanity, dignity, and a thriving future for all’.”
What a childish way to view politics. And that’s an insult to children. It’s borderline infantile.
I want to start by noting that I too am opposed to AIPAC’s overreach. If there was a magical button to get rid of them, I would press it. I agree that Israel should not have the influence that they have in America, just like any other foreign nation. I think dark money is bad. As a moderate Labourist, I have many leftist sympathies.
But what I do know is that we’re not having a violent overthrow of the state any time soon, nor should we (for obvious reasons). And if that is the case—if we are not arguing for full-blown warfare—then you have to play by the rules of the game. You have to stand for elections. You can’t just dunk on your opponents on Twitter and call them racist, you also have to convince voters to pick you.
Progressives seem to understand none of this. There is this terrible assumption that moral convictions are an appropriate substitute for practical groundwork. That somehow, believing in the right things will make them happen. Guys, coach said that if we work really hard and believe in each other, we’ll surely win! Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!
So I want to point out the two very simple reasons that Bowman lost, and why he would have lost even without the AIPAC cash in the race—if you for some reason didn’t understand that before. And what we should learn from that.
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In that vein, your positions matter. A lot. And Bowman took every series of terrible positions over the past year, without any consideration for electoral strategy. He first decided to pull a fire alarm to stop a vote on a funding bill he didn’t like. Even fellow Democrats recognized that this was a stupid fucking thing to do, and censured him. Then, in the aftermath of October 7th, he decided to deny the pretty credible evidence of Hamas’s mass rape.
To be clear, I have no skin in the game. I am still pretty sympathetic towards the Palestinian cause. Even if it comes at the cost of long-term regional stability, I am a proponent of a ceasefire. I have written against pro-Israel bullies like Bill Ackman. I even agree with the quips on there being genocidal freaks in Israel’s government. Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Golan, et al. are terrorists themselves.
But I still recognize the horror of Hamas’s gang rapes, in the same way I recognize the horror when Israel does the same. For starters, there’s mounds of evidence for it. But if you for some reason don’t buy that? You need to read up on history. If you have ever studied any war ever, you would know this happens almost without exception—from Ögedei Khan’s war rapes of the Oirat to the U.S. Army’s Mahmudiyah rapes during Iraq. This trend transcends borders, time periods, and conflicts. Sexual violence is commonplace even in neutral settings like college campuses. When you have tens of thousands of men pre-programmed to kill, and you give them freedom from consequences, like too many militaries do, violence of all forms is even more amplified.
All that to say: wartime sexual violence is one of the most horrific byproducts of foreign conflict, and anyone with half a brain knows that. But Jamaal Bowman, on the other hand, doesn’t. He boldly claimed, with no evidence whatsoever, and despite the extremely clear trend of history, that it didn’t happen. He said on TikTok: “There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women. But they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda.” He doubled down when questioned and later said, “I’m not talking about that now.”
What do you think the average person, who is against sexual violence on both sides, thought about that? Probably that he was a piece of shit. Even I did, and again, I’m by no means a supporter of Israel. And it works both ways. If my Congressman tried to deny the IDF’s sexual violence, I would probably think they were a piece of shit as well. So you shouldn’t do it in either way, but no. Bowman wanted his 10 minutes of TikTok fame.
Worse yet, Census data shows his district has approximately 190,000 households. The most recent data we have for that area shows that approximately 40,000 of those are Jewish households—after all, New Rochelle is a Jewish stronghold. By the way, the supermajority of Jews vote Democrat, and probably voted for him in the last election.
Do you want to know the easiest way to lose an election? To take a fourth of the people that voted for you last time, in an election that you barely won in the first place, and tell them fuck you. What a brilliant strategy, Mr. Bowman!
By the way, those are votes he lost unnecessarily. There are a lot of progressive American Jews that are totally fine with healthy criticisms of Israel, and data shows that most don’t consider the nation essential to their identity. But when you come out, fail to denounce October 7th, and deny the sexual violence in it, that’s good enough to lose basically anyone.
Good quote on Bowman from the New Yorker:
“Liberal Jews who disagree with AIPAC are going to suspect that somebody who treats AIPAC as the greatest force for evil in the world is harboring deeper levels of hostility toward their community.”
I want to end this criticism with the empiric nail in the coffin. Challengers don’t seriously jump into Congressional races without a good reason to. Campaigning for the House is tough, hard on your family, expensive, physically draining, and more. It’s also a period of time where your current work has to be sidelined, costing you job stability and income. The most important thing to note here is that Latimer did not run against Bowman because why not, it was because the polls were clear that Bowman had been too ridiculous for too long. It was clear far prior to AIPAC intervention that if he jumped in, he would win.
Latimer, by the way, is not a raging conservative. He is a reasonable liberal, with conventionally liberal positions, in a liberal district. He implemented eviction protections, banned gun shows, welcomed immigrants, is pro-union, and supported public transit. He is a competitive politician by every means, even if he is too moderate for people like me or you. So even the Huffington Post—a very progressive publication by every definition—showed that Latimer was ahead of Bowman by 18%. This was before AIPAC spending kicked in.
It is frustrating, sure, that AIPAC seems to have spent so much in this race. They did, and it was overkill outspending Bowman 9-to-1. But the reality is, Bowman was losing massively before that cash came in. All the numbers prove so, and we need to learn from this. We need to learn that if we want true progressives, that we hold them to a high standard so they don’t lose. That you cannot hold dipshit-stupid positions and expect to win. The reality of his district and the gravity of his words were too far apart.
And let’s be honest with ourselves. Bowman has been a political idiot for the past year. Who was he trying to appeal to? Briahna Joy Gray? There is almost no district in this country that you could say/do the things he did, and win. Certainly not in his. And I can see certain limited cases where a stance is so important that taking an electoral L is justified. For example, standing against the War in Iraq probably would have been a legacy performance, even if it cost you your seat in Congress. But denying credible evidence of mass rapes? This is the hill you die on? Bowman has no one to blame but his big mouth.
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The second and more important reality is beyond his poor self-control, and rather on his terrible campaign organization. Heads up: this is more dense, granular analysis. But if you’re a progressive who cares at all about the future of the progressive movement, you should stick around. As a sidebar, I see so many ‘progressives’ with tremendous outrage and passion and self-proclaimed care for the movement, that are too lazy to have ever looked into the data-driven truths that back American elections. It really goes to show how superficial many of your beliefs are. If you really cared, you’d do more than repost infographics with a half-sentence caption on your story. I am making this really easy for you, by giving you a very basic breakdown of things you need to understand to be successful in politics. Here goes.
Sidebar: if you’re really interested in politics and political economy, and are knowledgeable enough to understand political modeling, here is another essay with more mechanistic explanations for everything.
I think it begins with recognizing two very basic logical principles. It’ll show you why the further left you go, the more natural disadvantages you start with.
By definition, more radical positions imply a greater ideological distance from the median.
This is an extremely simple idea. If you’re radical, you have to convince people more because you have to cover a greater distance between their status quo beliefs and yours.
They also imply greater self-restrictiveness. This is not a normative claim. Rather, it’s pointing out that when progressive candidates swear not to take money from certain groups, donors, or organizations, it reflects a trade-off between finances and principles.
It’s not to say that either is necessarily wrong or right, but I will implicate this in just a second.
Compounding this effect: the American political environment is volatile by definition.
We have constant ideological movement, and every decade is defined by a completely new worldview. It was the Moral Majority in the 80s, the New Covenant liberals in the 90s, the Warhawks and Neocons in the 2000s, the Globalist neoliberals in the 2010s, and the right-wing populists of the 2020s.
It’s akin to a metaphorical earthquake. If you want a good explanation for why this is, I won’t get into it, but it has to do with how ideas pass through human networks. Glaeser et al. has a good paper on this.
But anyway imagine you have a table, with tons of glass cups on it. Assume the house that the table is in gets hit with this earthquake. The cups on the edges of the table are the first to fall off and shatter.
That’s a metaphor for why progressive politics already starts at a disadvantage. The more radical an idea is, the further away it is from the center. So when the political environment, or the Overton window shakes even just a little, the ideologies on the fringes are the first to fall off. With a slightly moderate shift leftwards in any given election cycle, the far-right falls off (e.g. Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservatives). With a slightly moderate shift rightwards, the far-left falls off (e.g. Bowman).
Pair this with two statistical truths that one discovers when they take the time to pull campaign data and clean it up:
Elections require money, because money equals outreach.
I took the raw data across campaigns over the past five cycles prior to 2024, and I found a fascinating trend. While the average winning campaign spends approx. $2.5 million to win a Congressional seat, this is weighed down by stable, uncompetitive districts and races (i.e. the cheapest win was $150K). Adjusting for both high-cost states (i.e. CA, NY, etc.) and competitive races (definitionally the top 10% most expensive), the average campaign spend has to be approx. $5.1 million. I will publish the full results of this in a later essay (hopefully pretty soon), but for now, it is part of an internal research project in my job.
Long-term political survival, even for moderates, is an unlikely outcome (with the exception of ‘for-lifers’).
The probability of long-term survival is generally represented by the equation: P(lost at least one election out of T) ≈ 1−P^T.
My data shows that survival past a decade is less than 20%, with the average member serving a little over four terms. But the distribution is definitionally skewed—when you pass a standard deviation above the mean, your long-term survival suddenly improves drastically.
So when you control for outliers—i.e. super-safe districts—survival past even three terms is less than 30%, for people who haven’t already been in Congress for decades.
What you should glean from this is simple. Soft-left ideology starts at many disadvantages in an already-difficult game. You have to make up more ideological ground, you are more vulnerable to stochastic shifts in sentiment, and you definitionally restrict yourself from certain resources. Pair that with needing lots of money to reach people and win, and the high likelihood of losing regardless.
The intuitive ways to counter this are twofold.
Develop robust resource apparatuses that counter the resource disadvantage.
If you definitionally need more money to cover more ground, and you refuse the largest source of money (corporations/PACs), you have to make alternative arrangements.
This means making fundraising literally the only focus. Screw gunning for committee assignments or trying to influence DC for the first few terms. You need to ensure long-term survival, which means all you should be doing is looking for creative ways to make money.
Ground your image in the palatable.
Screw the focus on polarizing issues, like identity. Don’t change your beliefs, but be willing to brand yourself in a way that is far more universalizing. A European-style Labour focus is a great way to do this, for example. Starmer and Corbyn obviously don’t hate Black gay people, but they don’t make them the focus of everything they ever say and do.
If you really believe in something, you should be willing to do it on the down-low and get no credit for it. If you really want to help the Black gay person, put the cart behind the horse.
But alas! Have progressives ever thought about any of this and implemented it? Of course not. There is serious brainrot in the sense that progressives do literally none of this, and make all the wrong decisions. Bowman is an incredible case study in this.
For starters, Bowman got bitched on fundraising. You need, again, approx. $5.1 million to win a competitive race in a HCOL state. Bowman only raised $4.25 million, and his war chest from the previous election was only $1.86 million (far less than even the flat median campaign of $3 million). Even if AIPAC had not ever stepped in, Bowman did not have the money to beat any competitive challenger.
I know why, because I’ve worked on probably a dozen progressive campaigns at this point. Progressives have this nasty tendency to shy away from money in general. They think, hey, the other side has more money than us, so we might as well opt out of the game of money and go directly to the grassroots. This is stupid as fuck, in light of literally all of the evidence that proves you need money to win. Even if you’re going to stand on principle and refuse ‘bad money’ (good on you if you do), you need to make that deficit up somehow. Or else, you will lose. 1 + 1 = 2.
Bowman, on the other hand, had three cycles to come up with a hefty chest to fight off challenges. He did not. He was not enough of a savvy operator to come up with those funds, hence, he lost. The most successful progressives have done this, but they are far and few between. AOC, for example, has consistently hefty war chests—in the past three cycles, she raised $21 million, $12 million, and $8 million. That’s why she can win. Money is the ability to curate an image. And she did it (mostly) cleanly, too. That’s why she’s going to stay in Congress, and Bowman is not. Denying the fact that Bowman did not run an effective resource apparatus and blaming it on the boogeyman is delusional.
Also, AIPAC, at the end of the day, is just another resource apparatus. It’s not some amorphous machine, it’s a group of people who know how to use money. Clearly, Bowman doesn’t, and all the progressive groups complaining about his loss need to wake the fuck up. The DSA is broke. Justice Democrats are broke. Stop whining, and start fundraising. Otherwise, you will continue to lose, because their numbers are greater than yours. But I digress on the financial point.
Because there are some cases where money isn’t everything. For example, Angela Alsobrooks, a candidate for the Maryland Senate seat, got outspent by $53 million by her opponent. She still won the Democratic primary, 54%-42%. Why? Candidate quality matters.
Alsobrooks had the sense to can her terrible campaign team and make fundamental changes when she was trailing in the polls. She booted her campaign manager—a risky but necessary decision—to radically course-correct. When Bowman saw he was down 18%, what did he do? He went on Twitter and cried about it.
Another example: Andrea Salinas, the candidate for Oregon’s 6th, got outspent 13:1. She still pulled through at a rate of 2:1 votes. How? She grounded her image to align with what her constituents needed. Have you ever heard a national controversy surrounding Salinas?
Bowman, of course, is a fucking idiot. I hate to call people names in the political realm, but I need to drive this point home. Screw the rape denial and the fire alarm for a second. The guy famously mistook the South Bronx as part of his district. He yells weird obscenities every time he takes the stage. He craves national attention without being the type of candidate who has the resources to withstand national scrutiny. He has no strategy, he didn’t course-correct when he was down in the polls (even before the AIPAC infusions), and has no cogent theory of how politics works. Critics are right: he wanted to be a martyr, so he committed political suicide.
I’m going to stop here, because it should be obvious. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Progressives aren’t exempt from the realities of fundraising and candidate quality, and anybody focusing on AIPAC right now is in denial.
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I don’t have the energy to give you a nice rhetorical outro. Here’s what you should’ve taken away:
Bowman was destroyed in the polls far before AIPAC jumped in the race.
The guy didn’t manage to raise enough money to win a competitive race, even if AIPAC didn’t exist.
Even if that weren’t the case, plenty of candidates this cycle overcame far greater financial deficits.
He is clueless when it comes to his public image, denying credible evidence of mass rape, pulling a fire alarm to stop a funding bill he didn’t like, and being very Hamas-friendly in a predominantly Jewish district.
He has no understanding of politics, as is clear by never changing anything (other than gunning for more controversy) when down in the polls.
Anyone looking to AIPAC to blame needs to do some serious soul-searching. We as progressives ought to figure out our fundraising and candidate quality, otherwise, this will happen repeatedly. Winning starts with being honest about the reasons we’re losing.
— SJY, 06.26.24
And “progressives” will continue to live by the vibes fail by the vibes….bc it’s too irksome to engage polities are shitshows and your little crew isn’t innocent and confined but one of many potential deeply imperfect interests shilling for power