In September 2025, Hinson — who is battling Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek in a tight race that could decide control of the Senate — tapped Abe Adams to lead her campaign’s digital efforts. 

Adams is a co-founder and managing partner of Targeted Victory, a digital consulting firm that has been used by high-profile Republican candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Targeted Victory shares an address and much of its staff with Targeted Communications Global — a related company with no discernible online presence. Both are subsidiaries of marketing company Stagwell Global.

Israel awarded Targeted Communications a $9.9 million contract in March 2025 focused on social media and paid advertising, documents show. By October 2025, the firm was at work pitching news content and guests on Fox News and CNN, and creating YouTube ads suggesting young Iranians have been educated to believe the “most sacred thing they do is stab a Christian in the heart.”

Hinson is endorsed by both President Donald Trump and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and has been supportive of Trump’s war in Iran. 

A June 2026 Department of Justice FARA filing from Targeted Communications details much of the firm’s work for Israel. The document lists 10 registered foreign agents working on the Targeted Communications contract for Israel. Six of them are identified as Targeted Victory employees on the company’s website or their LinkedIn accounts. Adams is not named in the filing.

Hinson, Adams, and Targeted Victory did not immediately respond to  requests for comment.

Adams is not the only Hinson campaign adviser with ties to Targeted Victory and the Israel lobby. Hinson’s current deputy campaign manager, Addison Lavis, worked at Targeted Victory before serving as Hinson’s campaign manager in her 2023 congressional run. Lavis was previously an intern at AIPAC. Lavis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Hinson has received more than $100,000 from AIPAC and related pro-Israel PACs in 2026, and as an Iowa state representative supported legislation that prohibited the state from working with any companies that boycott Israel. 

Hinson’s political action committee has paid Targeted Victory more than $1.6 million this election cycle for digital consulting and ads — 27 percent of its total expenditures, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Israel’s deal with Targeted Communications is part of a major public relations push that has pumped more than $100 million into swaying public opinion, particularly among young conservatives, back toward Israel.

The post Ashley Hinson’s Digital Chief Oversees Firm Paid Millions to Push Israeli Propaganda appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump has spent the erratic waning years of his presidency leading his party into a political wilderness by waging a deeply unpopular war on Iran and driving the cost of living ever higher. Republicans who enjoy a governing trifecta have tried to distance themselves from the party’s decision-making and its leader, a once-animating force who has turned himself into a liability. Poll after poll says the same: Democrats are poised to take control of one or both houses of Congress — and spend the next two years thwarting Trump’s agenda.

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But after a primary season dominated by an ascendant left wing and a broader rejection of centrist politics, the question isn’t just whether Democrats win on Tuesday. It’s what kind of Democratic Party emerges on Wednesday morning. 

“I really like the socialism aspects,” said Gibrel Said, a supporter of Abdul El-Sayed at his closing rally in Detroit Monday night. In the marquee contest serving as a referendum on the Democratic Party’s future, the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee espouses progressive politics and has often been associated with the the left’s agenda-setting socialists, though he doesn’t identify as one. His race has been rocked by the kind of left-versus-right identity crisis that presents a perennial challenge for Democrats. 

“One, Medicare for All; two, how do we fund things that help us as constituents,” Said told The Intercept, ticking off things he appreciates about the candidate. Said, who lives in the Arab enclave of Dearborn, Michigan, especially praised El-Sayed’s willingness to buck party leadership and speak out on U.S.–Israel policy. “Instead of tiptoeing around the subject, he very adamantly says, hey there’s a genocide happening here, we shouldn’t send our money.”

Cycle after cycle, in state after state, an insurgent band of Democrats critical of the political establishment’s ties to corporate interests and its unflinching commitment to Israel has had to overcome the barriers erected by its own party’s centrist leadership. Both sides present themselves as the true representatives of working people: the centrists by arguing that more transformative ideas will scare off lower-information voters, the left by saying they represent the masses.

How much of this trickles down to actual voters? On Monday, The Intercept followed canvassers and spoke to voters in Michigan, Maine, and Texas, asking about which issues had permeated and taking the temperature of voter enthusiasm. Some rolled their eyes at the spats that have dominated the headlines, dismissing the idea that eleventh-hour backstabbing would make a difference. Others regurgitated right-wing misinformation. Many complained of too many campaign mailers.

“They’re wicked mean,” said Sharon McDonnell, a supporter of Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine. Speaking to The Intercept in the town of Yarmouth, she described one mailer that included a photo of Jackson chomping a cigar and describing him as “evil.” “It’s just nasty.”

In Maine, the party’s left flank seized power in the nominating process for the Democratic Senate candidate — then fought to hang onto it after onetime rising star Graham Platner flamed out after a sexual assault allegation (which he denies). With Jackson, a former state Senate leader, Maine now offers progressives one of two opportunities to test their message at the Senate level, where a candidate has to secure appeal statewide, not just in deep-blue House districts.

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Radical Centrists Like Haley Stevens Are the Real Extremists in the Democratic Party

The other is Michigan, where the intraparty battle is still raging. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., demolished her past attempts at fence-mending when she endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers on Sunday and abandoned El-Sayed, who beat Stevens in a Michigan primary that saw $30 million in outside spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

The dustup has had Democrats biting their nails and moderate party leaders making the cable news circuit to demand party discipline — this time, to scold a centrist. The party leads in the polls for 218 of the 435 seats up for grabs in the House of Representatives, but they need to perform well in seven key states — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, in addition to Maine and Michigan — if they want to win the Senate. 

“I think she’s counterintuitively, perhaps, given people a reason to rally some more,” said Kathleen Britton, an El-Sayed supporter at the Detroit rally on Monday, of Stevens. “I really don’t think it’s gonna help Mike Rogers.”

Earlier that day, in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Detroit, a prominent Black supporter of El-Sayed preparing to knock on voters’ doors described Stevens’s endorsement as an “ego-driven statement.”

Mike Bland, the executive director of the Black Men Vote PAC, highlighted that Stevens made her public endorsement of Rogers in a Black church in Detroit. He doubted that Stevens, whose criticism of El-Sayed centers primarily on his skepticism of the U.S. relationship with the state of Israel, would be able to pull Black voters to Rogers, a conservative former House representative whose campaign has repeatedly peddled anti-Muslim tropes against El-Sayed.

“How can I say this without cursing? She used a Black church as a prop, and we have seen that time and time again,” Bland said. “Black folks aren’t stupid.”

Over the past month, El-Sayed has rallied with Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, the two most prominent Black politicians in America — and hardly radicals estranged from the establishment power center. At the same time that Stevens was making her endorsement of Rogers public, El-Sayed was attending a get-out-the-vote event at another church in Detroit. The two primary foes were supposed to appear together that day with Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.

One of the Democrats’ most coveted Senate pickups didn’t present much of an opportunity for the left in the primary, but it has still been characterized by intraparty animosity.

In Texas, where both Democratic Senate primary contenders espoused relatively moderate politics, outgoing Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, has declined to campaign with state Rep. James Talarico, though she endorsed him after he beat her in the state’s March Democratic primary.

Talarico has been performing well with Latino voters, a massive voting bloc that helped fuel his primary victory. But Crockett — who, unlike Stevens, is Black — has suggested that Talarico has not done enough to excite Black voters, a demographic she carried in the primary. On a canvassing operation targeting Black voters in the Dallas–Fort Worth area on Monday, few Black Texans who spoke to The Intercept expressed excitement for Talarico. But most had already voted for him, saying they were motivated to do their civic duty. 

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Black voters frequently discussed concerns over affordability, gas prices, and homelessness. Canvassers told The Intercept they had heard some of those voters express concerns over their perception of Talarico’s policies toward transgender children, at times espousing blatant misinformation, such as the idea that Talarico supported arresting parents who refused to give their children gender-affirming surgeries. 

“ I don’t stand for that,” said voter Jermiah Robinson, referring to her belief that Talarico pushed “sex-change” surgery for minors. Like many voters, she cited the cost of living as her most pressing issue. Robinson said she would “want to vote for him if he stands by his words, and he’s actually like ‘Yeah, I’ll help out as far as prices and everything.’” 

Talarico appears to have improved his margins with Black voters in the final stretch. According to the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, Talarico is leading with 79 percent of the Black vote, signaling a significant increase in support from Black voters from just last month. The conventional wisdom suggests that he could barely ask for a better opponent than the scandal-plagued Republican candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

In 2015, Paxton was indicted on felony securities fraud charges in Texas, in a case that dragged on for roughly nine years, and ended with Paxton being required to do community service and pay restitution. And in 2023, the Texas House of Representatives voted across party lines to impeach him as attorney general for alleged corruption and retaliation against whistleblowers.

Scandal kept rocking the race for Senate in Maine, where longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins faces her toughest reelection challenge yet from Jackson. Before Jackson, who lost a race this cycle for the state’s Democratic nomination for governor, there was Platner, hailed early as a working-class champion who faced a series of personal scandals in his successful primary campaign. There was the revelation of a Nazi tattoo that he claimed not to understand until last October. There were crudely worded Reddit posts and stories of cruelty from women he’d dated. One former girlfriend’s allegations of sexual assault ultimately ended his campaign — and set off a scramble to find a replacement that progressives ultimately won by elevating Jackson. 

By Monday, Mainers who spoke to The Intercept appeared exhausted by the lengthy, contentious, and expensive Senate race that has dominated the state.

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“There’s a lot of fatigue. People are tired of it,“ said Charlie Dingman, who chairs the state Democratic Party. “I have had some conversations at doors with people that have led me to think that the extremely negative and extremely untruthful ads may be backfiring.”

Tyler Echard, in Norway, said he’d already cast an absentee ballot for Democrats down the ticket. He was disgusted with a deluge of political mailers and eager to stop seeing them pile up on his doorstep.

“The amount of mailers we get — just mailers, not just handed at the door but in the mail — especially from the Republican side, the amount of money is probably more than I will make in my lifetime, spent in this election,” Echard said. “At some point, we gotta get legislation because money’s just gonna run everything into the ground. I ain’t got it, so I can’t influence it.”

Frustration with the status quo in Congress could spell the end for Collins’s 30-year career in the Senate. On Monday, a University of New Hampshire poll found Jackson leading Collins by 4 percentage points. And in September, Collins found herself thrust into a scandal of her own, when ProPublica revealed that the FBI anti-corruption squad was investigating an alleged pay-to-play scheme between Collins and a donor eager to secure government contracts.

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The Intercept later exposed that, alongside a series of campaign donations, defense contractors cozy with Collins had received lucrative carveouts in defense spending. (Collins has denied wrongdoing in all cases.)

But the incumbent senator has faced controversy and come out victorious before. And some Mainers doubt they’ll see change either way.

“I can’t vote for either side,” said a man, who declined to share his name with The Intercept, walking down a rural road in Norway with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. “You can’t trust neither of them.”

Noah Hurowitz reported from Yarmouth and Norway, Maine; Akela Lacy reported from Fort Worth, Texas; Matt Sledge reported from Detroit, Michigan.

The post If Democrats Win, Thank the Left appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump called him a “jihadist.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on a racist rant against Arabs. According to Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a mailer went out showing El-Sayed’s face next to the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.

“They are running the most bigoted, hateful, Islamophobic campaign I’ve ever seen,” McMorrow told a local TV outlet. McMorrow, who ran for the Democratic Senate nomination but dropped out before the August primary, is taking a far different tack than Rep. Haley Stevens, the Democratic primary runner-up who has spent the race’s final days painting El-Sayed as an angry antisemite and crossed party lines Sunday to endorse Republican contender Mike Rogers.

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Rogers has sought to portray El-Sayed as anti-American and repeatedly tried to tie his opponent to the Muslim Brotherhood. He insists the attacks have nothing to do with faith. But that is exactly how many observers see them, including Muslim Republicans who have been disgusted by the rhetoric.

As the election draws to a close, the Islamophobic attacks have taken a backseat to Stevens’s claims of antisemitism — most prominently concerning a PAC ad that connected high grocery prices to U.S. spending on Israeli military aid — and a personal feud between the former primary opponents. And some of El-Sayed’s allies worry that the Muslim and Arab-baiting attacks will work. One recent poll found that 38 percent of Michigan voters said they would be less likely to vote for a Muslim candidate.

Michigan’s Muslim and Arab organizers have not been taking the attacks lying down, however. In interviews last month, two prominent leaders in Dearborn’s Arab American community described widespread excitement over the opportunity to vote for the man who would be the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate.

“It very much feels like when President Obama was running and his whole campaign was around like hope. That’s what it feels like,” Layla Elabed, the organizing director at Arab Americans for Progress, told the Intercept on October 8.

Elabed, the sister of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., was one of the key movers in the Uncommitted movement, which urged Michigan voters to withhold their votes from Joe Biden during the 2024 primary in protest of his support for Israel’s war on Gaza. The movement succeeded in making a statement, but also drew criticism from centrist Democrats for allegedly fracturing party unity.

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Elabed’s current group is an evolution of the Uncommitted movement. Its canvassers have been knocking on doors to turn out support for El-Sayed and other candidates.

“I don’t think many people in Dearborn are surprised by Haley Stevens,” Elabed told The Intercept on Monday. “Arab American Democrats in Michigan have been sounding the alarm about her for years, warning our fellow Democrats about a pattern of putting political interests ahead of the people she was elected to represent.”

She believes the same coalition that came together for Uncommitted could help push El-Sayed over the top this election.

“Abdul has been able to really take a stand on all the issues that were really important to anti-war voters and anti-genocide voters,” she said. “It’s not a coincidence that that same coalition, that same base of Democratic voters are now all coming out to support us.”

Hers is not the only group seeking to mobilize Muslim and Arab voters, who make up a sizable slice of the Michigan electorate. The Arab American Political Action Committee has also endorsed El-Sayed. Its president, Osama Siblani, said there is widespread enthusiasm for El-Sayed in areas with dense Arab populations such as Dearborn.

Siblani compared El-Sayed’s potential victory to John F. Kennedy’s pathbreaking election as the first Catholic president.

“First of all, he’s qualified. Second of all, he’s saying the right things, he has a good agenda,” Siblani. “His opponent is an asshole. In addition to all of this, he is breaking the ceiling for our community and for other communities. That is a plus.”

The goal of the Arab and Muslim-baiting attacks from El-Sayed’s enemies is clear, according to Nazita Lajevardi, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

“Islamophobia is a tried and true strategy for garnering a candidate support and swaying the vote,” she said.

Yet it is also possible that the attacks on El-Sayed’s identity will lead to greater turnout in places like Dearborn, she said.

“I think scholarship would tell us that when political elites discriminate, that it does mobilize people into action. Past scholarship would say yes, it would, but it’s an open question,” she said.

Elabed agreed that the attacks are nothing new. “We’ve watched it play out time and time again,” she told The Intercept. Stevens’s about-face isn’t a major development, she said, “It’s that the rest of the Democratic Party is finally seeing what our communities have been saying all along. We weren’t wrong. We just weren’t being listened to.”

Siblani expressed a similar sentiment on Monday. “I’m not surprised, I’m disgusted,” he wrote of Stevens in a text message, attaching an emoji of a person vomiting.

Stevens’s choice to jump ship for the Rogers campaign appears to have galvanized El-Sayed’s base. His campaign announced a one-day fundraising record after his fellow Democrat pulled her endorsement on Sunday.

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s Race Has Been Defined by Islamophobia. Will It Be Determined by It? appeared first on The Intercept.

Michigan Democratic Senate primary loser Rep. Haley Stevens on Sunday released a video that will place her in an ignominious legacy of establishment Democrats who act against the collective good.

And, like others on the list, she did it for the sake of one thing only: Israel.

In the video — filmed on her phone, in her car, and at an awkward angle — Stevens announced her endorsement of Republican candidate Mike Rogers against the Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Stevens had previously called Rogers a “rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda.”

“I don’t belong in Abdul’s campaign,” said Stevens about El-Sayed, the candidate who currently enjoys 95 percent of Democratic voters’ support in Michigan, according to polls.

Stevens’s defection follows a pathetic, Islamophobic, and chaotic effort over the last weeks to suggest that El-Sayed must make greater overtures to Israel supporters.

Stevens now follows in the footsteps of other conservative Democrats who have shown an extreme disregard for the welfare of people in this country and beyond.

We might recall former Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona, who left the Democratic Party while still in office and notoriously delivered a dramatic thumbs down and curtsy when voting against a raised minimum-wage provision during the height of the Covid pandemic. Sinema and fellow then-Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia also joined with Republicans to effectively tank major voting rights legislation in 2022.

And, of course, there is the entire Senate career of conservative pro-Israel fanatic, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who still remains a nominal Democrat. Fetterman offers a consistent master class in dangerous extremism and should be seen as a profound political liability by his own party.

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It is, after all, so-called moderates like Stevens who are the radicals. As writer Eoin Higgins noted, an array of Democrats have revealed themselves more willing to see Republicans win than allow the party’s left-wing flank — or, more to the point, criticism of Israel’s genocide — to gain further ground.

And while there is little political agreement between the right and left wings of the Democratic Party on a whole array of issues, defeating Republicans, particularly Donald Trump’s Republican Party, was at least the stated goal of even the most conservative of Democrats.

To so openly fail on even those basic electoral terms should be the very definition of a political liability for a party.

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Meanwhile, left-wing candidates running on popular policies with support networks built from the ground up have again and again been treated as the primary internal enemy by the party establishment.

Shifting Winds

Stevens had perhaps thought she could rely on this pattern. Numerous powerful Democrats and Israel apologists like Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., were slow to get behind El-Sayed and have continued to pick fights over his policies on Israel.

Stevens’s Rogers endorsement was not, however, met with the tolerance that Democratic rightward lurches have typically enjoyed. In a bellwether moment, another strong supporter of Israel, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called her endorsement of the Republican candidate “a despicable betrayal.”

The condemnation is the correct response of a party leader to a member taking active steps to thwart a crucial Senate race. It may not mark a shift for Schumer away from his own reliable conservatism and support for Israel’s genocide, but it nonetheless reflects a shifting political landscape when a figure like Schumer sees greater political expediency in standing with a progressive, Israel-critical, Muslim candidate, than with the radical centrist wrecker with whom Schumer is more ideologically aligned.

Stevens’s theatrics are unlikely to make a significant difference to Tuesday’s election results. Voters who elevate support for the Israeli state over human lives in Palestine and in the U.S. were already not going to vote for El-Sayed.

It’s unclear, then, who would be swayed by Stevens’s erratic actions two days before the election. In a close race like this, however, pulling any support away from the Democratic candidate reveals the extremism of the purported center.

We can welcome what looks to be a long overdue shift in political common sense and hope that positions like Stevens’s are seen as a liability before they reach their most extreme iterations.

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Yet it shouldn’t take so-called centrists quite literally choosing Trumpian Republicans over progressive and left-wing Democrats to make clear who the real threat to the Democratic Party is — if winning elections and delivering policies to improve the lives of constituents is, in fact, their goal.

It certainly is for El-Sayed. He has dismissed Stevens’s performance as a distraction.

“None of this matters,” he told reporters on Sunday, and insisted instead on speaking about the state of schools, healthcare, and the cost of food for Michigan residents.

The post Radical Centrists Like Haley Stevens Are the Real Extremists in the Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.

“Even just rumors of [ICE at the polls] are going to spread fear. That’s not what we want,” said Daniela Padilla, deputy director at Texas for All, a statewide coalition of organizations working on democracy and justice issues. “Even your reporting around, ‘We’re watching for ICE at the polls’ — it could scare voters.” 

In Texas, a 40 percent Latino state where a longtime Republican grip on power now finds itself in question, there are real concerns that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents could pop up in targeted communities to make people afraid to go out and vote on Tuesday. But while the possibility of election interference has been discussed as one of several “big ticket items” of this year’s midterms, Padilla said, “the biggest threat that we face in Texas this year is voter suppression.”

That suppression can take many forms. In Tarrant County, for example, where local officials closed 92 polling locations, reports from early voting indicated some election officials wrongly turned away eligible voters. More than fearing ICE would actually approach the polls, Padilla and several organizers working on election integrity and voting rights in Texas told The Intercept they were worried that journalists amplifying the Trump administration’s stated plans to “surround the polls” with ICE and federal agents could function as an inadvertent form of voter suppression.

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Federal and state law prohibits federal immigration agents from being inside polling sites and bar any form of voter intimidation. Those laws haven’t stopped the Trump administration and its allies from threatening to deploy ICE and military personnel around the country during elections. In August, the Department of Justice announced that it planned to send at least 1,000 federal monitors to oversee midterm voting, prompting multiple states to assert they would not let them  inside polling locations. As states like Maine prepared to respond to the federal presence at the polls, the DOJ claimed to Newsweek it “never said” it would send federal law enforcement to the polls.

“The Trump administration has been spreading fear for months, refusing to say that they will not send ICE to the polls,” said Emily French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “I think that the main function of this discussion around ICE at the polls from the Trump administration is scaring people into staying home on Election Day.”

According to Brianna Brown, executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, disinformation efforts are a common voter-suppression tactic in Texas. “So we’re trying to reassure people it’s safe to vote,” she said.

Texas is home to one of the most dramatic potential Senate upsets in the country, with Democratic state Rep. James Talarico leading in the polls over the state’s scandal-plagued Republican attorney general Ken Paxton in a race that could see Texas end up with a Democratic senator for the first time since the ’90s. And the 32 million-person state has enough voter suppression strategies even without ICE in the picture, Brown said, pointing to a 2021 bill that banned drive-through voting, weakened protections for disabled voters, and gave more power to poll watchers appointed on behalf of a candidate or political party. 

“Texas is just like a perfect storm,” Brown said. 

When ICE showed up at a polling site in San Antonio in May — marking the first known case of ICE at the polls in the country during this year’s primaries — the county sheriff kicked the agents out. Even then, it did not appear that the federal agents were targeting someone in the process of voting; they had arrived at the scene shortly after state police, with whom they work closely, pulled someone over in the polling site’s parking lot.

That day, staff at the Texas Organizing Project and a group of civil and voting rights organizations working as part of the Texas Election Protection coalition helped coordinate outreach to the local sheriff to get ICE removed from the site.

The state coalition is part of a nationwide effort to protect this year’s elections from interference — federal or otherwise. In Texas, the Lawyers’ Committee and several other groups including the Barbara Jordan Leadership Institute, Common Cause Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project have been training people to help make sure voters know their rights on Election Day and that they report any instances of voter intimidation — whether an eligible voter is wrongly turned away or someone spots ICE — to a national hotline.

“We want to inform people, but we don’t want to scare them from coming to the polls,” said Khanay Turner-Osborne, executive director of the Barber Jordan Leadership Institute. She said she hasn’t heard much concern about ICE showing up around polling sites in Tarrant County, where she’s based and where people can vote at any polling site in the county. But still, for voters in hotspots of ICE activity and other forms of voter suppression, the group has told them to consider voting at a different eligible site, she said. 

The group wants to help people prepare, Turner-Osborne said. “But I don’t want it to be in a way that deters people from voting.” 

The post Warnings About ICE at the Polls Risk Their Own Kind of Voter Suppression appeared first on The Intercept.

Halloween weekend is the last chance for centrist Democrats to stop the nightmare they fear most: Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, who could be the first Muslim in the Senate. 

The Michigan Democrat’s campaign came under pressure from party moderates days out from the general election to denounce an ad produced by The Young Turks presenter Cenk Uygur and his Rebellion PAC. El-Sayed and his campaign were not involved in the production or distribution of the ad, which tied rising domestic prices to U.S. financial backing of the Israel military. But on Thursday, the campaign made the conciliatory gesture of distancing itself.

For centrists, it still wasn’t enough.

Rather than take the win, Haley Stevens, the House member who lost to El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate in August, used that condemnation on Friday as a springboard for a scathing denouncement of her former opponent, framed as a “celebration” of her magnanimous decision to campaign for El-Sayed this weekend alongside Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C. — and laying out conditions for her support with just a few days to go. 

In the statement, in which Stevens assigned herself the role as spokeswoman for Michigan’s Black and Jewish communities — Stevens herself is a white Protestant — she all but called El-Sayed an antisemite and a bigot attempting to cozy up to the worst of the far right. 

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“I have learned from Democratic Party leaders and emissaries, as reported in the news media, that Dr. El-Sayed has heard the deep concerns of the Jewish community and is now, for the first time in this campaign, formally condemning that ad for what it is,” Stevens wrote. “That is why I accepted Congressman Clyburn’s invitation to appear with Abdul on Sunday.”

Stevens’s eleventh-hour ratfuck came after her fiancé Jason Turkish, a political donor who supported incumbent Maine Republican Susan Collins this cycle, as well as other politicians of both parties, announced he’d vote for the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, on Tuesday. On Friday night, Turkish told TMZ that his fiancee might join him if El-Sayed didn’t accede to her list of demands.

Establishment Democrats see El-Sayed, and the politics he represents, as an existential threat. It’s not his rather anodyne liberalism in domestic policy — his policy portfolio isn’t far from that of party stalwart Elizabeth Warren — but El-Sayed’s opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians that’s the issue. It’s a major problem for the entrenched, centrist Democrats who have controlled the party for decades and have tamped down any dissent on this issue. 

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Recent polling is likely motivating efforts to ding the El-Sayed campaign. Senate polling from The New York Times/Siena University this week showed South Carolina in a dead heat — an absolute shocker — with Minnesota comfortably in the Democratic corner. CNN polling published on Thursday gave Democrats leads in Texas and Michigan and toss-ups in Maine and Kansas. 

With a Senate majority on the horizon, centrists need to enforce discipline and regain control. AIPAC is down, but not out; the lobbying group still has a hold on the party, even as voters are moving away from pro-genocide policies. 

Taking El-Sayed down would be a show of force to keep donors and the party’s right wing happy. If Democrats can win the Senate without him, it would be all the better.

But the effort may be backfiring as a faction of party elites, led by popular former President Barack Obama, are putting their muscle behind the El-Sayed campaign. Obama has been a steady presence in Michigan, and Clyburn will rally for the candidate on Sunday at the aforementioned event that Stevens was set to attend. 

Anger is also spreading among party members in the state.

“I have no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing,” Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan state senator who placed third in the August primary, told CNN Friday night. “This is a moment where we have to recognize the stakes.”

Stevens — who also demanded El-Sayed pull an ad showing far-right broadcaster Tucker Carlson saying he would “never” support the Republican in the race, Rogers — seems undeterred. 

Given an inch by the campaign’s willingness to publicly mend fences, Stevens took it several miles, using that ad as a way of implying that El-Sayed was, at best, disinterested in the concerns of Black Michiganders.

This last-minute blitz comes after months of attacks on El-Sayed by centrist Democrats, both before and after his primary win. The smears have been normalized and facilitated by a number of Democrats eager to stay on good terms with the party’s powerful but increasingly marginalized pro-Israel wing. El-Sayed’s connection to the streamer Hasan Piker, who helped get out the vote in the primary, has been a direct and implied slam on the campaign for over half a year from other members of the party. 

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Thursday called opposition to Israel’s existence as an apartheid ethnostate “more than concerning, it’s wrong,” on Donny Deutsch’s podcast, adding, “This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress.” On CNN Wednesday, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — a consistent pro-Israel voice — declined to directly endorse El-Sayed by name. 

Right-wing Democrats aren’t stupid. They know their influence over the party is at a historic low. The genocide in Gaza has pushed the base away from supporting Israel, perhaps permanently. Supermajorities of Democrats oppose the occupation and sympathize with Palestinians. 

But the party’s donor class still backs Israel to the hilt and is fomenting a war-on-terror-style Islamophobic bigotry toward Muslims. As Perry Bacon noted on Thursday in The New Republic, party elites attacked then-candidate for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani throughout 2025, then picked up where they left off with El-Sayed, the next prominent Muslim Democrat running for office, in 2026. 

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The same Democrats who indulge in the attacks on El-Sayed are making hay out of rejecting more openly bigoted attacks from the likes of President Donald Trump and Rogers. Rep. Dan Goldman — an outgoing pro-Israel Democrat who jumped on the Condemn El-Sayed bandwagon earlier this week — called Republican attacks on El-Sayed “Islamaphobia” [sic] on Thursday; Booker did the same. And Pelosi, just days after her comments on Deutsch’s show, urged Democrats to vote for El-Sayed.

Voters don’t seem very interested in the back and forth. In a Marist poll of Michiganders released October 21, 95 percent of the state’s Democrats said they support El-Sayed. There’s no split in the party at the state level with respect to the nominee; the fight is at a higher, ideological level with a national stage. 

As for El-Sayed, he seems done with Stevens and focused on the election. That rally on Sunday? Stevens isn’t wanted there, Politico reported, as the El-Sayed campaign is making clear it would be a distraction. In a statement released Friday evening, the candidate said he is intent on fighting for affordability, defeating the GOP, and making sure the Senate seat stays blue. 

“That should be the priority for all of us right now,” El-Sayed wrote. “So while Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago, let’s all focus on the task at hand: that’s beating Mike Rogers, holding Trump accountable, and getting money out of politics, putting money in pockets, and passing Medicare for All.”

Washing his hands of the wrecker behavior Stevens is engaging in at the final stretch of the campaign is a smart move for El-Sayed. After Tuesday, the Democratic Party should do the same for anyone who indulged in and encouraged it and present a united front against Trump. There’s no room for anyone more interested in keeping their increasingly untenable right-wing ideology beyond voters’ reproach — even if that means losing.

The post Centrist Democrats Would Rather Lose the Senate Than Win With El-Sayed appeared first on The Intercept.

“Why do you wanna have a pep rally when people are hurting?”

That was the question Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III posed at a September food drive in South Dallas, where volunteers were collecting groceries for struggling families. Across town, Republicans were holding a midterm convention. Haynes, a longtime Baptist pastor and Democratic congressional nominee, was introducing James Talarico, the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas.

A month later, speaking at a Dallas megachurch, Talarico offered his own interpretation of Christian duty.

“I try to love my neighbor through public policy,” the Presbyterian seminarian told the congregation. “I’m trying to make my neighbor’s life easier, better, less stressful.”

Both men are making a deceptively simple argument in some of the staunchly staunch red-as-hell, Republican territory in America, one that might transcend the conventional wisdom about national campaigns and the millions poured into competing campaign war chests: When far-right policy translates into actual pain, at what point does intervening become a spiritual obligation?

Amid the big-ticket ad buys, fundraising appeals, and armies of political consultants, Talarico and Haynes are tapping into a political tradition that has long sustained communities across the South: showing up.

At Haynes’s Friendship-West Baptist Church, the ministry extends to legal services, immigration advocacy, counseling, economic justice, and food policy. It is an example of how churches often form the connective tissue of communities suffering under economic and political strain.

That strain is measurable. Texas is home to four of the nation’s 10 most financially distressed major cities, including Houston, which ranks second nationwide, according to a 2026 analysis. Feeding America estimates that nearly 1 in 5 Texans experienced food insecurity in 2024. Meanwhile, federal analysts project that changes to Medicaid eligibility enacted last year will increase the number of uninsured Americans by 7.5 million by 2034. 

While Democratic Party leaders publicly debate how to punish Donald Trump politically, allege corruption, or navigate the ideological divide between moderates and democratic socialists, a different argument is emerging from Southern pulpits.

The Underground Church

From Quaker abolitionists to the Social Gospel’s challenge to industrial exploitation, progressive religious institutions have helped drive some of America’s most consequential political transformations. Christian farmworker ministries supported migrant laborers before joining the United Farm Workers’ California grape boycotts in the 1960s. And while Black churches overwhelmingly led, sustained, and suffered the brunt of violence in the fight for equal civil rights in this country, a handful of white denominations joined them. 

Of course, churches also defended slavery, segregation, and exploitation. The blunt reality is that throughout American history, Christianity has always been political and has been used to justify a wide variety of competing political ends.

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But Republicans have deftly exploited the perception that they alone speak for American Christians. The Trump administration has readily embraced religious iconography, from evangelical leaders praying over the president in the Oval Office to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s frequent invocations of the medieval Crusades.

There is no way around the fact that Republicans have built a formidable religious coalition, particularly among white evangelicals. Last year, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, found a majority of Republicans qualified as either Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers in 2025, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.

But Republicans don’t have a monopoly on Christian voters. Pew Research Center polling this month found 73 percent of white evangelical Protestant registered voters preferred Republican House candidates, while 74 percent of Black Protestants and 59 percent of Hispanic Catholics preferred Democrats. None of that is particularly surprising on the surface.

Nor is this some newly discovered religious awakening. According to PRRI’s Census of American Religion, which was published in April, 57 percent of Democrats identified as Christian in 2025, a significant drop from 70 percent in 2013. The white Christian left isn’t necessarily growing, but it’s far from insignificant. Much of it has simply been politically overlooked.

It’s a perception the GOP has routinely capitalized on, often spending a great deal of their election campaigns attacking opponents on religious ground. 

On Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cravenly tarred his Democratic gubernatorial challenger, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, as supporting “Sharia law,” citing an endorsement from a Muslim advocacy group’s political affiliate.

Perhaps ironically, Hinojosa is, and has been on the record, a Catholic — same as Abbott.

“My faith is my moral compass,” Hinojosa told the National Catholic Register in September. “It grounds me in purpose and gives me the courage to do what is right regardless of obstacles or consequences.”

Faith Without Works Is a Dead End

For those who have spent years watching their faith become synonymous with a politics they don’t recognize, frustration may finally be giving way to something else: a determination to be heard.

There are signs that this long-overlooked religious tradition is finding a more public voice. An August study by PRRI documented progressive Christians organizing against Christian nationalism in eight states, including Texas and Louisiana, channeling local meetings, religious discussions, and community networks into political action. Elsewhere, hundreds of members of the clergy have joined protests against immigration enforcement, and some have been trained in direct action and civil resistance. While the movement may not be growing in numbers, its willingness to challenge political power is increasingly visible.

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As retired Texas Rev. Kathleene Card, who has thrown her support behind Talarico, told the Houston Chronicle, “faith should influence how people respond to poverty, human rights, the environment, and the well-being of their community.”

Whether any of this will translate into winning on Tuesday is still an open question. An October Fox News poll put Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton at 49 percent apiece among likely voters, but newer polls show Talarico with a small lead. Abbott led Hinojosa by 5 percentage points in that Fox poll, and most polls in the race show the governor with a slim lead. 

No matter the result, the Texas campaigns offer a different, more nuanced way of understanding political persuasion. They also challenge a long-standing assumption among national Democrats: that their voters are a monolith, moved by the same issues, values, and appeals. 

Across rural America and the South, voters may be growing weary of manufactured arguments and hypothetical doomsday prophecies, with research showing that political advertising, as it stands, has little effect on changing minds at all.

There is something to be said for people willing to put boots on the ground, to do the work instead of endlessly debating how to begin and whether it matters, in the name of service. 

It’s a moral code not too dissimilar to a Western: When confronted with injustice, you stand for what’s right, even if you stand alone and are ridiculed for what you believe. It’s a mode of Christianity that harkens back to Abraham Lincoln (and maybe even John Brown.)

That might be a more enduring political proposition than many Democrats’ feigned, helpless aggrievance to the latest Republican spectacle. Campaigns come and go; so do their promises, if they existed in the first place. But the obligation to one’s neighbors remains.

The post The Rise of the Christian Left in Texas appeared first on The Intercept.

This midterms cycle, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s strategy seems to suggest the opposite. Contrary to its signature slogan, AIPAC’s name has become anathema to voters across the political spectrum repulsed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and frustrated by Washington’s outpouring of military aid for a foreign government while domestic costs soar.

So it’s going underground. As The Intercept reported in December, AIPAC entered the 2026 midterms by returning to its strategic roots — funding other groups and uniting donors, rather than focusing on direct-to-candidate spending. Now, AIPAC has announced that it will no longer officially endorse or contribute directly to candidates. 

Though progressives welcomed the announcement as evidence of AIPAC’s retreat, it’s far from a sign that AIPAC is backing down. The group is expected to continue spending heavily on elections through its super PAC, which took advantage of campaign finance loopholes to conceal its involvement in several races this cycle until after elections had already passed. To Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, AIPAC’s opting for obscurity shows that “its brand has become politically radioactive.”

But how much has really changed? As AIPAC shifts strategy, a new project by The Intercept reveals the hundreds of candidates still taking its cash, plus how the money paid off for them. The data suggests that though the pro-Israel lobbying giant may be weakened, it’s still dominant.

The Intercept tracked how much the group and its super PAC spent on elections to put pro-Israel candidates on the ballot in this year’s midterms — including the money it tried to keep out of the public eye. While AIPAC makes use of a series of new pop-ups and pass-throughs, it still poured millions directly into 2026 midterm races. Its candidates usually still win.

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The new data builds on a 2024 project in which The Intercept documented just how AIPAC shaped the last congressional class. At the time, Donald Trump was preparing for his return to the presidency as Kamala Harris ran a campaign hamstrung by public disillusionment over the Biden administration’s unflinching support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To critics of Israel desperate to stop the violence, the two parties looked equally bleak, and the pro-Israel lobby’s grip on Congress appeared unshakeable. 

It’s been different this cycle. Primaries across the country saw candidates win after vowing to cut off or restrict military aid to Israel, and incumbents signed on to legislation blocking weapons transfers in an attempt to keep their seats. But the shift should not be overstated: AIPAC still waded into nearly three-quarters of races, and its candidates still won far more often than they lost.

In total, AIPAC or its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent on 333 of the 473 seats up for election this year.

These are the dollars AIPAC and UDP spent directly in races. The former makes contributions to candidates, while the latter, as AIPAC’s leading super PAC, makes independent expenditures, like buying ads. They made up the bulk of the pro-Israel lobby’s known elections spending — $53.3 million from AIPAC and $66.7 million from UDP, compared to $53.7 million and $41.4 million last cycle. Simultaneously, the groups took up another tack: making it harder to tell which races they were actually involved in. The group’s donors poured money into races where AIPAC didn’t officially endorse a candidate. AIPAC’s board president hosted a fundraiser for a candidate who swore the group wasn’t backing her. And in a series of races, no one knew for certain that AIPAC had spent on the election until after it was over.

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The group tested different strategies in different states, spending directly in the Michigan Senate race, for example, while concealing its spending in several other primaries. In those races, UDP gave money to other committees, including a series of “pop-up PACs,” groups that registered just before primaries, allowing them to delay disclosing their donors until after the election passed. Several of those groups took money from AIPAC’s super PAC, spent on ads against candidates critical of Israel, and then disappeared. 

The pop-ups and pass-throughs represent AIPAC’s most talked-about new tactic, but the lobbying group and its flagship super PAC still sunk the bulk of their spending into key races and high-priority states. The Intercept analyzed where AIPAC employed which strategy, how UDP dollars flowed through pop-up PACs, and which candidates received the most AIPAC and UDP cash in their primaries. 

The Direct Spending

The pro-Israel lobby’s biggest investment in the primaries turned out to be a disappointment. UDP spent more than $30 million on ads attacking Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race or backing his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. Now that El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee, UDP is also battling El-Sayed in his general election contest with Republican Mike Rogers, spending just over $500,000 so far. 

Thanks in part to the deluge of spending, the El-Sayed–Stevens contest was one of the marquee primaries of 2026, pitting a vocal critic of the pro-Israel lobby who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator against an enthusiastic AIPAC cash recipient who famously said: “Israel comes to me in my dreams.” It’s one of the key races where we’re breaking down the money AIPAC and UDP spent in favor of one candidate and against a clear opponent. We’re skipping Democratic House candidate Adrian Boafo, who benefited from $5.7 million in UDP spending, because his Maryland primary included 23 other candidates.

After Stevens and Boafo, the top AIPAC and UDP recipient from this year’s primaries was Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate Democrat from Missouri who fended off a challenge from former Rep. Cori Bush to return to the House (AIPAC spent millions to oust her last cycle). When UDP spending is excluded, Bell received more AIPAC funding in the primaries than any other Democrat.

On the Republican side, the top beneficiary was Ed Gallrein, the Trump-backed challenger who unseated Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky. Massie, a libertarian critic of all foreign aid — including to Israel — was the relatively rare Republican incumbent AIPAC and UDP opposed.

Often, the pro-Israel groups backed Republican incumbents. Two more top recipients were Sen. Tom Cotton, who easily won his primary in Arkansas, and John Cornyn, who lost to state attorney general Ken Paxton in Texas.

But the greatest Republican recipient of AIPAC largesse — ahead of Gallrein, when UDP is excluded — did not face a primary opponent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, now facing a tight general election contest against Democratic candidate Troy Jackson, has been a longtime beneficiary of campaign cash aligned with the pro-Israel lobby. Asked by Zeteo last year for her comment on Americans killed by the Israeli military, Collins shook her head and said only: “I am pro-Israel.” 

The Pop-Ups

On top of the $53.6 million it spent directly on races this cycle, United Democracy Project poured another $13.1 million into Democratic primaries by giving money to other committees whose names or stated agendas indicated no connection to Israel policy. That $13.1 million, more than triple the $3.5 million United Democracy gave through other groups last cycle, helped fund at least three pop-up PACs that formed this year. 

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The groups’ names offered little insight into their political agendas, as The Lever recently highlighted. UDP spent the most on popup PACs in a series of Democratic primaries around Chicago, where groups with names like Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! used their funds to attack candidates running on rejecting AIPAC money or ending U.S. military support for Israel. Several of the groups also received funding from major United Democracy Project donors, and three of them shut down after the primaries and gave their money back to United Democracy Project. 

In other cases, United Democracy Project funded long-established political action committees with ties to current or former House Democratic leaders, like Bold America, which was formed by former members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. That group got almost a quarter of the $12.2 million it reported raising this year from UDP. The UDP share, $2.8 million, was nearly equivalent to the $2.9 million Bold America spent against Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist and pro-Palestine activist who defeated incumbent and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York.

The super PAC EDW Action Fund was similar. Former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Cheri Bustos and former Rep. Annie Kuster formed that group in late 2023 as an offshoot of the political action committee Elect Democratic Women. Like Bold America, EDW Action got about a quarter of its funding from UDP. It also provided more than 80 percent of the funding for Pro-Choice Majority Action, a new PAC that formed in May and spent in 12 primaries. The group presents itself as supporting Democratic women, but Pro-Choice Majority Action notably spent against pro-Palestine candidates like Melat Kiros, who ran a primary challenge against Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and won. 

In a statement to The Intercept, Pro-Choice Majority Action spokesperson Lenny Young dismissed reporting characterizing the group as a pop-up PAC and said it had backed 23 candidates with a range of views on Israel across the primaries and general election.

“To suggest that we would deny a Democratic woman from being elected to Congress because of her position on Israel, on either side, misses the whole point,” Young said. “We want more Democratic women in Congress because we believe it would improve the lives of women and families. Period.”

Bold America did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Emails to Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! bounced back because the groups have shut down.

UDP gave another $2.65 million to groups that did not spend directly on ads in Democratic primaries this cycle. 

In August, United Democracy Project gave $1.65 million to a group called SD PAC, also known as Save Democracy PAC, which registered in 2020 and has supported Democratic candidates in past general elections. The group did not directly conduct any outside spending in Democratic primaries this year, but it funneled money to affiliate groups that did — some of which funded attacks against progressives.

The other recipient of money from UDP, Palmetto Action, formed in May and only spent in South Carolina’s Republican Senate primary. The group backed Sen. Lindsey Graham before his death in July, then received a cash infusion from UDP and started supporting Graham’s sister, Darline, ahead of a special Senate primary. The group did not report any additional spending in its last filing due before the general election.

Palmetto Action, Save Democracy PAC, and EDW Action Fund did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

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If last cycle AIPAC proved that it could leverage its financial advantage to target critics of Israel, its performance this cycle suggests that its money has become a faltering superpower. 

New pro-Palestine groups have sprung up to spend against AIPAC — though their pockets aren’t nearly as deep. When candidates went head-to-head this cycle in primaries defined by U.S. military support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, pro-Palestine candidates often came out on top. 

For decades before it started spending directly on elections, “AIPAC operated in the shadows,” Friedman, of Foundation for Middle East Peace, said. Its endorsements were once “clear but unofficial,” she added, and its funding operated through “informal understandings with big donors and allied but ostensibly independent PACs.” 

Today, “AIPAC is trying out a sort of middle road,” Friedman said. “It will return in part to the shadows — no direct endorsements, no direct donations — but it will also continue to flex its power directly in elections, via tactics it has been testing and honing these past four years.”

If anything, next cycle could see an expansion of the recent pop-up PAC strategy, making it harder to tell when AIPAC is involved — until it’s too late. 

The post AIPAC Isn’t Retreating. Here’s How It’s Already Shaping the Next Congress. appeared first on The Intercept.

Super PAC networks bankrolled with millions of dollars from Anthropic and OpenAI executives spent heavily in competitive primaries earlier this year, including a high-profile race in New York City. They were touted as the looming successor to another single-issue group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as AIPAC moved its spending underground.

Yet as public outrage over data centers and AI’s threat to jobs soared, artificial intelligence super PACs dramatically throttled back spending on congressional races compared to the primaries. The biggest AI super PAC network has spent only modestly ahead of next week’s general election — and mostly in safe seats.

An Intercept analysis of AI spending in the 2026 midterms, based on Federal Election Commission records and independent race ratings, shows that only 5 percent of their direct expenditures have gone to contested general election races. The industry’s avoidance of the contested races that could determine control of the next Congress suggest that the PACs have realized how the public has soured on the tech, campaign finance and industry observers told The Intercept.

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“Essentially these companies underestimated how much the public despises the data center buildout, and the inescapability of AI systems that no one asked for that say they will automate jobs and maybe kill us all,” said Rick Claypool, a research director for the president’s office at Public Citizen, a nonprofit campaign finance watchdog.

Although there is still time for a last-minute flurry of spending, the story of AI’s role in the 2026 midterm elections may turn out to be the story of a single race — a primary in New York — that forced the industry to step away from the limelight.

Claypool’s group released an analysis earlier this year of “corporate supremacist” super PACs, a new breed of campaign committees modeled on a crypto super PAC called Fairshake that spent tens of millions on the 2024 elections.

The model was to amass a massive war chest and use it to punish candidates who opposed the company’s preferred government regulations, while throwing cash at allies or potential allies from both parties.

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The first big AI super PAC to launch in August 2025 was Leading the Future, which was bankrolled by the president of OpenAI and its investors. A rival super PAC network, Public First, launched months later with the goal of countering Leading the Future’s influence. Its donors include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who gave $1 million. Anthropic has also given a nonprofit associated with Public First millions of dollars, while stipulating that the money cannot be used on elections. Public First says that it supports tighter regulations than its rival.

The two networks plowed $50.7 million into the primaries, campaign finance records show. Most of that money was spent on primary races where the outcome was in doubt, driven by an eye-popping $21.3 million the networks spent on supporting or opposing a single congressional candidate, Alex Bores, in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District.

Bores, a New York State Assembly member, attracted the ire of those in the industry who favor a laissez-faire approach by authoring an AI regulation bill in the state legislature.

Leading the Future succeeded in defeating Bores, who lost to his State Assembly colleague Micah Lasher in June. But the group drew intense blowback in the process. Many observers suggested Leading the Future’s spending had boosted Bores rather than hurt him, because it gave him a chance to position himself as a foe of the AI industry — while also benefiting from a PAC aligned with the Public First network.

“Down to the wire, they were sweating,” Bores told The Intercept, referring to Leading the Future. “I think people who have been in politics for a while will realize that their spending really served to elevate the issue of AI.”

Leading the Future did not respond to a request for comment.

After wading into contested primary elections, the two leading AI super PAC networks have held back from spending on competitive general elections — even though they have plenty of money in the bank.

Until a few days ago, Public First had spent nothing on general election races. Leading the Future has spent only $7.4 million on general election races as of October 26, according to the FEC data, despite having $34 million in cash on hand across its network as of its most recent report.

Only 31 percent of that total has gone toward competitive races, as measured by the independent analytics website FiftyPlusOne. The only reason Leading the Future has spent money on competitive general election races at all is because it’s backing U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., who filled the seat of her late brother Lindsey Graham and is now facing an unexpectedly fierce challenge from a Democrat to win a full term in ruby-red South Carolina.

“They are not going to have an impact on the balance of power in Congress,” said Shaunna Thomas, one of the founders of Guardrails Alliance, another new super PAC set up to counter Leading the Future’s influence. “They are spending money on candidates who they think will protect their ability to control if and how they are regulated.”

Public First has only recently started spending a relatively small sum on a handful of general election races. The spending had amounted to $1.1 million as of the morning of October 26, according to processed FEC data.

Asked for comment on how its strategy has changed since the primaries, a Public First spokesperson said that it was still trying to support “strong advocates for AI regulation.”

“Public First was founded as a counterweight to Leading the Future, and that fight looks very different today. Leading the Future is going dark. Its biggest backers are walking away,” said Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, the spokesperson.

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Into that gap have stepped new groups pushing for tougher AI regulation such as the Guardrails Alliance, which bills itself as a grassroots alternative to corporate-backed super PACs. It is funded in large part by Silicon Valley tech workers but has taken a more aggressive stance against “tech oligarchs.” Guardrails has spent about $2 million thus far and reported having $1.2 million on hand as of October 14.

About three-quarters of voters are less likely to support a candidate they know has received support from an AI super PAC, according to a Data for Progress poll of more than 3,000 likely voters in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio commissioned by Guardrails. Voters were more concerned about spending from AI companies than from crypto companies or AIPAC.

The dislike for data centers and AI cuts across party lines. In Michigan’s purple 7th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Will Lawrence has seized on data centers as one of his leading issues.

“The politics of this are terrible. Eighty percent of everybody is against it, whether you’re a Democrat, independent, or Republican,” he told supporters at a recent town hall.

Notably, neither of the super PAC networks has intervened in Lawrence’s race, despite it being one of the closest in the nation. (Lawrence’s campaign has pointed out that Elon Musk, who leads AI company xAI, has spent against Lawrence via his America PAC.)

There are emerging signs that the big AI super PAC networks are changing tactics in response to that public distaste. Public First’s dark-money affiliate donated $3 million since August to a preexisting super PAC supporting California state Sen. Scott Wiener, one of two Democrats vying to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi in California.

Leading the Future, meanwhile, gave a $500,000 donation on October 9 to a pro-data center nonprofit called Build American AI.

AI super PAC critics are also watching to see what Leading the Future will do, given its large war chest.

“I think they are going to continue to spend. I think they are going to try to do more and more spending that isn’t as easily tracked, because they are such political dead weight,” said Bores.

Delaware Corporations

When single-issue super PACs know their issue is unpopular, they use vague names, “pop-up” affiliates, and other dubious tactics to hide their activities from voters.

Add another one to the list: Leading the Future has routed more than $30 million of spending through newly minted Delaware corporations, blocking transparency during an election that has been defined by voter backlash against the industry.

Those apparent shell corporations have accounted for the lion’s share of the largest artificial intelligence super PAC network’s expenses during this year’s election.

The practice is a flagrant violation of Federal Election Commission guidelines that require campaign organizations to disclose which consultants, pollsters, and advertisers they are paying, a campaign watchdog alleged in a complaint filed in May.

There may be little recourse for observers worried about the lack of transparency for now, however. The FEC is short of the quorum that would allow it to take action on complaints such as the one filed by the Campaign Legal Center. (Leading the Future, which did not respond to a request for comment, has previously defended its tactics as legal in a statement to Wired.)

The Leading the Future network was funded in large part by an executive at or investors in OpenAI, one of the world’s largest AI companies. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Company president Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna Brockman, donated $25 million to the network last year. When it came time to spend that money, the Leading the Future network leaned on two affiliate super PACs, one for Democratic candidates called Think Big and the other for Republican candidates called American Mission.

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That is a typical tactic of the new breed of single-issue super PACs popularized by the crypto industry. Campaign finance reform advocates say it may help obscure the origin of campaign ads from voters but does not run afoul of any laws itself.

What those super PACs did next raised red flags for watchdogs, however. Since December, American Mission has reported spending $17.4 million through a Delaware-incorporated limited liability corporation called Summit Ridge Media Group, on services ranging from media placement to ad production to consulting.

Think Big has spent $21.3 million through a different Delaware corporation, Lantern Production Consultants, on a similarly wide range of expenses.

The grab bag of expenses is a giveaway that the super PACs are likely using the newly created corporations to hide their true vendors, according to Shanna Ports, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

“There’s no way of knowing what is motivating this arrangement — but I know there is backlash to AI. It is possible that the vendors who are working with American Mission and Think Big don’t want to be identified in FEC reports,” Ports said.

Thomas, of the rival super PAC Guardrails Alliance, told The Intercept she thinks the network is obscuring its spending because a lax regulatory approach has become “politically toxic.”

“Their donors don’t want to be associated, their candidates don’t want their support, and their vendors don’t want to be associated,” Thomas said. “If you were public, you are running away. If you are not, you are interested in not being exposed.”

This story was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

The post AI Tried to Buy the Midterms — Then the Lobby Learned Everyone Hates AI appeared first on The Intercept.

Officials in the state have prepared for months against the possibility of election interference from federal officials, and the state remains on high alert in the run-up to the general election on November 3.

Training materials for law enforcement officials in the state, obtained by The Intercept through a public records request, were updated this year for the elections to include explicit references to federal statutes barring armed federal agents from polling sites. 

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said the inclusion of such references was a direct defense in response to the fearmongering around election integrity from President Donald Trump and his administration.

“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” Bellows said. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”

Bellows’s office offered up the training slideshow, which cites a U.S. law that bars armed civil or military officers from posting at voting sites, to law enforcement personnel in the run-up to Maine’s primary election in June and again in the lead-up to the general election on November 5.

Nationwide, Democratic officials have expressed fears that the Trump Administration might weaponize U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies to undermine the rights of voters. In New York, state Attorney General Letitia James issued a reminder to voters that federal officials may not “police the polls,” and the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP called out the assignment of federal election monitors to two counties in the state as potential intimidation.

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The Trump administration, meanwhile, has sounded the alarm about the alleged scourge of non-citizens on the voter rolls, sending agents from the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division to probe alleged fraud. A handful of people in California, New York, and North Carolina have been indicted for allegedly voting as non-citizens, but a review of similar cases by the Washington Post found that such cases were often the result of honest mistakes.

In Maine, worries about federal interventions at polling places flared when — following a slew of social media videos from Trump allies suggesting that fraud is already taking place among the state’s Somali American community — a local outlet reported that the Department of Justice would be sending election monitors to the state.

Jon Fetherston, a journalist with the far-right Maine Wire, which is funded by conservative megadonor Leonard Leo, was seen following people in and around an early voting site at Lewiston City Hall and aggressively questioning them. (The Maine Wire did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Critics said the moves were tantamount to voter harassment, but Maine Wire editor-in-chief Steve Robinson later defended them as an act of election transparency. Robinson, who has led a crusade against what he alleges to be a network of fraud in the state’s Somali American community, questioned the role of interpreters tasked with helping “jobless Somali bums” cast their ballots.

In the wake of the Maine Wire controversy in Lewiston, Bellows confirmed to the Maine Morning Star that a wave of federal election monitors would be headed to polling sites in Lewiston and Portland.

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The Department of Justice on Tuesday confirmed to The Intercept that it intends to send election monitors to Maine for Election Day, but did not elaborate or respond to specific questions about where the monitors were to be sent. 

“We will have around 1,000 monitors in counties throughout the United States, but we will not share the full list until Election Day,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Intercept in an email Tuesday. “All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process. Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate.”

Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Collins Takes Right-Wing Bait

With Maine a key battleground state for control of Congress — Democratic challenger Troy Jackson is seeking to topple long-serving GOP Sen. Susan Collins, and the Democratic House candidate Matt Dunlap is seeking to best former Gov. Paul LePage in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District — temperatures are running high in the state.

Progressives in Maine worry that even without a robust federal presence at voting places — whether monitors are armed or not — activist campaigns like the one undertaken by the Maine Wire journalists could pose a potential threat to voters’ rights.

“Basically, if you were walking into City Hall and you were Black, you could expect to have this guy come up to you with his phone and ask you all sorts of rude and obviously racist questions,” said Ben Chin, co-director of the progressive Maine People’s Alliance. “We’re trying to encourage everyone to come out to vote, but it makes sense why that might give people pause. You hear a guy like that is outside a polling location, it’s reasonable to wonder, ‘Should I go down there right now?’”

In a statement to The Intercept, Bellows said the state and the city of Lewiston were taking steps to ensure that voters could cast a ballot free of harassment.

“We have received complaints about the intrusive filming, photography, and harassment of voters in the City of Lewiston by political operatives,” Bellows told The Intercept in a statement. “All voters should be able to exercise their right to vote without feeling watched, questioned, or harassed, and we take these allegations seriously, particularly when it appears that voters were targeted for no other reason than their race or ethnicity. We understand the City of Lewiston has taken steps to address the problem, and we will continue to monitor the situation.”

Collins, meanwhile, took the Maine Wire’s reporting seriously after Fetherston asked the senator at a campaign event about the role of interpreters, which he and the Maine Wire cast as “electioneering.”

“I’m unaware of those allegations, but certainly only Americans should be voting in American elections,” Collins said. “And it is troubling to me if people are being accompanied into voting booths and handling ballots in a way that is not sanctioned by law.”

The post Trump Vows to Send Election “Monitors” to Maine After Far-Right Conspiracies Spread appeared first on The Intercept.

“I never thought about leaving the country,” Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator and son of the deposed, disgraced leader, told his 16 million Instagram followers on Monday. It was the day after he lost the presidential election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a margin of more than 4 million votes. 

Flávio promised to stay in Brazil to “organize the opposition” during Lula’s next term. 

“I’m the last obstacle to the Workers’ Party’s plan to destroy the country,” Flávio warned, referring to the party of Lula, who defeated his father four years earlier.

A few hours later, he left his mansion in Brasilia and sought asylum in the U.S. The Trump State Department told The Associated Press that it will grant him and his family visas.

“I didn’t take ​sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday, echoing Flávio’s election night talking points without providing any credible evidence that casts doubt on Lula’s come-from-behind victory — even as Flávio’s own party put out a statement acknowledging the results later that day.

It is no coincidence that the Trumps and the Bolsonaros are so fond of each other. Their modus operandi is nearly identical. 

Both wrap themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism and moral righteousness, while treating their political offices as personal get-rich-quick schemes. And, when their lies finally catch up with them, you can be sure that they will jump ship to save themselves first and abandon their followers.

The affinities become obvious when you watch Bolsonaro, his failsons, and co-conspirators all end up in Trump’s America, where Flávio is about to join his brother, and in the denialism and violence that follow their failures.

Coups and Flight Risks

Flávio Bolsonaro’s election denial and hasty escape are his version of Trump’s infamous January 6 speech: Rile up the troops to do your dirty work and get the hell out of the way.

It’s not the first time a Bolsonaro ran this playbook. After Jair Bolsonaro became the first modern Brazilian president to lose a reelection bid, he refused to attend the January 2023 inauguration ceremony. Instead, he also fled to the U.S., staying in a Minions-themed children’s bedroom in the Orlando, Florida, home of retired UFC fighter José Aldo.

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A week later, on January 8, the ex-president’s allies laid siege to the capital, Brasília, vandalizing Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court, as foot soldiers in a larger coup plotted to overthrow the Lula government. Nearly four decades of Brazilian democracy was only spared when key military leaders blinked before they could finish the job.

Jair Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading the plot, which included a plan to assassinate Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Allies, including top military brass, were also convicted. Jair remains under house arrest — widely thought to be pinning his hopes for freedom on a Flávio presidency that wasn’t to be.

Flávio, however, will not be lonely in the States. His brother, former Brazilian Congress member Eduardo Bolsonaro, just received green cards for his family and is living in a $1.2 million McMansion in Southlake, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as we revealed in The Intercept Brasil earlier this year. Eduardo, who is a regular on the Trumpworld circuit, was sentenced in absentia to four years and two months in prison for lobbying the U.S. government to interfere in his father’s trial. 

Flávio, too, seems poised to receive news of his own prison sentence while sitting on a couch in a Texas suburb. In May, our reporting at The Intercept Brasil put the first nail in the coffin of his presidential campaign when we published chat logs and audio recordings of the senator negotiating $24 million — and being wired $10 million — from disgraced billionaire banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is a sort of Brazilian cross between Charles Ponzi and Jeffrey Epstein. 

The payments, wired to a U.S. account, were supposedly meant to finance “Dark Horse,” a biopic about Jair Bolsonaro starring Jim Caviezel. Brazilian Federal Police, though, have already poked holes in Flávio’s story as they investigate whether the money was actually used to bankroll Eduardo’s treasonous lobbying of the Trump administration to sanction Brazil and help his brother’s electoral chances. 

Flávio is also being investigated for his alleged ties to a billion-dollar money-laundering scheme through an online betting company run by Willer Tomaz. The two are not only close friends but also business partners. Flávio even had unfettered access to one of Tomaz’s offshore bank accounts. You will not be surprised to learn that Tomaz left Brazil in August and is now living in Miami.

Police argued that, after losing the election, Flávio would pose a flight risk, especially in light of his closest associates’ recent actions. They asked the Brazilian Supreme Court to order Flávio to turn over his passport, which is permitted under Brazilian law. A top justice granted the request and, when the deadline passed, canceled the senator’s travel documents. 

By then, Flávio was already on his way to the U.S.

The post The Bolsonaro Family Playbook: Lose, Cry Fraud, and Run to Trump’s America appeared first on The Intercept.

San Francisco resident John Hering has sunk more than $1.25 million into an effort to defeat Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general at the California Department of Justice endorsed by the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and to support John McKinney, a county prosecutor running an uphill general election campaign. It’s a heavy injection of cash from a single individual in a local race for a little-known office, but it pales in comparison to Hering’s private-sector spending: In 2022, his investment firm Vy Capital pumped $700 million into Musk’s takeover of the company then known as Twitter and $300 million into his tunnel-construction Boring Company.

A co-founder of the cybersecurity company Lookout, Hering is spending in line with the tech industry in which he’s long been invested. While the city attorney’s office is commonly used as the city’s defense against litigious residents, the office also carries the power to mold legislation, enforce state law, such as labor protections, and take on corporations and the federal government in court. Roy has vowed to wield the office’s regulatory muscle against corporations — including Big Tech.

“Monopolies and Big Tech are things that [Roy] sees as an opportunity to wage battle against,” said former LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who has not endorsed either candidate. “If I were Big Tech, I would certainly think, ‘OK, well, this is someone who is a potential threat.’”

Hering, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, is part of a group of tech titans backing McKinney. Others include the founders of Ring, Tinder, and Boingo, and investors in Anthropic, Anduril, and SpaceX, who have collectively put more than $1.9 million into pro-McKinney committees. A group called “Committee to Expand the Middle Class Candidate” — backed by the property rental tech giant Airbnb — donated an additional $4.2 million to a committee supporting McKinney.

To help get McKinney through the June primary election, Hering and fellow tech investor Diego Berdakin poured more than $1 million into another committee. Over the past month, Hering’s general-election spending group, Neighbors for John McKinney, has been paying for TV and online ads and mailers that play up McKinney as “a lifelong Democrat” and “100% anti-MAGA.” 

The same can hardly be said for the group’s top funder.

After giving to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid and Democratic candidates like Beto O’Rourke, Hering donated $41,300 to the Republican National Committee and $500,000 to Musk’s America PAC in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s run for president. He has publicly praised Musk’s chaotic purge of the federal government through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency program and called the world’s richest man an “American hero” for offering to pay TSA salaries during the spring government shutdown. In 2025, Hering and Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who has also donated to Neighbors for John McKinney, attended a White House dinner where Trump hosted dozens of high-profile Silicon Valley figures. The pro-McKinney group is also funded by billionaires Rick Caruso, a failed LA mayoral candidate, and Ron Burkle, a Democratic megadonor.

Earlier this cycle, Hering, who listed San Francisco as his residence in campaign finance documents, also waded into the LA mayoral election — boosting right-wing reality star Spencer Pratt.

Tech industry spending in LA’s elections arrives amid a midterm cycle where Big Tech and artificial intelligence have doled out millions of dollars to exert influence in congressional and state races across the U.S. as lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the industries. Musk, for example, has dropped more than $442 million into the midterms, including more than $70 million in his political action committee, America PAC, in October alone. And in state Assembly and Senate races across California, tech and AI executives have spent more than $29 million, according to Tech Equity Action, a political nonprofit that lobbies to craft tech-related legislation while advocating for workers’ rights.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom gave big AI companies a scare last month, when he signed a slate of bills protecting workers from AI overreach, like limiting its use to terminate or discipline workers, banning employers from using AI to surveil employees in bathrooms, and assuring that human healthcare workers will have the final say on patient care decisions. 

The tech industry had fought hard to kill the bills, and while Newsom did offer the industry some concessions, labor organizers say the new laws offer them an opportunity to expand local worker protections, too. 

In LA, Roy has said she would use the city attorney’s office to fight for workers against losses in potential wages, promising that she would go after “large corporations and big tech companies” that “misclassify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying them minimum wage and providing benefits,” according to her campaign website. She also spoke against companies who are increasingly using automation “to evade regulations and eliminate jobs.”

Tech leaders may view a city attorney with an appetite for regulation as “existential to their business model,” said Brian Justie, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center who was part of the coalition that pushed for the bills. 

“What happens in California sets a precedent and serves as a blueprint for the rest of the country,” Justie said. “And so if you’re a Big Tech, you really need to have a certain outcome come to pass here to avoid ripple effects elsewhere.” 

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For his part, McKinney has blasted Roy for her desire to “turn the city attorney’s office into the country’s largest public interest law firm” as out of touch with what LA voters want. However, voters across the U.S. have increasingly expressed opposition to the expansion of artificial intelligence and the construction of data centers. Roy’s campaign has shown a willingness to lend an ear to growing AI anxieties.

“Billionaires don’t want to answer to the working people, consumers, and communities they exploit,” Roy said in a statement to The Intercept. “But as Los Angeles’ City Attorney, I intend to hold them, their corporations, and the MAGA Republicans that permit their behavior accountable — that’s why they’re spending on someone who won’t.”

McKinney did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Ads put out by Neighbors for John McKinney assert that McKinney would “take on crooked landlords.” The committee’s website said he would fight for tenant’s “legal protections” against things like “illegal eviction.” But among the committee’s biggest funders is the Santa Monica-based real estate firm, Douglas Emmett Properties, which attempted to carry out one of the largest mass evictions in LA history until it was overruled by a judge. Douglas Emmett donated $250,000 to Neighbors for John McKinney in late September.

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Neighbors for John McKinney has also funded attack ads against Roy that paint her as an inexperienced attorney who is weak on crime and has “extreme DSA” positions. The ads cite an article by the conservative California Post, a West Coast spinoff of the New York tabloid, that claimed she had supported a freeze on prosecuting misdemeanors, which she denies.

McKinney campaigns in the mold of law-and-order candidates, pledging to address homelessness and public safety by prosecuting misdemeanors, touting closer relationships with police, and promising to revive a neighborhood prosecutor program. Other California tech-supported efforts have echoed the same — like when tech leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area fueled a successful effort to oust progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. 

But the LA city attorney’s office holds limited criminal enforcement power, Bonin pointed out. He suspects the tech investment in the LA race is more concerned with potential civil litigation, and he thinks that if voters make that connection, it could spell an issue for the campaign.

“Voters are concerned about Big Tech, they’re certainly concerned about AI, they’re concerned about the influence of — I don’t think you can describe it any other way — 21st-century robber barons,” said Bonin, who now runs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “Income inequality is a big issue in Los Angeles, so if they make the connection that this funding is symbolic of the agenda that McKinney will pursue … then it becomes more of an issue.” 

Roxana Tynan, senior advisor of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, called the amount of Big Tech money being spent in the race “outrageous.” As she and other labor rights groups gear up for a fight for more worker AI protections in LA — like expanding safeguards to include temporary and gig workers, and banning employers from using AI software to collect sensitive worker information — she said she hoped people would follow the money being poured into the race and the influence that a few figures look to exert on the city.

“These are people who really believe that not only can they buy elections,” Tynan said, “but that they deserve to buy elections.”

Correction: October 29, 2026
This story has been updated to correct Roxana Tynan’s title.

The post The Elon Musk Funder Trying to Sway the Race for LA’s Top Lawyer appeared first on The Intercept.

The PUMA spirit is back. The 2008 Democratic Party protest movement, inflamed by what Hillary Clinton supporters viewed as Barack Obama stealing the nomination from their primary candidate, scorned his general election campaign and embraced the mantra “Party Unity, My Ass.” 

This time, that energy is aimed at the candidates preferred by the Democratic Socialists of America.  

DSA-aligned progressives have won a number of party primaries and are set to help Democrats take the majority in Congress. But once in power, they’re likely to make demands — the kinds of demands that could upend decades of carefully crafted donor-friendly policymaking. 

For moderate Democrats, “party unity” is only a goal worth pursuing to bully the left wing of the party to fall in line with their preferred candidate. When it’s on them to step up and vote for someone who might have different goals, that’s another story completely, and some centrists are even hoping for Republicans to win the House this November if the alternative is an empowered DSA Democratic wing. 

James Carville, the fossilized Cajun strategist who was part of exactly one successful national political campaign, Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House victory, said on The Bulwark podcast last Sunday that he’d prefer a tight GOP hold on Congress over a narrow Democratic majority. 

“I would be disappointed if it comes in at 225 House seats,” Carville told host Bill Kristol. “I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats to win by five, because, if that happens, they’re hostage to the DSA.”

To his credit, Kristol — who, in a sign of how people can change when they know which way the wind is blowing, spent the PUMA moment promoting Sarah Palin but is now a self-proclaimed Democrat — pushed back, saying he’d rather win. 

Carville is the first of his cohort to explicitly call for a GOP victory rather than the left flank of the party getting more power, but he’s not the only centrist deprioritizing his party’s prospects in November.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills has yet to endorse the Democratic Party’s Senate nominee, Troy Jackson, after she lost to now-disgraced Graham Platner. (Mills and Jackson have a long and bitter history from state government, which may be playing a role here.) 

Perhaps most consequentially, in Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has faced an uphill battle since winning his party’s grueling primary. He’s now focused on winning in the general election and becoming the first Muslim U.S. senator, but resistance to his candidacy remains a concern.

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Much of the difficulty has come from members of his own party and other liberals. Their antipathy toward a candidate whose positions aren’t so out of step with other members of the caucus has raised questions about what exactly is so objectionable about him. El-Sayed may skew to the progressive side of the party, but he’s not a socialist and not a member of the DSA; his positions on domestic policy should place him companionably among the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wing. 

Until recently, most of the anger after El-Sayed’s primary in early August was confined to X and occasional cable news hits. 

That changed on October 16, when two Michigan Democratic Party power players, David Kramer and Lon Johnson, urged voters in a Detroit News op-ed to leave El-Sayed’s place on the ballot blank — effectively handing the Senate seat over to Republican Mike Rogers, an election denier and a lockstep Trump ally. 

The piece tied El-Sayed to extreme elements of Islam and suggested his opposition to Israel’s genocide, war crimes, and occupation was based in hatred for the Jewish diaspora.

“Our gravest concerns involve El-Sayed’s associations with figures who have excused or minimized terrorism, his reluctance to unequivocally condemn dangerous rhetoric, and his support of extreme policies,” Kramer and Johnson wrote. “At a time of rising antisemitism, Democrats deserve leadership that unequivocally rejects rhetoric threatening Jewish communities.”

Comedian Mike Drucker accurately described on Tuesday the centrist rejection of El-Sayed as less “blue no matter who” and more “blue unless brown.”

But Democratic leaders like Carville, Kramer, Johnson, and others are panicked beyond their obvious Islamophobia — they can see the writing on the wall goes well past Michigan. It’s a full-on existential crisis.

Former Intercept writer Jon Schwarz once opined on what he termed the iron law of institutions: “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” 

What we’re seeing now is the iron law’s white blood cells fighting a threat they don’t believe can be easily assimilated into the existing power structure. It’s a danger to their status and power.

Their attacks on the left are going to backfire, leaving the Democrats’ centrist wing even less empowered than before. 

That outcome is ideal for the party, the base, and the country. For centrists, it’s a disaster — but if the way to stop their coming irrelevance is to vote for a progressive American Muslim who opposes genocide, they’re incapable of taking that step. 

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Ultimately, all their griping may not matter. El-Sayed is regularly polling slightly ahead of Rogers, and 95 percent of Michigan Democrats said they intend to vote for him. Much like Jackson in Maine, should he win, El-Sayed will be even less beholden to the elements of the party power structure who are so desperately trying to prove he needs them, rather than the other way around.

The post The Spirit of “Party Unity, My Ass” Is Back and Coming for the DSA (and El-Sayed) appeared first on The Intercept.

When it was founded a year ago, news reports suggested that Fellowship PAC would concentrate on supporting Republicans.

Since June, however, the only candidates Fellowship PAC has spent on have been Democrats, including those who have criticized the president’s meme coin, and it is getting help from a former Trump administration official’s company.

Fellowship PAC funneled $600,000 since this summer through a firm co-founded by former Trump crypto adviser Bo Hines to help reelect Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. The Democrats are considered crypto allies, and none of them are facing competitive elections this fall.

All those advertising dollars have been spent through a vendor called Nxum Group, which was co-founded by Hines, a former Republican congressional candidate and Trump administration official.

Hines did not return a request for comment, and it is not known whether he has personally been involved in the Nxum Group’s work on behalf of Fellowship PAC. In congressional races in 2022 and 2024, he presented himself as a Trump-loving MAGA acolyte.

There is a thick web of ties between Hines, Fellowship PAC, and one of the biggest players in the crypto industry, a stablecoin company called Tether.

Before Trump’s election, Hines was involved in promoting a Trump-themed meme coin that made a handful of investors millions before plummeting in value. After Trump’s election, the president tapped Hines to serve as the head of the White House Council of Advisers on Digital Assets. In that role, Hines helped pass a law that created stablecoin regulations that benefited Tether.

As Hines served in the Trump administration, Tether was paying money to the firm that Hines co-owned, Nxum Group, according to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal. Nxum Group told the news outlet that Hines had no involvement in the company’s business dealings with Tether during that time. Hines said in a June 2025 ethics disclosure that he had only a “passive investment interest” in the company.

Hines left the Trump administration in August 2025 and, a month later, Tether announced that he would serve as the CEO of its U.S. branch.

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Tether also has ties to Fellowship PAC. The newly created Fellowship PAC received a $10 million donation in January from Tether’s U.S. banking firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. In April, Fellowship PAC announced that Tether’s vice president of regulatory affairs would serve as its chair.

Although it launched with a splash last year by claiming that it had a $100 million war chest, the PAC has never reported as much as that in official campaign finance disclosures. The PAC’s last receipt was in January, and its cash on hand dwindled to $250,000 as of October 14.

Throughout the midterm elections, Fellowship PAC has leaned heavily on Nxum Group to spend advertising dollars on various congressional races.

Fellowship PAC spent exclusively on Republicans until its first expenditure on behalf of a Democrat, Torres, in June. That spending coincided with public polls showing increasingly dismal fortunes for Republicans in the midterm elections. Since then, the PAC has spent exclusively on Democratic candidates.

Torres’s and Warner’s campaigns did not respond to requests for comment. Goodlander’s campaign said she had nothing to do with the $150,000 that Fellowship PAC spent on digital advertising in her race. The money, the PAC disclosed in filings, had been routed through Nxum Group on August 31.

“Congresswoman Goodlander has been one of the strongest advocates in Congress for cracking down on Big Tech and crypto profiteering and getting dark money out of politics,” her campaign said in a statement. “Like all campaigns, we’re legally barred from coordinating with outside groups like these, so you’d need to ask them why they’re spending in this race.”

The PAC did not return a request for comment.

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Goodlander, Torres, and Warner are all rated as strong supporters of the crypto industry on an industry scorecard. Still, all three have been critical of Trump’s personal dealings in the industry though his $TRUMP meme coin, which has helped make him $1.4 billion from crypto ventures.

Warner recently ran an ad of his own attacking Trump over the meme coin.

“That’s not governing. It’s grifting,” the Democratic senator said. “The corruption needs to stop.”

The post Giant Crypto Super PAC Funnels Big Money to Former Trump Official’s Firm to Support… Democrats? appeared first on The Intercept.

The October 8 shooting of Oscar Belgal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of his 5-year-old son in Manhattan forced into the open a question that had been on many New Yorkers’ minds: What would the New York Police Department do when ICE broke the “rule of law” in the city, and how would Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the person who has the power to hire and fire the NYPD commissioner, respond? 

Shortly after the shooting, Mamdani addressed the incident with an appropriate amount of outrage, declaring ICE “rotten to its core,” and calling for the department to be abolished. His frustration was visible, but he was much less expressive when it came to his appraisal of the city’s response to the situation. He had nothing substantive to discuss with respect to his police department’s involvement, despite NYPD officers arriving on the scene only to find unidentified ICE agents holding guns, wearing plain clothes and disguises and masks, in apparent violation of federal laws requiring identification. (A recently passed New York state law prohibiting federal agents from wearing masks and other face coverings was temporarily blocked by a judge.) NYPD officers applied first aid and transported Belgal to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen hospital.

According to many eyewitness accounts and widely circulated video, members of the NYPD appeared to assist ICE agents by forcefully helping with crowd control — at one point, an NYPD officer shoved congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Mamdani personally stumped for, to the ground. Later, NYPD cleared a path for federal agents to whisk Belgal away from the hospital to a federal detention facility downtown. 

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After the shooting, the Democratic Socialists of America, several legislators, and Avila Chevalier all called on Mamdani to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and demanded the mayor uphold his campaign pledge to disband the NYPD’s infamous Strategic Response Group. Mamdani repeatedly refused to fire Tisch but said he was reviewing the 24-hour period around the shooting. When asked directly about Avila Chevalier being thrown to the ground, the mayor called it unacceptable, saying, “That is not something I will look to justify.” He reminded New Yorkers to be patient with efforts to reform the NYPD, ordered a review of the department’s use-of-force policies, and added funding for the inspector general’s office. But once again, he stood by his commissioner, citing “her record of uprooting corruption from the upper echelons of the NYPD while lowering crime across our city.”

Noticeably absent from any of Mamdani’s public remarks about the NYPD or Tisch was any public acknowledgment of the NYPD officers in relation to ICE agents during the Belgal incident.

Federal and city law enforcement occupy similar spaces but never really interact with each other. Mamdani made no mention of the ways in which the actions of federal agents put pressure on the NYPD as mediators — the primary function of police — to liaise in moments of conflict.

The NYPD typically relishes this role, which is why the department consumes so much of New York’s budget and shuns any attempts to redirect funds to other services that might reduce the need for police mediation to begin with. ICE forces local police to make choices in policy and in practice about how to deal with violent (often illegal) immigration operations.

If the NYPD believes itself to be the thin blue line, on which side of order and chaos do New York’s force and Mamdani believe these federal outside agitators to be?

This omission — or evasion, depending on how you look at it — of this predicament is strange considering Mamdani’s willingness to speak with moral clarity about even the most contentious issues and confront them head-on. It’s also bizarre considering his penchant for weaving shared experiences together and for putting the lived experiences of New Yorkers front and center.

On the campaign trail, one of Mamdani’s most alluring traits was his ability to speak to the actual problems of everyday residents. It wasn’t just because he possessed once-in-a-generation oratory skills; candidate Zohran achieved this because, as a proud democratic socialist, there was an analysis — an explanation of the material conditions of life — baked into his politics. His rhetoric seemed in line with, or at least not alienated from (see: establishment Democrats), how fast reality was moving and how it was impacting the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

When it comes to ICE, however, Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies haven’t always aligned, which has opened him up to questions about the kind of mayor he really is. On one hand, he has shown that he will speak out against Trump’s fascist and inhumane immigration efforts. On the other hand, Mamdani hasn’t moved with the same level of force as his words. Many have pointed out that Mamdani seems to be engaging in realpolitik in an effort to get his extensive progressive agenda passed. It’s certainly not easy to bring the machine of the New York government up to speed while also being transparent about the ways in which he is moving the needle. But that’s exactly what he was elected to do.

Had Mamdani got into office and done nothing different than previous mayors — or even been exceptionally corrupt, pro-cop, and willing to help the Trump administration like predecessor Eric Adams — he might have been able to avoid his current moment of reckoning. But his administration’s genuine efforts on immigration set into motion a future where the NYPD and ICE would come into conflict.

One of Mamdani’s first moves as mayor was to take stock of how the city’s many agencies were upholding existing sanctuary city laws. In February 2026, he signed Executive Order 13, his first major order pertaining to immigration, to create the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and establish baseline guidance, such as explicitly prohibiting ICE and other non-local law enforcement agencies from using city-owned garages and vacant lots. Crucially, EO 13 also required an audit of several agencies, including NYPD, to review their immigration-related policies.

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NYPD already has a problematic history dealing with immigration enforcement. During the Adams administration, there were documented cases where the NYPD assisted or collaborated with immigration enforcement, sometimes in accordance with NYPD policies. A December 2025 report by Jocelyn Strauber, then-commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, found at least one incident in which “an officer violated local law by providing assistance to federal authorities in connection with enforcement of the federal civil immigration law,” as well as evidence that NYPD did “not fully comply with documentation and reporting requirements concerning requests for assistance with federal civil immigration enforcement.” The report also found that there were numerous examples of NYPD policies and practices that elevated the “risk of improper information sharing or assistance to federal authorities for purposes of civil immigration enforcement.”

The resulting audit, which was released on May 22 by Mamdani’s deputy mayor, built on those findings and recommended NYPD (and other city agencies) update its reporting requirements. But the audit also left a lot of open questions, which numerous legal advocates attested to, about areas in which NYPD protocols and policies keep avenues open to potentially collaborate with ICE. The NYPD was “not being held to a high standard of accountability or scrutiny for collusion,” the audit found, and there were significant “gaps” in documenting potential violations of department policies. The question of what the city and its mayor could do to ensure compliance also remained unanswered.

Sanctuary laws prohibit using city resources for immigration enforcement, and a January 2025 NYPD internal memo specifically barring officers from facilitating street closures to enable immigration enforcement seemed to solidify that directive. But several high-profile incidents involving the NYPD have tested the department’s compliance with sanctuary laws. In October 2025, before Mamdani was elected, during an immigration raid in Chinatown, eyewitnesses and viral videos showed NYPD officers establishing perimeters to create a path for federal law enforcement agents. In another instance in May 2026, ICE reportedly “dragged” a Nigerian immigrant out of a Brooklyn hospital after agents used force in his arrest; NYPD officers brutalized and arrested numerous protesters and cleared debris from the road to enable ICE to escape the crowds and abscond with their target.

Both of these incidents happened under the watch of Tisch, who has insisted again and again that the department follows all sanctuary laws. When asked about the Brooklyn incident, Mamdani insisted NYPD was responding to 911 calls about the protest, not helping ICE. “Our laws leave nothing, no room for interpretation about the fact that our NYPD will not participate in civil immigration enforcement,” he said. NYPD told the Guardian US: “Upon arrival, officers observed numerous individuals acting in a disorderly manner, obstructing vehicular traffic, and blocking emergency entrances and exits at Wyckoff Heights medical center.” 

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When the NYPD arrives at an ICE raid or at a protest against an immigration abduction, what are officers supposed to do? On this point, NYPD and Mamdani have offered little clarity. But October 8 doesn’t pass the smell test for anyone who lives in overpoliced neighborhoods or closely observes the activity of police and their behavior.

NYPD officers were responding to an unrelated call nearby when they heard the report of shots fired. When they arrived, they encountered several men in various forms of attire, including some in construction-style vests, face masks, and at least one carrying a long gun, which officer body camera footage released by the Department confirms. The official account of the NYPD’s interaction offers no mention of ICE. There are no additional insights or explanations of department protocol that might shed light on how officers are supposed to act given the circumstances. Curiously, what those officers thought when they encountered several masked men with guns, and the conversations that took place between the ICE agents and the police, is a mystery, too. All we know is that officers agreed at some point that the NYPD would place Belgal in a vehicle, apply aid, and take him to the hospital. 

Since that evening, Mayor Mamdani has stood firm in his condemnation of ICE and their operations. “We will not normalize ICE’s viciousness,” he said, calling for the agency to be abolished. That’s the least he could say to reassure New Yorkers he understands the stakes they feel in their bones already. The shooting of Oscar Belgal and his subsequent inhumane treatment — his lawyers say Belgal is still in solitary confinement with a bullet in his neck — is a reminder of how normalizing ICE operations in New York City is already well underway. 

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There have been more lower-profile ICE sightings and kidnappings, which echoes what has been the case in other parts of the country. What Mamdani will do to bring the city’s response into alignment with the needs of New Yorkers in this moment still remains an open question, including clarifying the NYPD’s role in the city’s ongoing fight against the Trump administration’s gestapo tactics.

If this month’s incident offered a lesson for Mamdani, it is that clearly articulating what is right is a full-time job that requires an unwavering willingness to confront reality. It’s not enough to say the thing on one issue — calling a genocide by its name, publicly dragging FIFA for pandering to wealthy elites, or deriding the inhumane practices of slumlords — but not stand on business when it comes to the reality that New Yorkers are seeing on their own streets. 

Sometimes, an actual seismic event can reveal what needs to be done and that there are alternatives that may not have been fully realized before. Hope isn’t lost. There is still time for Mamdani to update his analysis. But in this moment, the mayor must make a choice: renew his commitment to the truth, or be defined by its absence. 

The post Mamdani’s High-Wire Balancing Act Between ICE and NYPD Can’t Last appeared first on The Intercept.

The Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan spent more than $40,000 to cover a single private jet bill last month, according to campaign finance records reviewed by The Intercept. The five-figure ticket was part of over $100,000 worth of campaign cash Rogers spent on luxury travel last quarter, most of it on private jet trips.

As economic woes shape the Michigan Senate race, Roger’s opponent, Democratic candidate and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed, has attacked the Republican repeatedly for his ties to corporations and billionaire donors. Rogers, who represented Michigan’s 8th District in the House from 2001 to 2015, regularly advocated in Congress to let lawmakers receive gifts and other benefits from restricted nonprofit groups. He helped defeat a 2006 bill that would have cracked down on former congressional members’ lobbying activities and banned certain privately funded trips.

For Jeffrey Hauser, a critic of corporate political influence, Rogers’s newly revealed campaign spending on luxury services might spell a warning to Michigan voters feeling the crunch of a struggling economy.

“It seems like Mike Rogers has developed a real taste for the finer things,” said Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, which is not backing any candidate in the Michigan race. “That means he is likely to want to continue to court, and be courted by, the economic elite, which portends badly for working class Michiganders who prefer their Senator have some understanding of their lives and identification with their interests.”

In September, the Rogers campaign paid $93,152 to JL Jets for at least five separate private charter flights, including the $40,000 transaction. Around the same time, the campaign also dropped another $500 on the luxury chauffeur company Blacklane. From July to September, Rogers’s campaign paid an additional $4,527 to Blacklane for luxury car services, including a $2,078 chauffeur expense on August 17. The campaign spent $683 on a pair of limo rides in August and September.

Campaigning requires a lot of travel, and El-Sayed’s campaign finance records show higher total travel costs — roughly $330,000 last quarter, according to public filings. But those funds went toward commercial flights on Delta and American airlines, Hertz car rentals, gas, Uber and Lyft rides, and hotel accommodations.

El-Sayed had a busier campaign calendar with a competitive Democratic primary against Rep. Haley Stevens, while Rogers was the presumed Republican nominee since the early days of the race. El-Sayed’s campaign said he did more than 500 events ahead of the August primary, and Rogers has carried a more relaxed schedule into the general election cycle.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Rogers pointed to El-Sayed’s spending on meals and travel on the campaign trail as well as a series of high-dollar contributions his father-in-law made to a super PAC backing the campaign.

“Abdul El-Sayed reimbursed himself $90K, and his father-in-law, a senior advisor of CAIR, gave his SuperPAC $300K,” said Rogers campaign spokesperson Abby Ronson. “If the Intercept is looking for an FEC story, I’d take a long hard look at Abdul.” The El-Sayed campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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If elected, Rogers wouldn’t be the only U.S. senator to spend big on private jets. He would appear to compete with top spenders. As public scrutiny has driven politicians away from chartered flights, only Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., spent more on private flights than Rogers did last quarter, Axios reported — and they spent it over the course of a year and a half.

The Rogers campaign did book some flights with airlines like Frontier and Southwest, spending about $29,000 on 10 flights, but luxury transportation accounted for the vast majority of the campaign’s travel expenses last quarter.

Among Rogers’s hotel spending was a $2,000 stay at The Breakers, a luxury oceanfront hotel in Palm Beach, Florida; another $1,295 at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa in Michigan; and $200 at the five-star Palazzo at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. In addition to travel costs, the campaign paid $2,165 to its deputy campaign manager Tyler Henningsen in late September for car repairs at a BMW dealership in Bloomfield Hills, one of Michigan’s most affluent areas. Henningsen did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the Rogers spokesperson said the car was used for campaign purposes.

Campaign finance rules state that spending on travel and vehicle costs is allowed, as long it’s strictly for campaign purposes. It is generally illegal to use campaign funds for personal travel; if a person uses campaign funds for mixed personal and campaign travel, they have to reimburse the campaign within 30 days. If the campaign pays for a car, that car can only be used for campaigning.

Rogers holds significant personal investments in the real estate, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity industries. His Senate campaign has received significant backing from corporate figureheads such as billionaires, Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan, the DeVos family, and Elon Musk, who through his super PAC, America PAC, has poured into the race more than $6 million since Rogers promised to “shield” the world’s richest man from congressional oversight.

On the debate stage, El-Sayed has targeted Rogers’s home in Florida and his two “yachts,” attempting to paint the former congressman as out-of-touch from everyday, working Michiganders. Public records show Rogers owned two boats measuring 32 and 39 feet in Maryland, though he reportedly sold one of them. Rogers is attempting to sell his Florida home and is living full-time in Michigan, according to news outlet Bridge Michigan.

While Rogers was in Congress, he chaired the House Intelligence Committee and was a key supporter of the Patriot Act, pushing to expand domestic spying powers. Toward the end of his time in Congress, in 2013 and 2014, he and his wife Kristi attended a pair of weekend retreats at a five-star resort, The Cloister in Sea Island, Georgia, on the dime of the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute. At the 2014 forum, described in 2022 by CBS News as “a private, off-the-record gathering of conservative leaders and wealthy donors,” Rogers spoke as a panelist in his capacity as House Intelligence Committee chair on “cybersecurity and national security issues,” disclosure forms said. 

Alongside Rogers, the 2014 event featured prominent conservative figures as speakers, such as then-House majority leader Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.; Iraq War architect Karl Rove; then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; New York Times columnist David Brooks; then-president of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling; and Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Also in attendance were Betsy and Dick DeVos, Donald Trump’s first-term education secretary and former Amway CEO, respectively, who have since funded Rogers’s current run and several past campaigns.

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A few weeks after the conservative retreat, Alexander stepped down as NSA director under the cloud of the Edward Snowden leaks revealing the U.S. government’s role in a global spying network. That year Alexander founded cybersecurity firm IronNet, which hired Rogers in 2015 after he decided not to run for reelection. He was later elevated to a board role at IronNet — which has since gone bankrupt — and received more than $700,000 in payments and held stock with the company worth $250,000 to $500,000, according to financial disclosure forms.

“Politicians spend enormous amounts of time with the super rich, either because they are seeking to raise money from them, consulting with them about the economy, or both,” Hauser said. “As a result, they start to develop expensive tastes.”

The post Mike Rogers Spent $100K on Private Jets and Luxury Travel Last Quarter appeared first on The Intercept.

Democratic leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York have been cagey about their strategy on Iran for the lame-duck period before the next Congress is sworn in on January 3. So far, months of Capitol Hill maneuvering have produced few concrete results. And one path to potential progress for ending the war is laden with risk: threatening a government shutdown.

Opponents of the war say that, with Democrats pushing for support based on their efforts to end to the war, they owe it to voters to put government spending on the line.

“It will certainly demonstrate whether Democrats are willing to stretch themselves and put up a fight and get uncomfortable,” said Hannah Morris, the vice president of government affairs for the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street, which opposes the conflict. “So much of the rhetoric has been about the Iran war.”

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In the months since the conflict began on February 28, Democrats and the handful of Republicans opposed to the war have poured most of their energy into votes based on the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which limits the president’s power to wage war without congressional approval. In June, they succeeded in securing House and Senate passage of a war powers resolution, but the Trump administration has ignored the vote, arguing the law is unconstitutional.

Advocates still believe the Trump administration should be bound by the June resolution, but they concede that other paths may have more teeth.

If they really want to stop the war, Democrats will have to confront questions of timing, divisions within their own caucus, and the risk of a government shutdown.

One prime opportunity could be the December 11 expiration of a spending bill called the continuing resolution that has been funding the government since the last shutdown. Democrats could attempt to attach a rider to the bill prohibiting the use of any of its funds for the Iran war. If that bill does not pass both chambers, the government shuts down.

The process will provide Democrats with rare leverage before the next Congress is sworn in.

Congressional Democratic leaders have not said whether they are willing to risk a shutdown, however. Jeffries did not tip his hand when he was asked during a recent interview with CNN.

“Listen, we’ll deal with the appropriations process when we deal with the appropriations process,” he said. “Right now, the mechanism that is in front of us will be to aggressively move war powers resolutions until we end this war in the best interest of the American people.”

Some Democratic candidates in hotly contested races have gone much further than Jeffries, zeroing in on the appropriations issue. Rep. Tom Barrett, of Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, was one of the few Republicans to vote for an Iran war powers resolution. But environmental activist Will Lawrence still attacked him at a recent debate on the issue of war funding.

Morris, who is part of a coalition of groups that have called on Congress to cut off funding for the war, said she is not sure how aggressively Democrats will be willing to pursue the issue during the lame-duck period.

“Will they be willing to shut down the government over this? I don’t have real answers. I think there are a lot of variables here,” she said.

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Another option supported by many advocates is the pending debate over the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual Pentagon budget and policy bill. Critics of the war argue that Congress could attempt to insert a provision into the law cutting off authorization for the conflict.

Democrats should be willing to block the bill if it does not include “meaningful restrictions” on the administration’s ability to wage the war, said Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East Policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

“That’s the mandate we’re seeing from the American people,” he said. “They shouldn’t pass a massive defense bill while leaving the administration free to pursue yet another open-ended war in the Middle East.”

The defense bill is generally considered “must-pass” legislation on Capitol Hill, providing leverage for Senate Democrats who could block it with a filibuster. The office of Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who plays a key role in the process as the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not respond to a request for comment.

Falling short of either of those paths, Democrats could continue to try to pass more war powers resolutions. With their party poised for a dramatic shift in its favor in the midterm elections, Democrats could even try to exert pressure on Republican legislators to vote in favor of the resolutions, some opponents of the war believe.

Democrats could also wait until January, when they are widely predicted to retake control of one or both chambers of Congress. Holding the gavel in the House or Senate will give them vastly expanded powers to set military spending and launch investigations into the conduct of the war.

One key Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, told The Intercept in a statement he was willing to pursue multiple paths to stopping the war, but all of them face obstacles until the next Congress.

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“I am open to exploring options for using the NDAA or appropriations bills as a way to end the war,” said Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. “That effort would most likely require bipartisan support. Unfortunately, I am not confident that there is sufficient Republican will or support for such legislative efforts or to override an inevitable veto.”

Whether in this Congress or the next, cutting off spending for the war appears to be the best way for Democrats to force the Trump administration to negotiate with Iran, according to Brian Finucane, a former State Department official who serves as a senior adviser at the nonprofit International Crisis Group.

“If they are serious,” he said, “they should be willing to play hardball, and that would require using the power of the purse.”

The post Dems Have an Opportunity to Force an End to the Iran War. Will They Take It? appeared first on The Intercept.

Already a decade late and nearly $200 billion over its original cost estimate, the F-35 program faced a new crisis. An internal government watchdog report detailed a cascade of new problems with the program, which was in a period of flux amid plans to upgrade the jet’s engine and cooling system.

The report from the Government Accountability Office criticized the Pentagon for lumping those upgrades in with the overall purchase of the planes. Conflating the two, the authors said, would limit congressional insight into cost increases. And they criticized the contractors behind the aircraft for failing to deliver the F-35 in a timely manner.

For Lockheed Martin, the main defense giant overseeing the development of the F-35, the timing was far from ideal. In a few weeks, Congress was set to debate the Pentagon’s mammoth budget — and with it, new funding for the military’s purchase of F-35 jets.

So Lockheed and its lobbyists went on a charm offensive in Washington. The weapons maker shelled out hundreds of thousands over a two-month period, in what the money-in-politics watchdog Open Secrets described as “one of the largest coordinated lobbying efforts” around that year’s military budget.

No member of Congress benefited more than Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who at the time served as the ranking member on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

From May 1 to June 30, 2023, employees and top executives from Lockheed Martin donated $59,500 to Collins’s campaign committee. The donations were outliers during that period: Collins was among the largest recipients of Lockheed cash; the company was her largest single donor over those two months; and it was the largest spending blitz on Collins by Lockheed compared to the same period in other years.

The effort appeared to pay off for Lockheed. In July 2023, less than two months after the release of the Government Accountability Office report, Collins voted in favor of appropriating funds to purchase 83 new F-35 jets. Later that year, when the final version of the military budget was signed into law, Collins celebrated the economic boon she said it would bring to the state of Maine.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee, said Collins’s support for the jet had nothing to do with donations from Lockheed or any other firm.

“Sen. Collins did not support the F-35 because of donations that she received,” Keller said.

“The F-35 jet program is a longstanding bipartisan defense priority,” Keller said. “Sen. Collins has always publicly supported the F-35 jet program, as dozens of both Republican and Democratic Senators.”

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Collins’s position on the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee likely played a role in the outsized donations, according to analyst Dan Grazier. And Collins, for her part, would have good reason to approve the spending: The F-35 program, Lockheed claims, has had a nine-figure economic impact in Maine.

Fight of Her Political Life

In the final weeks of the biggest fight of her political career against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, fresh scrutiny on Collins’s donations from defense contractors has become a sore spot for her campaign.

In some cases, the senator’s interactions with defense firms are the routine for Washington: glad-handing, lobbying, contributions, and directing pork-barrel spending back home. Not all of it, though, is standard.

Last month, a bombshell report in ProPublica detailed an FBI investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme. A former defense contractor claimed to federal agents that he worked with figures tied to Collins to disguise campaign donations — and got federal contracts totaling $32 million in return. (The FBI probe fizzled after Trump returned to office and purged the bureau; Collins denied wrongdoing, pushing back on elements of the report.)

On Wednesday, more than 250 Mainers signed a letter to the state’s attorney general asking the official to investigate the allegations of corruption, according to Maine Morning Star, a local news outlet.

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And earlier this month, The Intercept reported on donations from another defense contractor, AM General, and its parent company, whose employees gave $58,000 to fundraising committees associated with Collins after a damning assessment from the Army put its federal contracts in jeopardy.

As with the AM General donations, the contributions by employees and lobbyists of Lockheed Martin do not indicate wrongdoing by Collins or her donors. They instead illuminate how companies that garner lucrative contracts zero in on powerful members of Congress, who often tout the benefits to their states.

“This is an example of what’s wrong with our approach to buying weapons,” said William Hartung, an analyst who has written critically of defense spending and influence peddling in Washington. “If we buy things because they’re in the state of a powerful member, we’re not going to have a coherent arsenal.”

Lockheed Giving

Collins was not the only member of Congress to push for funding the F-35, which enjoyed broad bipartisan support — especially from lawmakers with eligible firms and facilities in their states. And she was not the only one to benefit from the largesse of Lockheed Martin.

From May 1 to June 30, 2023, Lockheed’s corporate PAC doled out $421,000 in a bipartisan blitz to various campaign political action committees, campaign funds, state parties, and charitable foundations. (Aside from 2024, the year of the presidential election, contributions in that two-month period in 2023 eclipsed subsequent years. In the same period this year, Lockheed’s corporate PAC made 128 donations totaling $236,000; last year, it gave $286,000 across 158 donations during the same period.)

Collins was by far the biggest single beneficiary of the influx of cash — which came at a time when she was not actively campaigning. And, unlike the donations spread out to other campaign committees, the cash going from Lockheed into Collins’s coffers during those months came exclusively in the form of individual donations by employees and executives, including the firm’s CEO and chief operating officer, data from the Federal Election Commission shows.

Lobbyists working for Lockheed contributed another $5,000 to Collins during that period, and corporate PACs for Lockheed’s lobbying firms shelled out another $5,500 total, according to FEC disclosures.

Among individual contributions by Lockheed employees, donations to Collins made up more than 10 percent of all donations during the two-month period surrounding the watchdog report.

Only the firm’s in-house employee PAC, which received 75 percent of all employee donations, took in more from figures tied to Lockheed. Collins got more than twice as much as the next highest recipient, ActBlue, the Democratic Party-aligned fundraising vehicle, which received 4 percent of all Lockheed employee contributions in that period, according to FEC data.

The vast majority donations from Lockheed employees and officials were under $1,000. Of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more during May and June 2023, 56 went to Collins.

Virtually all employee contributions from Lockheed workers and executives to Collins during her current term came during that two-month window, according to the FEC.

Lockheed donations made up a quarter of all contributions during May and June 2023 to Collins’s main fundraising arm, Collins for Senator. The next runner-up was telecom giant Charter Communications, whose employee contributions made up just 8 percent of gifts to the Collins campaign in the second quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.

A spokesperson for Lockheed did not answer specific questions regarding the reason for the sudden influx of individual contributions to Collins in 2023.

“Our employee PAC program continues to observe long-standing principles of bi-partisan political engagement in support of our business interests,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Another Vehicle Army Didn’t Want

Two years later, a similar pattern played out in miniature when a lesser-known defense firm with a troubled product enjoyed Collins’s support on Capitol Hill.

Collins went out of her way last year to slam the Pentagon for canceling its plans to purchase robotic combat vehicles from Textron and its subsidiary Howe & Howe, the Maine-based developer of the Ripsaw.

Collins has repeatedly hyped the unmanned robotic combat vehicle in Senate hearings and official statements. On June 18, 2025, she took issue with the fact that the vehicle had appeared in a recent military parade, but did not make the cut for further spending.

“It’s the height of irony that you would feature this combat vehicle in your parade as the future of the Army at the same time that you’ve canceled the contract — the cancellation of a contract that was won over a lot of other competitors,” Collins said, describing the decision as “terribly unfair and a real mistake.”

A month later, after the military budget cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins singled out Howe & Howe, and its plant in Waterboro, Maine, as a potential beneficiary of a portion of $44 million allotted to outfit the U.S. Marine Corps with amphibious and autonomous vehicles.

She gave another shoutout to Howe & Howe in January, after the 2026 military budget was signed into law. This May, during the congressional testimony by then-Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, Collins again took the military to task for cutting its planned purchase of the Ripsaw.

Textron’s corporate PAC made contributions totaling $4,000 to various PACs associated with Collins just ahead of her vote on the 2026 military budget. $3,000 of the gifts came days after Collins criticized the military for cutting its plans for the Ripsaw program that would have brought millions of dollars to Howe & Howe.

Later in the year, the Textron corporate PAC donated another $7,000 to Collins for Senator and the Collins-linked Dirigo PAC, according to FEC filings. (A spokesperson for Textron and Howe & Howe did not respond to a request for comment.)

Keller, the Senate Appropriations Committee spokesperson, said that Collins was not a member of the Armed Services Committee that voted on funding the Ripsaw.

“She doesn’t have the agency to fund or not fund the vehicle because it wasn’t through the Appropriations Committee,” Keller said, adding that Collins’s longtime support for the Ripsaw was not motivated by the Textron and Howe & Howe donations.

Employees of Textron and its subsidiary, meanwhile, made contributions to various Collins-linked PACS totaling nearly $15,000 between September 2025 and October 15, 2026, FEC data shows.

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The donations, relatively small in the post-Citizens United era of campaign finance, still illustrate a troubling pattern of how influence plays out in Washington, according to Hartung, the analyst critical of military spending.

“A lot of members lobby to get more units of something built in their state, or craft legislation for a system that only their local firm can produce,” Hartung said. “It’s kind of business as usual, but sometimes business as usual causes great harm.”

Update: October 15, 2026, 7:00 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include further statements from Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Senate Appropriations Committee, that were made after publication.

The post Lockheed Martin Showered Susan Collins With Cash as F-35 Program Hit Turbulence appeared first on The Intercept.

Agents from the Department of Homeland Security on Monday raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar ostensibly in connection with a criminal investigation into her childhood immigration to the United States. The raid was signed off on by a federal judge, apparently after a “back-and-forth” with federal law enforcement, and has been condemned by civil rights groups as highly suspect.

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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s targeting of Omar escalated even further as federal agents issued subpoenas to many of her relatives, including her sister Sahra Noor, and the Wall Street Journal reported the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her. This obscene abuse of power comes after years of Trump targeting Omar with threats, racist smears, intimidation, and calls for her deportation. 

But with rare exception, the response from the mainstream media’s pundit class has been largely muted, with the vast bulk of the coverage coming in the form of he said/she said, down-the-middle reporting. This is in stark contrast with how elite opinion-shapers responded with uniform outrage in the days after Trump’s also dubious raid on John Bolton, his former national security adviser and a neoconservative commentator, in August 2025. Both are part of a consistent pattern of Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to attack his perceived enemies, yet only the latter solicited widespread media condemnation.

The very day of the Bolton raid, we saw scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each of these newspapers also published separate pieces from their opinion staff opposing the raid, casting doubt on its legitimacy, and otherwise leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in Politico, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.

The raid on Omar’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal; no preening in The New Yorker or Politico or Atlantic about the erosion of “rule of law.” The Atlantic did run an article on the Omar raid but it was equivocal and Both Sides in its tone. (A similar Both Sides column The Atlantic published about the Bolton raid was not included in our list of opinion pieces expressing outrage over the Bolton raid.) 

This is in stark contrast to the breathless tone of outrage leveled at Trump when his DOJ targeted Bolton last year. “It is clear that Mr. Trump and his appointees,” the Times wrote in August 2025, “are perverting the justice system to serve their political interests and intimidate their critics.” “FBI raid targeting Bolton crosses a line in the Trump revenge campaign,” proclaimed the Trump ally–owned Washington Post. Even the right-wing WSJ editorial board, typically a staunch backer of Trump, got in on the fervor under the headline “Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets John Bolton,” which made clear “that second-term success for the President includes retribution.”

The Journal not only didn’t publish an editorial or column opposing the Omar raid as they did with Bolton, they published a column by assistant editorial page editor James Freeman endorsing it and using tabloid innuendo to cast aspersions on Omar.

This isn’t to say the mainstream press hasn’t reported on the Omar raid. The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all ran articles, and analysis, on the raid, but — unlike with the Bolton case — they have published no opinions expressing outrage and demanding recourse for the obvious authoritarian power grab.

The reasons for this glaring discrepancy are likely many: Omar is Black and Muslim, Bolton is white and not. Omar is a woman, Bolton is a man. Omar is considered “far left,” Bolton is squarely in the center-right of elite Washington consensus. Omar is a harsh critic of Israel, and Bolton is among its most overtly and bloodthirsty champions. The reality is it’s almost certainly a combination of all these factors. Writ large, Bolton is a member of The Club, and Omar isn’t.

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How Democrats Paved the Way for Kevin McCarthy’s Attack on Ilhan Omar

A similar dynamic of asymmetric In-Group vs. Out-Group outrage could be seen during the early months of Trump’s first term when the media spilled oceans of ink lamenting Trump’s determination to intimidate the press and lock up reporters. Yet this same press almost entirely ignored his DOJ’s absurd prosecution of two independent reporters, Aaron Cantu and Alexei Wood, for covering the January 20 unrest during his 2017 inauguration — a case that was found to have no merit. Ultimately, the city of Washington, D.C., was, despite the lack of any sustained media attention, forced to settle with a payout to the persecuted reporters. 

As a rule for U.S. media, the consistent application of principle — as high-minded and lofty as they may appear — takes a back seat to class solidarity. Bolton is a corporate media figure, a national security elite, a hawk, and a committed institutionalist. He is, in other words, one of them. Omar is none of these things. As a direct result, her outrageous persecution by Trump is noted and perhaps critiqued around the margins but is not a source of widespread, sustained outrage and condemnation. This distinction is reserved, very clearly, for those in The Club.

The post Trump Is Targeting Ilhan Omar. Where’s the Elite Media Outrage? appeared first on The Intercept.

Though the investigation into Omar has reportedly been ongoing for years, an ICE official working in immigration enforcement suggested the timing of the raid raised questions.

“She’s always been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration,” said the ICE official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood. “This has to be politically motivated.”

The raid is the latest of what several officials inside ICE told The Intercept were a series of moves — policy changes, sweeping initiatives, and, in Omar’s case, a specific operation — that reflect a scramble to help lift Republicans’ dimming prospects in November’s midterm elections.

In the last month, ICE has undertaken steps like requiring vehicle stop training, announcing surges into sanctuary cities, and freezing then quickly unfreezing non-criminal deportations — what one official called a “midterm panic move.”

According to analysts, these politically charged moves are rapidly degrading the reputation of law enforcement agencies among many Americans.

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“Throughout the Trump administration, we have seen them use law enforcement for overtly political purposes, often directly targeting blue states or blue politicians for their actions” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “This is something that has really been a significant challenge for the reputation of law enforcement, because we have seen so many issues along these lines where there are allegations of these overtly political actions.”

Reporting had linked the raid on Omar’s home immigration paperwork — she arrived in the U.S. as a refugee in 1995 and naturalized five years later — but a second ICE official familiar with the matter questioned that explanation.

“There is something more than that, there have to be other charges for the substantiation of the warrant because a judge wouldn’t sign something beyond statute of limitations,” said the official, who is with Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that carried out the raid, who also spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity.

An article in the New York Post suggested the investigation might be related to an effort by Omar in 2019, just after she arrived in Congress, to correct her birth year in a Minnesota state legislature library.

The statute of limitations for crimes related to citizenship, according to a Justice Department website, is 10 years. Civil denaturalization proceedings do not have a statute of limitations, but must meet certain conditions, according to Reichlin-Melnick.

“In order to subject someone to civil denaturalization,” Reichlin-Melnick said, “the government has must prove either that the person committed fraud or that they were ineligible for naturalization in the first place.”

“A Waste of Time”

According to accounts from inside ICE, the moves, allegedly motivated by the midterms, are creating chaos and confusion inside the agency — and fostering resentment among employees.

“We are highly trained agents who should be working child exploitation and trafficking cases, instead we are being used as pawns in our administration’s games,” said the Homeland Security Investigations official, touching on a shift away from the ICE branch’s traditional areas of focus. “I think everything happening with the agency right now is related to the midterms and to stoke divisive fires.”

Politically motivated operations started ramping up inside Homeland Security Investigations after federal agents were ordered to pursue a criminal voter fraud probe across nine states in early September, according to the first ICE official.

“The voter fraud initiative was just inefficient and ridiculous,” the official said. “Knocking on doors to question people about voting before you even have evidence to present to them is a non-starter.”

The official added, “Directing your entire workforce to do that for weeks instead of real criminal investigations is a waste of time.”

“It Backfired”

With the midterms themselves approaching, fresh controversies engulfed ICE, prompting the administration to react with a string of messy policy changes and public announcements.

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As the voter fraud investigations were underway, public backlash erupted after immigration officers from ICE’s other division, Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, shot and wounded a 28-year-old Venezuelan man during a traffic stop in Austin, Texas, on September 20.

Days later, on the weekend of September 25, ICE leadership quietly issued internal orders for a major change that would overhaul nationwide immigration enforcement. The orders directed all deportation officers to stop arresting undocumented immigrants without criminal histories. After news of the orders broke in the right-wing Daily Wire, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, denied the story.

Despite the denial, ICE officials operating across the country told The Intercept that the orders were legitimate and stayed in place for nearly a week.

“We reverted back to Biden-era enforcement,” said one official with Enforcement and Removal Operations, who was ordered to stop all arrest of non-criminal immigrants, including those who had standing deportation orders from immigration judges. “The DHS denied it but the orders stayed in place for 4-5 days and we followed them.”

Another deportation officer, who also asked for anonymity, described the orders as a “midterm panic move” in response to the ICE shooting in Austin.

“Our FODS” — field office directors — “told us through our team group chats and word-of-mouth to keep it out of the press, it was never in writing. I think leadership wanted to dial things back after the Austin shooting, but the orders got leaked and it backfired.”

On the same day as the leak and denial, the Department of Homeland Security seemed to take a harder public line by announcing a “nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities” targeting “criminal illegal aliens.”

Vehicle Stops “Shit Show”

On October 1, a week after the stand-down order, the Washington Examiner reported on another leaked DHS guidance that announced the formally amended ICE’s vehicle stops policy.

The Department of Homeland Security issued another direct denial, downplaying the significance of the guidance, which took aim at keeping unexperienced personnel from engaging with vehicles.

“Wrong, this is nothing new. This memo makes no changes to how ICE conducts vehicle stops,” the department said. “ALL officers have always received vehicle stop training.”

In 2025, the DHS cut training time requirements for ICE’s academy by approximately 40 percent, including cuts to driving and firearms training. The cuts came ahead of a hiring spree that added about 12,000 people to ICE’s ranks to meet the Trump administration’s deportation goals.

The recent amendments to ICE’s vehicle stops policy marks the third time this summer that department and ICE leadership ordered Enforcement and Removal Operations officials to change how they engage with vehicles. Previously, ICE halted and then amended its policy after immigration officers shot and killed two men during traffic stops in Texas and Maine in July. These orders were also challenged by official government social media channels.

“There’s clearly a disconnect between leadership on the ground level and what’s coming out of Washington” said one official. “It’s a total shitshow.”

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Then, on Thursday, October 8, plainclothes ICE officers opened fire on a vehicle during a targeted enforcement operation in New York City. At least seven rounds were fired into the car, according to reports. The driver, a 28-year-old Dominican man, was struck in the neck as his 5-year-old son sat in the backseat.

“The footage looks like a carjacking, they fucked up again,” said another Homeland Security Investigations official after reviewing video of the incident. “ERO was never given the freedom to work like they have in the past 2 years. They were always much more restrictive with their general enforcement.”

“Now comes these free-for-all mandates, and these guys who weren’t used to ‘enforcement’ and dealing with the public who were thrust into this world. Couple that with no tactical training — disaster.”

The post Inside ICE, Officials Question String of Trump Admin “Midterm Panic Moves” appeared first on The Intercept.