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.

For decades, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been sounding the alarm about rising inequality and the concentration of power in America. Having served in three presidential administrations, he’s become one of the loudest and clearest voices challenging Democrats for their failures in the Trump era.

Reich joins Intercept Briefing host Akela Lacy for a live conversation about the most pressing issues this midterm season. He is the author of numerous books, including his memoir “Coming Up Short,” out in paperback now. His media company, Inequality Media, has also made a timely new documentary, called “The Work in Progress,” exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times.

Watch live at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT.

Transcript coming soon.

The post The Intercept Live in Conversation With Robert Reich 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 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.

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.

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.

The Defending Main Street super PAC spent thousands of dollars on an attack ad to audiences thousands of miles away from the Maine Senate race it was targeting. 

The ad hit Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson on the issue of taxes and cost of living in the state.

“Maine can’t afford Troy Jackson and all his taxes,” the ad said.

The group, which describes itself as the “most effective independent expenditure organization supporting the governing wing of the Republican Party,” paid for the ad to attack Jackson, who’s mounting a challenge to incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins. Both candidates have made cost of living a central plank of their campaigns in the run-up to the midterm election on November 3.

The only problem with the ad in question: The group paid for the video ad to show more than 1 million times in the wrong Portland.

Rather than being delivered to audiences in Portland, Maine, the state’s largest city, the ad was shown to digital audiences more than 3,000 miles and three time zones away in Portland, Oregon, according to data from Google.

The mix-up may be embarrassing for the super PAC, which is oriented around electing so-called moderate Republicans like Collins, but likely spared voters in Maine from the latest wave in a deluge of ad spending in the state, according to Andy O’Brien, a political operative who supports Jackson.

“We have billionaires with no connection to Maine spending millions of dollars to buy Susan Collins the election, so it’s pretty hilarious to see them throwing money at the wrong Portland,” O’Brien told The Intercept. “It’s clear these people don’t know anything about Maine, because they’re directing their ads to the wrong Portland.”

“I’m glad they’re wasting their money in Oregon and not continuing to waste it in Maine.”

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Representatives of the Jackson’s and Collins’s campaigns and a spokesperson for Defending Main Street did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The group is affiliated with Republican Main Street Partnership, a nonprofit group that counts Collins among its nine members in the Senate. Republican Main Street Partnership was initially aimed at supporting moderate Republicans that has, along with much of the rest of the GOP, moved to the right in recent years.

Busy Maine Street

The race between Collins and Jackson — a longtime Maine politico who stepped in to replace Graham Platner after Platner dropped out amid allegations of sexual assault — has become one of the most high-profile races in the country in the run-up to the midterms.

The campaign has helped make Maine one of the top locations for political spending this cycle, according to the Portland Press Herald. 

The Defending Main Street ad, however, did not have the impact its sponsors might have hoped. The ad buy first came to light after an X user reported seeing multiple anti-Troy Jackson ads in Portland, Oregon.

“I’ve gotten 5 anti-Troy Jackson ads in the last 24 hours. I choose to believe they mixed up Portlands,” wrote the user, who goes by the name Lillian Belle and posts about progressive politics in Oregon. “Hearing I’m not alone lol.”

That suspicion appears to be borne out by data from Google Ads Transparency Center, which shows Defending Main Street dropped between $20,000 and $25,000 to place the 30-second ad in hundreds of ZIP codes across Oregon and the state of Washington between October 8 and October 11.

O’Brien, the Maine political operative, said, “At least now Portland, Oregon, residents can enjoy some of the crap we’ve been seeing every single day.”

Correction: October 12, 2026, 2:04 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated how many time zones away Portland, Oregon, is from Portland, Maine; it is three, not two.

The post Susan Collins-Aligned Super PAC Buys Attack Ads in Portland… Oregon appeared first on The Intercept.

As so-called prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket embed themselves in every aspect of our daily lives, from elections to sports and entertainment, concerns have grown about what the explosion of these poorly understood, loosely regulated platforms could mean for regular people and democracy writ large.

Celebrities from LeBron James to Sydney Sweeney have inked lucrative deals with prediction platforms. Legacy news outlets have even begun including prediction market data in their coverage. And the Trump family is deeply embedded in these platforms’ success; Donald Trump Jr.’s VC firm just became a lead investor in Polymarket, and he is a paid adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

But what actually is a prediction market, and what separates it from online sports betting platforms like DraftKings or FanDuel? 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Kate Knibbs — a senior writer at Wired who covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet — breaks down the battles to define prediction markets; what they’re getting away with in the meantime, while existing in this “weird” regulatory gray zone; and their potential to be a “disruptive force” in next month’s midterm elections.

States have been looking to regulate these platforms like they do sports gambling. But the companies are pushing back: The founders of Kalshi donated $200,000 to a new Texas-focused political action committee, a week after state lawmakers held hearings to investigate whether prediction markets constitute sports betting, which is illegal in Texas.

“Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight,” says Knibbs. “Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. … I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars.”

In addition to spending heavily on lobbying, their survival strategy includes inking deals with mainstream media companies like CNN, CNBC, and even Substack to establish credibility.

“I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit, while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world,” says Knibbs. “They are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: So Akela, we completely missed a major milestone for the Intercept Briefing.

AL: That’s right, we published 100 episodes — and technically this is our 102nd.

JW: I actually can’t believe how fast the time has flown. Thank you all so much for sticking with us every week. We genuinely and literally could not do this without you. Akela, what are you watching this week?

AL: The story that was all over my feed on Thursday morning was this bombshell report from the New York Times about how a senior adviser to U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suppressed and distorted internal reports that were critical of Israel, including a report describing the dozens of Palestinians who were killed near food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation last summer. This reporting comes after the anniversary this week of the October 7 attacks in 2023.

There was also a lot of news in New York City where protesters met Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an October 7 vigil and were shouting him down, basically criticizing him over his administration’s inaction on different policies that are within his purview in terms of sticking to some of his campaign promises on Israel policy, including the sale of occupied land in the West Bank that occurs across New York City.

JW: Online, what I had really seen was a lot of misconstruing of what the protesters were actually doing there. A lot of people saying they were just upset about Mamdani’s October 7 post, where he both spoke about the loss of life in Israel and the people who were killed on October 7, but then also talked about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and about the long history that led to the point of October 7. So there were some who were saying that the protesters felt that he wasn’t deferential enough to Gaza protesters in that post. But obviously the reality, as you’ve pointed out, is that while there are, I’m sure, a myriad of reasons that people showed up that day, a lot of it had to do with actual policy disagreements.

Speaking of protest movements, in France, hundreds of thousands of protesters — including students, teachers, and union leaders — have taken to the streets to protest widespread education inequality. The protests began in the suburbs outside of Paris, which are plagued by deep racial and socioeconomic inequality.

Students say they’ve suffered significant neglect, from teacher shortages to crumbling infrastructure. As the protests continued, they’ve really been bolstered by union leaders and left-leaning politicians. Now, there have been accounts of violence from the police towards protesters, and thousands have been arrested. Another mass demonstration was held on Thursday as well. 

It really made me think back to that Nikole Hannah-Jones essay in The New York Times from a few weeks ago, where she wrote about her own experience navigating our unequal education system in the U.S. as a parent. It’s been really interesting to read about the parallels in France to our domestic system, where we’re also currently seeing massive cuts to the education system, particularly for vulnerable communities in programs like Head Start, but also in college programs throughout the country that are seeing cuts in high schools.

So it’s interesting to see both those parallels and the anger we’re witnessing in France toward not just cuts, but the long-standing inequality that’s been present.

AL: That’s one of many issues that will be top of mind for voters as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections next month.

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JW: We’re less than a month away from the midterms, and among this long, long, and growing list of concerns around election integrity, prediction markets have somehow made their way into the conversation. So while these markets are best known for users betting on sports, Kalshi and Polymarket users — and by the way, these are prediction market platforms — are also betting on election outcomes.

So a number of controversies have come up in the primaries related to these platforms. Both of these platforms have had to ask their paid influencers to remove misleading information on social media. I get into all of that and much, much more with Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED. She covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet.

Kate, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Kate Knibbs: Thanks so much for having me. 

JW: Kate, we wanted to speak to you today because prediction and betting markets appear to be everywhere these days. You can’t walk down a busy street without seeing an ad for one, or on TV, watching your favorite sport’s team. Celebrities are cashing in. NBA player, LeBron James has a major deal with Polymarket, the prediction platform. Actress Sydney Sweeney made waves with her ad promoting Novig, a sports prediction site. Prediction markets have become ubiquitous.

So to start, how are prediction markets being defined? How do they differ or not from sports betting and gambling, and how are they similar? 

KK: OK, you’re starting off with a very hard question because— 

JW: It’s a big question. [Laughter.]

KK: There’s this huge, ongoing, multifaceted legal battle happening in the United States right now to define prediction markets. So what the federal government and the prediction markets think is these are regulated financial instruments that are traded on regulated financial exchanges. This view of prediction markets perceives them as a cousin to traditional commodities exchanges — except instead of trading corn futures, you’re trading futures on who’s going to win the Super Bowl, who’s going to win the presidential election, whether Iran is going to nuke anyone.

It’s just this idea that these are financial markets for anything. Kalshi actually means, I believe, “everything” in Arabic. And the idea behind the platform is that they want to commodify absolutely everything in the world.

Now, a lot of states have seen this and gone, “OK, wait, but you’re also allowing people to trade futures on the outcome of sports events. That’s just sports gambling, and we want the tax money. And we don’t think that the federal government should be able to just give you carte blanche to operate in our states without our permission, without you having to abide by state gambling laws.”

There’s honestly dozens and dozens of lawsuits to the point where I don’t have the exact figure. It’s upwards of 50. So at the moment, the status quo is that they’re “financial exchanges.” Whether that will change and they’ll be reclassified as gambling platforms remains to be seen and will likely go to the Supreme Court.

To make matters even more confusing — there are two main prediction markets right now, Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange in the United States. Polymarket has Polymarket U.S., which is a federally regulated exchange with the United States.

But Polymarket’s flagship product, like what you’re probably thinking of — the website polymarket.com — that people go on and trade about the Iran war? That is an offshore, unregulated exchange that Americans are actually banned from using, even though it’s headquartered in America and heavily promoted in America.

So it’s actually in its own weird regulatory gray zone right now, and I think there are intentions to bring the entire exchange back into the U.S., but right now, the main Polymarket is not supposed to be accessed by people in the U.S. It doesn’t have the “Know Your Customer” regulations that something like Kalshi does, so people can trade anonymously, and it’s just sort of a different beast. So there’s that layer that makes things even more confusing. 

JW: From your perspective, what is the difference between placing a bet on who wins the Super Bowl on something like DraftKings, and making a prediction on something like the Super Bowl? Understanding that, yeah, this is complicated, but what is the difference between those two things?

KK: It’s complicated on a technical level in that when you’re placing a bet on something like DraftKings — DraftKings has a house, so you are giving money to the platform.

And with prediction markets, you’re supposed to be trading with another person. It’s supposed to be peer to peer, and that’s why it’s allegedly more like a financial exchange.

In practice, though, if I’m betting that the Bears win, and they win, I make money either way. Functionally, for most regular people who are using these platforms, there’s not much of a difference at all. 

JW: I want to get into some of the impacts and some of the potential harm, but first, you alluded to some of these state fights, and so I wanted to get into one of them in Texas and how these prediction markets are responding.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the founders of Kalshi, the prediction market platform, dropped $200,000 into a new Texas-focused PAC.

The state has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country, where it’s pretty much illegal outside of the state lottery and some animal races. Kalshi’s founders’ contributions come one week after Texas lawmakers held a hearing to investigate whether prediction platforms like Kalshi are actually just gambling sites.

What is known about how these companies are trying to influence lawmakers and shape policies that are going to affect their bottom line? 

KK: Kalshi in particular is making an extremely concentrated push into political lobbying. It has a murderers’ row of lawyers — many of whom come from the Biden administration — fighting to ensure that it stays a federally regulated financial exchange and doesn’t get reclassified as gambling. It is basically continually hiring different comms people and lobbyists who come from D.C. and know how to get things done.

There are a few different organizations that it’s associated with, in addition to the PACs that it’s giving money to. One is called the Coalition for Prediction Markets, and that does a lot of advocacy work on behalf of regulated exchanges, really trying to ensure there’s a bipartisan coalition that approves of these markets being regulated like financial exchanges.

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It’s also worth mentioning, right now, the company has pretty deep pockets. Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight. They are willing to put everything on the line and as much money as necessary on the line to ensure that they have the right people in Washington advocating on their behalf.

JW: I want to get into who they have in Washington a little bit more and what’s going on with the federal government in this regard. But I also want to talk about their potential impact on the midterms.

You reported in August that “election officials are preparing for prediction markets to sow chaos in the midterms.” You spoke to election officials across the country for that story. What did you hear from them? What are their major concerns? 

KK: There’s a lot of concern about this. One of the main concerns is actually not directly tied to how the markets are resolved. So it wouldn’t be tied to how, for example, Kalshi or Polymarket called an election — but it’s tied to how these platforms currently use social media.

Both of the prediction markets have very popular X accounts and social media accounts, and they really use them like they are more traditional media companies. There’s a lot of breaking, scoop. There’s all of these news summaries blasted out to millions of followers. There have already been some cases where the way that these prediction markets have been updating their followers has been confusing or misleading for voters. They’ve made social media posts that implied that a race was over when it wasn’t.

There’s concern that their social media presences will be a disruptive force. Right now, when we’re in a moment where a lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever. If a candidate that someone has put money on them winning ends up losing, but then one of these prediction markets sent out a tweet two hours before the polls closed, implied that it was a sure thing — that that could anger the electorate to the point where poll workers would be in jeopardy, or there would just be even more rancor and discord and distrust of the election process. That’s one of their concerns. 

Another major concern is that there could be market manipulation in some of the markets that are directly tied to elections. We’ve already seen — Kalshi has caught politicians trading on their races. None of them were really successful in moving the odds for a long period of time or anything. But there’s still a risk, especially on Polymarket offshore where people can trade semi-anonymously, that there could be bad actors coming in deliberately trying to manipulate the markets in a way that, again, would make the wagering electorate very angry when they ended up losing money on races that they thought they would win, in part because the markets were manipulated to make them think they would win.

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There are a few different reasons why people are really concerned. Then there’s the overarching concern that encouraging people to gamble on the elections is going to change their relationship with the electoral process in a very detrimental way to society. It’s not tied to any one specific race, but more of a general, “This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.” I honestly think that that’s the one that I’m the most on board with as a real threat.

JW: These platforms are partnering with traditional media as well. Your reporting has shown, and other reporting as well, that we’re seeing these partnerships between Polymarket and Dow Jones and Substack; Kalshi has deals with CNN, CNBC, and Fox.

What is known about how these partnerships and how the data from Polymarket and Kalshi are being integrated into news coverage? Does this give them an air of legitimacy that maybe is unearned? 

KK: I think that striking these deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility that they might otherwise not have at all with the general population.

If you flip around, I’ve been waking up super early with my baby and turning on [CNBC’s] “Squawk Box” — because I hate myself, I guess [laughs]. And I’m always amazed: They are constantly bringing up Kalshi. The Kalshi odds are another part of the program in the same way that like the stock market ticker is. It’s really just considered another signal to tell people about what’s going on with the world, what’s going on with different markets — and they’re not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN, Dow Jones.

I’m sure there’s going to be more partnerships inked by the time the year is up, too. I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world.

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They’re not inaccurate; they’re not more inaccurate than polling in many cases. I think there are many reasonable arguments to be made that these can be sources of information that have use cases. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in writing about them, to be honest, is because I do think that they’re fascinating signals about public sentiment.

That said, they are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have. 

JW: In that vein, I wanted to talk about a really interesting story you published on Monday, about a new prediction market — Verifact Markets — which allows users to essentially place predictions on facts, like where the Covid-19 virus originated from, and whether the moon landing was staged.

You spoke to tech investor, Peter Wokwicz, whose family office Positron Capital Management, is funding and incubating the start-up, writing that Wokwicz, “envisions the startup as a way to settle debates over hot-button issues like the amount of energy consumed by AI data centers.”

How does predicting on a fact even work, and should prediction markets be in the business of adjudicating reality?

KK: Such an interesting question, and it’s just such a bonkers startup. I get a lot of pitches from startups in the prediction market space in my inbox at this point, and most of them I just ignore for my own sanity. This one was so off-the-wall that I had to speak to them, and I had to know more about how this would actually play out, because it’s such a zany concept.

I still have a lot of questions because, as I laid out in the piece, they’re pretty unwilling to give potential users or the media any specifics about how they’ll ultimately resolve the markets.

My first question was, “OK, well, if somebody wanted to prove a point, they could just put a bunch of money on whatever their desired outcome would be, and then point to that and say, ‘See, I was right.’”

And the Verifacts team was quick to assure me that they weren’t actually going to resolve the markets based on the outcome of the markets alone. It was going to be how people were trading on them and the odds. Then they were going to use some sort of proprietary, AI-flavored system to adjudicate the truth.

JW: Of course. 

KK: There was a lot of hand-waving going on. The market just opened, so we’ll see, first of all, if anyone’s going to use it, and second of all, whether they’re actually going to be able to clear up any of the long-standing mysteries or debates about conspiracy theories that are ongoing, because it seems like an extremely tall order.

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A friend of mine texted me after I published that article and was like, “I think we just had our Pets.com moment for the prediction market space.” This specific startup is really indicative of how frothy the bubble is right now. You’re just rolling out a prediction market for the past, and people are seemingly OK with it.

We’ll see if they actually manage to do that. I definitely don’t think that a world in which Verifact markets will be able to adjudicate contentious specifics about reality would be good, but I also am very skeptical that that will actually happen. 

JW: That’s a fair point. Reading the article, which is really well-written and interesting by the way, I thought it was a very good catch when you pointed out that it would be a very big deal if they could figure out what actually caused the Covid-19 virus, if they could give a definitive answer, and you’re like, “Well, major news outlets are really interested in some of these questions.”

I did want to get into some of the possible harms here though. Prediction markets obviously want to distinguish themselves from sports betting, but people suffering from gambling addictions and the clinicians who treat them have said both produce the same results. That’s according to reporting from The Associated Press earlier this year. 

“There may be real differences in how these products are defined or regulated, but in the therapy room, we are often seeing the same cycle of anticipation, action and reaction play out again and again.” That’s what Dr. Cynthia Grant told the AP. She’s the vice president of clinical for Birches Health, which operates a national network of providers for treating gambling addiction.

Kate, what have you found in your reporting? Do they really differ in terms of promoting addictive tendencies? 

KK: No, I don’t think so. I’ve talked to some people who are working in the addiction space to try to get some clarification about whether there’s a big difference, for example, in demographics of people who are coming in with problematic behaviors in prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

I haven’t actually written anything about it yet because I’ve been still gathering thread, but what I’ve found so far is that there’s a ton of overlap. One therapist I spoke to noted that they anecdotally have seen more women who have been coming in with problematic behaviors tied to prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

It’s still really something that predominantly affects young men. The prediction markets, even while they’re having these battles and insisting that they’re financial instruments, have at least nodded towards the reality that the way that people use their products has a lot in common with gambling and wagering.

They’ve come up with different guardrails. Both sportsbooks and prediction markets now offer people an opportunity to self-exclude. So if you basically want to ban yourself from something like DraftKings, you can, and now from something like Kalshi, you can. Which obviously is a good start, but it doesn’t resolve the baseline fact that what they’re offering is something that is speculative, and you’re putting money on the line.

For many people, it can be fun and entertaining in the same way that people wagering small sums of money on football games in traditional sportsbooks can be fun and entertaining. But there’s inevitably always going to be a portion of the population that struggles with addictive behaviors, and the way that these platforms incentivize risky financial choices.

As they grow even more and more mainstream, inevitably that’s going to mean that there’s going to be more and more people who struggle with that kind of behavior. I don’t know if there’s any version of these products that’s going to exist that can do away with that kind of harm altogether.

I really perceive these platforms, both sportsbooks and prediction markets, they’re vice platforms at heart — in the same way that alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there’s no inventing a healthy alcohol. There’s no inventing a type of prediction market or sportsbook or stock exchange that doesn’t have some portion of the people using it displaying really problematic behaviors.

JW: It sounds like what you’re saying is that these are almost like the flavored vapes of the online world, in some way, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s so safe,” and now all of the kids are smoking these vapes. 

KK: Yes. 

JW: There’s something similar about it. And there’s a ubiquitousness about it that feels really different, too. What you just said about women being more pulled in, potentially — obviously, we don’t know that research yet — that makes sense to me, only because I see the ads in a way that I never would get ads for sports betting.

Do you want to place a bet on “Dancing With the Stars”? Do you want to place a bet on whether or not Donald Trump’s tie is going to be this color that day? Things that are outside of the sports world that kind of appeal to a larger audience. That clearly seems to be the goal, like you said earlier.

KK: “Love Island” was a big one for a while, and “Survivor.” There are certain reality shows that have really robust markets, and I think that the people on them skew more female than they would versus a football market or basically anything happening on the sportsbook. So yeah, the ubiquity is crazy.

It’ll be interesting to see how long these platforms are able to cater to the 18-to-24[-year-old] crowd. There are some, Novig, for example, like the prediction market startup that Sydney Sweeney’s involved with, they are only 21+ and are positioning themselves as a more virtuous option because of that.

I could see regulators really pushing to raise the participation floor to 21. I don’t think that the other major players are going to do it voluntarily. But, yeah, just how rampant this seems on college campuses doesn’t seem great. 

JW: It’s hard to argue that. And when we’re also talking about the harm of these platforms, I think it’s important to also talk about who is propping them up.

I know earlier we got a little bit into who was behind these real attempts to limit regulation. Of course, the elephant in the room here is that these industries have exploded in an environment where a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgate to legalized sports betting, and you also have a president and his family fully invested in the prediction market industry succeeding.

When it comes to the legal battles to regulate companies like Polymarket and Kalshi, the Trump administration is backing the prediction market operators, fighting the states who are at minimum trying to enforce some regulations or outright ban them where sports betting and gambling is illegal.

Can you talk more about this tension and the stakeholders who in particular have a lot to gain by limiting regulations on these industries?

KK: I think that any conversation about what’s going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket. His VC firm, 1789 Capital, just became the lead investor for Polymarket’s latest fundraising round. He’s, in addition to that, also a paid adviser to Kalshi.

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In addition to that, Trump Media was planning on launching its own prediction market. It walked that back a little, and now it just has this weird partnership with crypto.com. But Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. It’s the fact that it’s coloring everything that’s going on here. 

I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars, or people affiliated with the Biden administration, or Democratic politicians.

Will that be enough? I don’t know. But yeah, at the moment, the very explicit financial ties that the Trump family has to the leading players in this world seem to be directing how easily it’s been for them to explode in popularity.

JW: With all of that said, with the Trump family’s interest, with the fact that these companies know that they need to get in good with Democrats as things go forward, where is this going to go?

Where do these platforms go from here? Do you see them massively expanding? Do you really see any kind of effort at regulation? I frankly, five years ago, could not have predicted that I would be interviewing people about prediction markets and sports betting as this kind of major force. Where do we go from here? 

KK: Right now, almost everyone I talk to who is a legal expert paying attention to the regulatory battles is expecting the Supreme Court to end up taking one of these cases — and most of the cases are specifically about whether the sports markets are gambling or not.

It’s really unclear how they will land on that, so there is a world in which the sports markets end up getting reclassified as gambling. I definitely don’t think that these markets are going away, by any means. Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade.

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Kalshi and Polymarket are often described as arch-rivals, and they are, but they’re also gunning for CME Group and more traditional financial institutions. So, we’ll see. I do think that we will probably get more guardrails at some point, I hope, but not until a new administration comes in.

If the Supreme Court ends up siding with state regulators and reclassifying the sports markets, that will have a pretty big impact on the bottom lines of these companies, because right now the war markets and some of the more controversial geopolitical markets get a lot of attention, but most retail traders are using these to bet on sports. So yeah, I think they’re not going away. They might be reined in, but not in the near term. 

JW: Sounds like we have a lot to watch out for. We’re going to leave it there. Kate, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Kate Knibbs’s reporting at Wired. 

KK: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Prediction Markets Have a Lock on the Midterms appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s the year of the democratic socialist. But the group that helped start the earthquake currently transforming the Democratic Party almost didn’t make it to 2026.

After suffering major losses last election cycle after a deluge of pro-Israel lobby spending, Justice Democrats, which supports progressive candidates getting elected to Congress, was on the verge of being written about in the past tense.

“Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC,” says communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability.”

But Justice Democrats resurrected itself, had its most successful primary season to date, and helped put democratic socialism on the map. So what changed? 

The group says it won big this year, even being massively outspent, because it tapped into the brewing frustration among voters — frustration directed at Democratic Party leaders. “We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back, and what voters were looking for as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want,” says Andrabi. “That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Andrabi speaks to host Akela Lacy about how the group that helped elect Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib has seen their candidates make impressive gains in the primaries, and how they’re planning to leverage their wins — and what they can learn from their losses — beyond November.

This primary season, Justice Democrats endorsed 15 candidates; seven won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won.

“This work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress,” says Andrabi. “These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.”

“Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. So, Akela, how are you doing? What’s been top of mind for you this week? 

AL: I am really stuck on this news that apparently hackers now have information on all FBI agents, which is crazy. Hackers claimed that they were able to breach a bunch of FBI services and steal a bunch of information about federal agents. 

That’s on top of another insane story that I saw on Thursday morning about yet another rogue AI agent, but this time it hacked an Australia government healthcare portal — an OpenAI agent. I don’t know if you saw that, but that really stuck with me.

JW: All of these AI attacks, everything that’s come out, I keep thinking back to our interview with Karen Hao, who wrote “Empire of AI,” and how so much of the stuff that she’s warned about is now something that people are talking about in the discourse. It’s all really scary stuff, but it’s also stuff that’s kind of been reported on before, so it is interesting to see it all blow up now. 

As someone who started in television, I have to say I cannot stop thinking about this Paramount deal. So for those who don’t know, on Monday, Paramount reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros., which would give Trump ally David Ellison control of a massive media empire, which includes both CNN and CBS News. Ellison is reportedly considering tapping Elon Musk for an investment, which would give the billionaire a stake in two of the largest news organizations in the world. 

AL: This is all happening while the White House is waging a war on mainstream media outlets: CNN, Politico, and MS Now. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the White House efforts to strip those outlets of their White House press credentials. But we saw President Trump this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York ask CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins why she was there because she wasn’t supposed to be covering him — but she wasn’t at the White House.

So the state of our media ecosystem is healthy as ever. 

JW: Things are going great in our democracy. In other news, ProPublica reported that in 2024, the FBI was seeking to launch an investigation into a potential pay-to-play scheme between Sen. Susan Collins and one of her top donors, a former defense contractor who reportedly told federal agents that he had received millions in federal contracts by donating to campaigns of politicians. The investigation was reportedly halted after President Donald Trump returned to office and gutted the entire bureau. 

Akela, you had a really interesting campaign finance story come out this week as well, relating to Sen. John Fetterman. What happened there?   

AL: I got a text on Monday from a source who had seen an email that the Fetterman campaign sent from a domain called, “gopsquad.com.” The story we basically did was about after finding several other conservative email domains that Fetterman was using to send this campaign fundraising email after he delivered a surprise video speech to the Republican midterm convention earlier this month, was that he’s either renting or buying Republican targeted email lists to raise money right now.

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We’ve been covering Fetterman’s fall from grace over the past several years, but his fundraising numbers have really struggled as he has pursued this rightward turn on issues from immigration to Iran to Israel. Many of his small dollar donors, we reported in, in recent years, were asking for their money back.

We see his campaign now pretty openly just asking Republicans for money. Something funny — well, funny or depressing —that happened on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Mike Lee from Utah was sending out emails fundraising off of Fetterman’s fundraising. I’ll just read you this email.

The subject line: “I just got this email from John Fetterman.” “Friend, I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now. I need your help to draft him. Sign here. Thanks, Sen. Mike Lee.” Which is pretty chef’s kiss, if you ask me. 

JW: I have to say: gopsquad.com is probably my favorite part. 

AL: Not subtle.

JW: Not at all subtle. Is there anything else that you’re following that you want to talk about? 

AL: We’re still waiting to learn the name of the ICE officer who shot a 28-year-old Venezuelan delivery driver in Austin, Texas. I spoke with sources there who said that the local district attorney’s office and the Austin Police Department are cooperating to basically get whatever information they can from HSI — the Department of Homeland Security Investigations — which apparently has not declined to give them any information, but also hasn’t given them any information yet.

So we’re seeing a very similar playbook as to what we saw after the ICE shootings in Minneapolis, where local law enforcement and prosecutors are basically fighting with federal agencies to try to get any information — the bare minimum, this person’s name — out of this. The Travis County district attorney, which encompasses Austin, has apparently been in close touch with the Minneapolis prosecutor to learn how they navigated the situation.

I’ll remind our listeners, we interviewed Mary Moriarty, the Minneapolis prosecutor, who was working on prosecuting the ICE shootings in Minneapolis earlier in the year. 

JW: To your point, it’s been so many months, and there’s still not any kind of justice in those cases, and it’s hard to imagine that there will be in this most recent shooting.

Thinking about ICE and the election, I’ve been reporting on groups that are trying to fight back against potential election interference. They’re planning for a ton of different scenarios, one of which includes ICE potentially coming to the polls and being there to intimidate voters of color and immigrant voters as well.

These groups are trying to prevent that harassment, and so they’re there to monitor, to report, and to keep people safe against a terrifying new threat. Obviously, voter intimidation isn’t new. I spoke to the NAACP, who had mentioned, we’ve been fighting on this issue “for the last 117 years.”

But ICE at the polls is new. What Trump has been discussing in terms of election sabotage scenarios are very new, and so these organizers are trying to use the tools they learned in the resistance to ICE movement that we saw pop up in January and February to try and keep our election safe as well.

On that topic, Akela, I know you also speak with Justice Democrats communications director and spokesperson Usamah Andrabi about how progressives are preparing for the general after a really impressive sweep in the primaries. Let’s hear that conversation.

AL: I speak now with Usamah Andrabi, Communications Director and Spokesperson for Justice Democrats, the group that brought us AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and many more.

Usamah, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Usamah Andrabi: Thanks for having me. 

AL: I want to start by taking our listeners back to a different time.

It’s 2018. The “Squad” has just been elected to office, and a fresh new crop of democratic socialists and progressives are making themselves known on Capitol Hill. 

Think: AOC joining a sit-in to protest for a Green New Deal outside of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. For listeners who aren’t familiar with the legacy of Justice Democrats, they have your group to thank in large part for that moment in time and for bringing us the Squad. But a lot has changed since then. How is Justice Democrats different today from in 2018, and what’s the same?

UA: What’s the same, first and foremost, is the commitment to the values that we had then are the same commitment we have to those values, and those are the values that we demand of the candidates we recruit, support, and endorse. Because those are the values that Democratic voters share — values that put the needs of working-class people above the needs of corporations and billionaires, and taking on lobbies like AIPAC, crypto, or AI.

I think that’s a little bit of what’s changed, is what we have seen since 2018, really, is the increased appearance of more and more moneyed interest organizing against the Squad, organizing against left-wing politicians, because they are bringing working-class people into the halls of power and bringing their needs to the top of the agenda for the Democratic Party. Billionaires hate that.

I don’t think we would have seen the sort of organized construction of a United Democracy Project or a Democratic Majority for Israel or Jobs and Democracy PAC or Fairshake or a lot of these. But particularly the Israel lobby seems to really organize in direct response to the success of our candidates in Congress.

We had the Squad get elected in 2018. Then two years later, folks like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush won very specifically against deeply pro-Israel politicians like Eliot Engel and [William] Lacy Clay, and they won without compromising on those values. That’s a really scary thing for the Israel lobby, who has really had a sharp control over how Democrats unconditionally support the Israeli government and military like Republicans have for decades.

What I think has happened is, we’ve had some wins, we’ve had some losses, and we’ve had to learn a lot from those losses and understand how to organize our donors better, organize funders, organize progressives, really, to coalesce more around independent candidates and broaden this network.

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I talk a lot about how I feel like in 2024, Democrats across the board suffered a lot of losses. We suffered two of our best members of Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their seats. And obviously, the Democratic Party lost every single other thing they could have lost. It felt like the job was to go home, everyone was supposed to do their homework and come back stronger to fight back against this very clearly fascist agenda that was laid out for us.

The left went home. We did our homework. We organized coalitions, we built broader donor networks, and we really invested a lot in candidate recruitment at Justice Dems.

And it feels like the establishment came back even weaker. Despite having weeks and months and years to really prepare for what Donald Trump promised he was going to do, they came back flat-footed and continue to look as weak as possible. That’s why I think you’re seeing so many successes for the left this cycle, because we are a true balm to the ineptitude of the Democratic establishment.

AL: We’re going to run through some of those wins in a second; many of our listeners are already familiar with them because we’ve talked a lot about these candidates on the show.

But I want to go back to this money thing before we get into that because, as you mentioned, coming off of those major losses of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman to money from the pro-Israel lobby last cycle — I don’t think anyone expected you all to notch as many wins as you did in the primaries this year.

We read obituaries of Justice Democrats, right? And that outside spending, as you mentioned, still has not gone away; it’s only increased. But it still wasn’t enough to stop the candidates behind the rise of democratic socialism that everyone is talking about, who were, to your point, far outmatched in terms of spending.

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I’ll just run through the numbers quickly. You endorsed 15 candidates; seven of them won, with democratic socialists knocking out three incumbents. That includes Darializa Avila Chevalier who toppled Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York, Melat Kiros who beat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney who took out Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Those three are all are but guaranteed to head to Congress next year, along with the four other candidates who won. Three of your other candidates won or came in the top two slots in the California primaries, which are nonpartisan, and are headed to runoffs in November. And only five candidates lost.

So what made this cycle different?

UA: First and foremost, love to prove our haters wrong at all times. [Laughter] 

A lot of spite drives that. But also, it’s exactly that. Everyone sort of doubted that there was a comeback to be had. I think a lot of people, AIPAC included, saw last cycle as the harbinger for what’s to come: They were on the rise, JD and the left were on the decline. For the first time ever, we didn’t endorse a new candidate since our founding, and because we had to focus on defending against $100 million in spending from AIPAC.

The truth is, that moment was really — for lack of a better word — the apex of AIPAC’s momentum and ability. Because on the other side of that, as we had been working for years to expose, was the toxic involvement of AIPAC in these primaries and the right-wing network of billionaires who are actually funding this.

It took many years for us to break down AIPAC, and it took a lot of losses to get to that point, but it was worth it. We did a lot of polling. We invested a lot of money in research to bring this message to voters. 

Cori and Jamaal’s losses unfortunately were the final nails in the coffin for a lot of people to wake up to realize how the Israel lobby really functions in our politics — paired with the fact that obviously we watched a genocide get livestreamed on our screens for years at this point, and voters began to wake up to understand: Why is it that a majority of us oppose this genocide — we support an arms embargo, we support a ceasefire — yet only a minority of left-wing politicians in Congress are responding to our demands?

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They understood that that was the role of the Israel lobby, spending infinite amounts of money and buying members of Congress to ensure that they would do their bidding. Even before the 2024 election, we were very clear that this cycle was going to have to be a cycle where we went back on the offense, made big bets, and fought back really hard.

We knew we were going to have to endorse a lot more candidates, spread the board out across the country, really, to make sure that AIPAC didn’t just have two members of Congress to target but had 15 different candidates, as well as meeting where Democratic voters were at. 

We know no matter if Kamala won or if Donald Trump won, there was still a lot of work to do to rebuild this Democratic Party to actually represent the needs of the working class. We understood as soon as Donald Trump won that clearly the Democratic establishment was unfit to fight back.

What voters were looking for, as we’ve seen throughout this cycle, is this amorphous fighter that they want. That fight doesn’t just look like, as we say so often, press releases and strongly worded letters. It looks like fighting corporate establishment. It looks like fighting AIPAC. It looks like fighting crypto and AI.

For so long, even people who call themselves progressive have tried to figure out, how can we go around, under, or behind these lobbies and skirt this very particular line to avoid their wrath? We try to make it clear to everyone, even in the cycle where we lost the most we’ve ever lost, that there’s no going behind, under, or any other prepositional phrase around AIPAC or these lobbies. The only way to defeat them is to go right through them and beat them head-on.

We knew that this was an existential crisis for us. As you said, people are already reading our obituaries, and we wanted to make it clear that this work doesn’t happen overnight. These losses don’t happen overnight. It takes years and years to build this progress.

The excitement that you are seeing from the Democratic electorate across the country for our candidates, it’s taken years to build, and it’s taken years of the Democratic establishment failing to actually live up to their potential and what the demands of working-class people across the country have been.

AL: I want to talk about this process that you’re talking about, this iterative process of bench-building that gets lost in a lot of the horse-race analysis.

But first, I just want to mention, we had one of your candidates, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, on the show earlier this year to talk about Republican gerrymandering efforts as part of this last-ditch plan to fight off what is expected to be big losses for Republicans in November. Pearson is running in one of the districts at the forefront of that gerrymandering fight.

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Even with the momentum we’ve seen against Republicans and against the Democratic establishment, as we’re talking about, what can Democrats do in the face of this massive gerrymandering push? How do you think that could potentially affect Pearson’s race?

I’ll just mention this again: Justin Pearson is running in a seat that was vacated by longtime Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, who is the last Democratic representative in Tennessee, so this is an important race. 

UA: First and foremost, it’s doing exactly what Justin is doing, which is really not surrendering to the Republican gerrymander. 

It’s very easy for us far away in the Democratic establishment to see these sort of Republican gerrymanders and say, “All right. Well, it’s cooked. There’s no chance of us doing anything here. We can put forward our standard DCCC candidate and talk about it a little, but we’re not going to invest any resources in there.”

I think that would be a failure. This is the tip of the spear of our modern civil rights movement. We are seeing the Voting Rights Act gutted in front of our face, take away the last Black-majority district in the state of Tennessee at a time when Justin J. Pearson was ostensibly going to win his Democratic primary against Steve Cohen.

When he talked about whether or not he wanted to do this, he understood no matter if he wins or loses, this is a fight worth having. It’s worth showing Democratic voters in the electorate, and the establishment more than anyone, that we can go into these Republican districts and these rural communities and not compromise on our most basic values.

Justin has not changed the policies and agenda he was running for when he was running against Steve Cohen to what he’s running for now. He has been the leader in that state on taking on AI data centers, and he is still the leader taking them on as his Republican opponent has unleashed them on Republican areas of this district.

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He’s uncompromised on standing up against the genocide and endless wars abroad and U.S. taxpayers funding for that, and he’s demanding Medicare for all. These are extremely popular policies, not just in the bluest districts across the country, but across the board ideologically. He is showing an example of how we don’t have to run Amy McGraths everywhere we go in these red districts to win over “red voters.”

These are working-class voters who are also been shivved and fucked by the same establishment that is run by Republicans and Democrats. These are people who are getting their hospitals and schools closed down in rural communities, who are getting their ACA subsidies cut and Medicaid subsidies cut.

This is a failure of the establishment of both parties. We can show that a different way is possible. Obviously, we need to fight to restore the Voting Rights Act, and we need to expand the Supreme Court and reform this court so we cannot continue just to see fights that people who are still living have fought for to be taken away in the same breath.

There’s a lot of work to do. It feels really difficult to know how we can claw back some of this institutional power when our institutions are so broken and corrupt. But I think that visionary agenda and ideals are what we need to see more from the Democratic Party, rather than simply being a party that is not Republicans.

That’s what these candidates have been so exciting for voters across the country about are that they, for the first time, are giving Democratic voters in a lot of these districts an affirmative positive agenda that centers their most urgent crises and actually has bold enough solutions to tackle those crises.

AL: This criticism came up a lot in this cycle, and this is the kind of thing I think that often says more about the person that is saying the criticism than the people they’re actually targeting. This is often lodged against candidates on the left or candidates backed by Justice Democrats that, “OK, all this is great, congratulations on your win, but once you get to Congress you’re not actually going to be able to do anything because there aren’t enough of you yet.” What do you say to that? 

UA: You could have said that to us nine years ago, right? That would’ve been the case. Yet one of the most popular politicians in this country is AOC, and the most popular politician is Bernie Sanders, who has these same values. So clearly there’s an appetite from the American electorate for more voters like that.

People know who Ilhan Omar is, people know who Rashida Tlaib is, and it’s not simply because Fox News uses them as an attack every other week. It’s because they have been standing up and been the most courageous leaders in Congress, standing up for the values they need, not only on Palestine, but no one is louder about needing clean water in the state of Michigan than Rashida Tlaib. Ilhan Omar is the reason that the state of Minnesota has universal school lunches for children. These are leaders who have actually delivered on the promises that the Democratic Party has only hypothetically talked about. 

Coming off a cycle where we lost two members, it’s very easy for people to say “Well, you have no power in Congress.” Yet we are sending seven new leftists to Congress this cycle, at least. It’ll be really telling how big the hypothetical Democratic majority is in Congress, because if it is seven-member majority, then you’re starting to ask a lot more different questions of, well, now you have a block of new members of Congress who can actually sway what policy and what agenda we are fighting for in this party.

So this shit doesn’t happen over fucking night. It takes years and years and cycles to build this block in Congress. You have to bring the people with it, and it takes time to organize and convince the masses of the working class to really buy into an electoral project that has screwed them time and time again, and to have that revolutionary optimism that there’s something to be done here.

There’s a lot of promise with this new class of members who are now joining an already existing class of members. We will nearly double our size in Congress, and that’s a big deal. You can look at far smaller groups of members of Congress that have wielded much more power than the amount that we’re sending to Congress.

These leaders were elected with the mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment, and so they will have to do that. More than anything, it’s up to the Democratic establishment on how they want to respond to the clear demands of their voters. These candidates that we elected this cycle are giving you a blueprint on a silver platter on how to excite your base and how to energize your party. The Democratic Party can either listen to them or be forced to listen to them, as they have been this cycle when we beat them.

AL: I do have to ask here, Cori Bush is the anomaly in the success stories that we’re talking about, right? What happened in that race? Why do you think that this momentum did not extend to her challenge to take back her old seat from Wesley Bell in Missouri?

UA: She is not the only loss we’ve had this cycle. The first race of the cycle was Nida Allam, who had lost a really close race. 

AL: In North Carolina. 

US: In North Carolina. We saw two races, Kat Abughazaleh and Junaid Ahmed in Illinois, lost at the hands of big money from AIPAC, crypto, and AI. Saikat Chakrabarti in Nancy Pelosi’s seat also lost the primary as well to a lot of big spending from seemingly pro-Israel donors.

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The truth is, we are always going to be up against this insurmountable amount of money. To the best of our ability, we have to organize our resources and organize our people to fight back against that. But it’s also the truth that we don’t take corporate PAC money. We don’t take money from billionaires, and so our resources are limited, and we’ve grown that. We’ve grown that pool. We’ve expanded our donor network to be able to run 15 candidates and win seven races.

But there’s not an infinite amount of resources, and so those losses are proof that the left still also has work to do. We do need to build more resources. We do need to build better connections to ensure that champions and fighters like Cori Bush, who to me really embody the fighter that Democratic voters are talking about, can be sent back to Congress.

Because in the absence of them, we have useless corporate shills like Wesley Bell, who have done absolutely nothing for their community since they got to St. Louis — and it shows.

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A big part of that is a resource constraint, also, the truth is, Cori had to go up against nearly $15 million of attacks last cycle, and that’s really recent. It’s not just the money that was spent against her this cycle. You have to look at what happened last cycle, because it’s all the same attacks. They ran the same playbook all over again, and it’s effective.

When you have a 20 to 1 outspending situation, and the only thing you’re seeing on TV and mail is how much you should dislike Cori Bush, it works at a certain point. That’s why it worked last cycle. Cori is a deep proof point that the left still has some work to do to really ensure that all of our champions can get to Congress. 

AL: I want to move now to some of the news of the week. This week, ICE shot yet another person in Austin, Texas: 28-year old food delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez from Venezuela. After he was released from the hospital he was taken to an immigration detention center with a bullet still in his back, according to him and his lawyer.

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If Justice Democrats candidates make it to Congress in November, what power do they have to push Democrats to do more to stop ICE from killing and terrorizing people? What can they do, particularly in a House session where we expect Democrats, if they win power to be putting a laser focus on investigating Trump’s corruption, for example? 

UA: We should first and foremost be bold and listen to where voters are at. A majority of voters do not believe that ICE needs to exist. That’s understandable because both you and I were alive at a time when ICE didn’t exist — and yet I’m still living. 

AL: What a time. 

UA: What a time that was. The proof is in the pudding that we don’t need an ICE to have a “safe” America, whatever that means. But clearly the fascist governments need ICE to execute immigrants in this country and shoot down our neighbors and kidnap our families.

First and foremost, we should start from pushing to abolish ICE and ending this agency for all. Delia Ramirez, one of our Justice Democrats in Congress, has been leading the charge on this, calling to abolish ICE and also to dissolve the Department of Homeland Security, [which] in many ways, is also a relic of our lifetime. It is a relic of the George W. Bush era.

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“Terrorist”: How ICE Weaponized 9/11’s Scarlet Letter

I am baffled when there are Democratic leaders in this country who are so obsessed with defending an institution created by George W. fucking Bush. I remember when we didn’t like George W. Bush, and we didn’t agree with his policies. I’m not sure why the Democratic Party of 2026 should be the same as the Republican Party of 2004.

It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, and I think we are always, on immigration over the last 20 years, have always been allowing the right to dictate what the agenda and our playground should be on immigration policy, on border policy, on all of these policies. And as a result, have always tried to be a diet Republican Party on immigration policy, when the most popular policies we ever put forward on immigration were things like a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers and abolishing ICE, now. 

We have to be bold and not only end this agency, but also, as many people are talking about, prosecuting the people who were in charge of ICE and these officers who were killing folks. 

The ICE agent who was the shooter in Austin wasn’t even wearing a body cam. As if that’s enough anyway. Then there’s so many different accounts and these lies. We are living through another evolution of our criminal legal system being so extrajudicial and so outside of the bounds of what should be legally allowed that I think we have to massively reign in this agency. We cannot do it in a mealy-mouthed way that says we need to pay lip service to this right-wing propaganda, while continuing to allow our immigrant neighbors and families to be murdered and shot down in the streets while they’re trying to deliver food to your house.

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AL: In the Austin shooting the district attorney in Travis County, which is where the shooting happened, which is where Austin is, they are still trying to figure out the name of this officer, and they are waiting on getting footage from other ICE officers in the vicinity who had body cameras on, and they’re also trying to get footage from local hospitals to figure out where this officer who was allegedly injured went, because they do not yet know his name.

UA: But they know the man who he shot’s name, so.

AL: Yes. Much of the news this week centered on President Donald Trump’s attacks on the news media and his trip to New York City, where he met with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and attended the United Nations General Assembly. 

Outside the UNGA, Jewish leaders protested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday. Mamdani once said he would arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York, though he didn’t have the authority to do so, and the two battled publicly this week. 

Many people praised Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu, even though it had not really any teeth, but as an example of what we’re talking about, of just wanting Democrats to do something — the kind of sentiment that has animated many voters who’ve supported Justice Democrats candidates this cycle.

Democrats are heading into this lame-duck session for Trump where there is still little appetite among leadership to do something substantive on Israel — though last week we saw an unusual refusal from top Democrat Rep. Greg Meeks to approve Trump’s latest proposed $2.8 billion sale of more bombs to Israel. 

What is the strategy for the progressive bench on this issue right now? It seems like every time one of these packages comes up, there’s this big dust-up over OK, what’s going to happen? And every time, a few more Democrats either vote against it or, as in this case, voice some sort of opposition. But where do you see this going in the next Congress? 

UA: The writing is on the wall if even Chairman Greg Meeks is suspending some of these things. You can go to the FEC’s website to see why that is an interesting development. 

AL: [Laughter] Just in terms of support that Meeks has gotten from the pro-Israel apparatus in the past is what you’re referring to, I’m assuming.

UA: Yes. He’s been a dear ally to the lobby historically. But I think, like we saw on the vote on the Massie amendment, for the first time a majority of Democrats are voting to say, “We’re not going to send money to Israel.” A lot of people can say, “Well, that’s just a performative vote,” all these things.

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Look, I worked in Congress. Those performative votes don’t happen in that sort of way, unless the people are pressuring members of Congress to get to this point. That’s what we’re seeing, is that you are seeing Democratic voters across the country reject you if you have an endorsement from AIPAC or you take a single dollar from AIPAC, which is why AIPAC has to hide its money so much this cycle.

That’s what we’re going to see coming into this new Congress, is a real thrust of energy for the pro-Palestinian movement within Congress now that you are really doubling the amount of leaders in Congress who are unabashedly against the endless supply of military funding and resources to the Israeli government.

You have a renewed movement to really organize even more members. You can look at the co-sponsor for the Block the Bombs, Delia Ramirez’s arms embargo bill has a lot of members you would not have expected even a cycle ago to do so. But that’s the power of not only these elections, but also mass movements across the country demanding that their leaders actually stop the endless supply of weapons.

There will absolutely have to be a fight in Congress for this next Congress to say we need to stop funding the Israeli government and military, and the Democratic voters are behind us. That might be a fight that has to challenge leadership on that fight, because obviously leadership has historically been more aligned with funding the Israeli military and government.

But at a certain point they have to also see the writing on the wall. They are beginning to see that. There’s a lot of opportunities with a Democratic majority to show voters that we are hearing them, that we also don’t think your tax dollars should fund a fucking genocide for three to four to five years after also already funding decades of apartheid.

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That’s where we have to move next is not only ending funding right now, but ensuring that we never fund this military and government, and actually push towards a solution where we can end the apartheid state that Israel is running over the Palestinian people, and actually have a place where everyone has equal rights and dignity, which currently does not exist, obviously.

AL: You mentioned that you used to work in Congress, and I’m taken back to the fond days when I first met you around circa 2018 when you were working for then Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Mark Pocan. And since that time, we have been having this same conversation about the fight over the future of the Democratic Party.

Where do you see Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and party leadership more broadly, either fitting into or obstructing your vision for the future? In that vein, I’m curious there’s been a lot of talk about where will Justice Democrats’ candidates land on, supporting a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries in 2027? What conversations are you having around that? Where do you see this conversation going? 

UA: Look, the corporate establishment will always be a barrier to progressive change and delivering for the needs of the working class. That, they have proven. They have made it clear. They have said it on the record.

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These are not my feelings. They’re theirs. These elections, these campaigns, have proven that they are on the wrong side of the Democratic Party electorate, and they are in the minority, as they always have been. But it’s really eye-opening for people in leadership to have races like people like Claire Valdez, and Zohran, and Darializa become these leaders in New York, in your backyard, speaking of both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who obviously represent New York in the Senate and the House.

It doesn’t stop there. As much as people want to say every city is not New York — well New York is not Philly, is not Denver, is not Dallas, is not California, is not Tennessee. Let’s be fucking for real. This is happening across the country. There is a bloc of leaders across the country who are actually responding to the needs of the working class.

Like I said, they got elected on a mandate to challenge the Democratic establishment. They will be pushing this Democratic Party to meet the needs of voters, be it pushing for Medicare for All, or an arms embargo on Israel, or a stop to AI data centers, or raising taxes on billionaires. All universally popular fucking policies that the Democratic Party could lead on. 

So often this question has been framed as, what will the left do when they get to Congress? How will they deal with these sorts of institutions? We should be asking Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and everyone else that question far more, which is: What are you going to do about the fact that your electorate is making clear that you are not fighting for the policies they are looking for?

When you come out to say you oppose Medicare for All after being a co-sponsor for it for a few cycles, you are in the minority of Democratic voters. I promise in your district particularly I imagine maybe, what, 5 percent of voters agree with you. It’s incumbent upon Democratic leadership to wake up and decide where they want to be on these issues and how they want to lead this party, because do they want to be a one-term House majority? 

They can win back the majority a lot because Republicans are failing and because the left is showing voters what an opposition party could actually look like and what a governing party could actually look like. The establishment is not doing that. Until they start taking lessons from the left on what to actually fight for, they will continue to be running on cycle-to-cycle losses and wins instead of really looking at, long-term, how can we take back power and ensure that we don’t consistently backside into this fascist and authoritarian regime that is overrun by the same corporate interests that the Democratic establishment is also funded by.

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We absolutely are looking at this new crop of leaders joining this already existing group of progressives to really have a sizable influence in bringing the people’s power to the halls of Congress more than anything, and using their coordinated megaphones in many ways to bring light to the issues that people need them to.

Because even if we take back the House majority, Donald Trump is still president, even if we take the Senate back. He can veto any bill, and that’s a reality, but that should not stop us from showing people what we could do if we had power.

And what we could do if we had power should not simply look like turning back the clock to what it looked like before Donald Trump, which is what some of the agenda I’m seeing from Democratic leadership is, let’s roll back this. Let’s get this back. The status quo three, two, five, seven, eight, pick a fucking year, was not good enough for working-class people, so why would we go back to that? 

Obviously, we need to roll back all these attacks. We need to claw back the destruction that the Trump administration has done, but that’s obviously also not enough. We need universal healthcare. We need housing for all. We need to make billionaires pay their fair share. We need to stop fucking AI data centers from destroying every community, and raising our utility bills and poisoning our water. There are a litany of crises that we are facing. Mealy-mouthed solutions are not what Democratic voters are looking for.

They are making that deeply clear, and no matter how much fear-mongering around socialism or the Red Scare you want to do, the truth is, voters support these policies because these policies support voters. 

AL: If we’re picking years, I pick 2004. [Laughter] I think you’re onto something there. We’re going to leave it there, Usamah. Thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

UA: Thank you, Akela. 

AL: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The Blueprint for Democrats to Win Back Voters  appeared first on The Intercept.

Volunteers who showed up a few months ago asking, “Where do I buy a whistle?” are now trained and committed members of an “ICE Watch” movement, said Zach Mueller, whose anti-authoritarian group States at the Core started hosting trainings earlier this year. “They’re not in the normal cast of characters that have been showing up to rallies over the last several decades,” said Mueller. Now, they’re planning to fan out to their local polling places and defend their neighbors’ rights to vote.

The ICE-watchers-turned-poll-watchers are preparing for the worst despite a temporary win the voting rights movement secured last week, when the Supreme Court upheld a decision to block a Trump administration rule that would have let the U.S. Postal Service refuse to deliver ballots from states that don’t share their voter rolls with the federal government, among other new constraints, which advocates warned would lead to chaos and uncounted votes. While that plan was foiled for the midterms, other electoral threats abound.

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“There are 100 different scenarios that you can run through,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible. “Could be ICE at the polls, could be Trump getting every Republican to swear to sabotage the results … Could be something after the fact, seizing ballot boxes or refusing to acknowledge the results. Who knows?”

What is clear, Levin said, is, “If you think that some Democratic politician is going to have some neat trick in the back pocket that they going to pull when it happens, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Federal interference at the polls is illegal. Despite lawsuits seeking to block federal immigration officers from poll sites, administration officials have continued to threaten their presence anyway. Earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that immigration agents could be deployed at polling places if there is a “threat” or if they’re serving a warrant. And President Donald Trump has previously said that federal agents and the National Guard could be sent to polling locations.

Levin’s organization, which co-sponsors the No Kings protests, has launched “election protection” training programs to help people prepare to mobilize for different election sabotage scenarios, including federal immigration agents at the polls, and Mueller’s group has expanded its trainings to include election protection trainings known as “Beyond ICE Watch.”

“Ultimately this is going to come down to: Do you have a sufficient number of people organized and prepared to push back when shit hits the fan, or don’t you?” said Levin.

In the past two years, Levin said, an elite class composed of “media and business and law firms and universities” and parts of the Democratic establishment, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have capitulated to the authoritarian whims of the Trump administration.

“The only thing that has changed anything over the last 22 months has been normal, everyday people deciding they weren’t going to put up with this shit,” said Levin. “They organized, they reached out, they formed communities, and they pushed back.”

Last year, the Save America Movement, a nonprofit political and pro-democracy organization that rose up in opposition to Trump, launched “liberty vans” in Los Angeles.

The vehicles are staffed with organizers trained in documenting and deescalating violence from federal law enforcement agents. “Our perspective was that if everybody in America knew what it felt like to be in Los Angeles during that summer, nobody would be OK with this,” said Mary Corcoran, who serves as the group’s executive director.

The project later expanded to other cities including Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.

Now, Corcoran plans to deploy a similar strategy in battleground states. The group is working with major civil and labor rights figures like Rev. Al Sharpton and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to send volunteers — including trusted community leaders like clergy members — trained in deescalation, documentation, and local voting laws to precincts with large Black, Latino, and Asian populations in North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan.

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Corcoran said the precincts they chose are all electoral power centers with large minority and immigrant populations. “If they were successful in intimidating even 10 percent of those voters from coming back this midterm cycle, it could easily swing the outcome statewide,” she said.

Corcoran is hopeful that people knowing they will not be alone at the polls will help them feel safer, but she acknowledges that this election cycle will be a new test. “Voter intimidation has always been around,” she said. “But ICE is a new X factor in this election.”

For the NAACP, voter intimidation is a familiar threat, even if the players have changed, explained Dominik Whitehead, the group’s head of membership. “Much of this we’ve seen before,” said Whitehead. In Georgia and other battleground states in 2024, there were at least 227 bomb threats targeting polling locations and election-related offices, many of them in Black precincts.

The NAACP is “going to defend democracy and ensure voters have access to the ballot box, as we have done for the last 117 years,” said Whitehead. But like Corcoran, he acknowledges that these are “different times.”

ICE has “no jurisdiction” to prevent anyone from voting, something the NAACP has been including in their messaging to voters, he said. However, Whitehead said that they’re still anticipating the agency’s presence. He said the NAACP is “working closely with immigrant organizations” and focusing their election monitoring efforts in places like Michigan, Florida, and Texas, where they expect threats against Muslim, Latino, and Black Caribbean immigrant communities.

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Voting by mail has already begun in several key states, including Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. For Mueller and States at the Core, the real test will come after Election Day.

“There is a real question mark in my mind about what is the reaction from the authoritarian movement to this election,” said Mueller. “And it’s worth thinking more about how folks are planning, not just for the lead-up version to this, but what happens on November 4th and afterwards.” 

The Trump administration’s attacks on mail-in voting, for example, will likely become an issue again. Concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the new rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that his issue with the new rule was its timing.

The post They Trained to Protect Immigrants From ICE. Now They’re Prepping to Defend the Midterm Elections. appeared first on The Intercept.

An email first sent over the weekend sent by Fetterman’s campaign came from the address “info@gopsquad.com” and vowed: “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the Anti-American way of life.” Other recent appeals sent from the same address encourage readers to help President Donald Trump pass new voting restrictions, to read an “urgent memo” from House Speaker Mike Johnson on fighting the left, and to back Republican Mike Rogers for Senate in Michigan over Abdul El-Sayed, whom the email compared to a terrorist and a “threat to our way of life.”

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The email from Fetterman’s campaign comes as the senator has moved closer to the Republican caucus, rankling his Democratic colleagues and spurring rumors that he might switch parties. He received the maximum allowed contribution from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, as The Intercept reported in July. But the use of Republican fundraising infrastructure represents a new step in Fetterman’s confounding electoral strategy.

The Fetterman campaign also sent copies of the fundraising email from alternate GOP domains including “unshakeableconservatives.com” and “freedomfaction.net.” It’s possible that Fetterman for PA rented or bought a GOP email list, something campaigns commonly do for targeted outreach, but the campaign’s specific arrangement is unclear. The text retreads major talking points that the Democratic senator delivered in a controversial video appearance at the Republican party’s midterm convention earlier this month, where he railed against “extremes” and promised to “stand with America.” 

Fetterman’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Former Fetterman staffers, who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal, condemned their old boss’s pivot and suggested he’d betrayed his previous supporters.

“After taking contributions from millions of small-dollar donors who wanted a Democratic Senate, John Fetterman turned around and became Donald Trump’s useful idiot,” said one former staffer. “Now, it’s no surprise that he has to resort to GOP donors to prop up his dismal fundraising numbers.” 

With two years left in his first term, Fetterman has made himself the subject of a series of political upheavals and dramatic reversals. The image he was heralded for upon his 2022 election — a gritty, heterodox, and unpredictable model for the future of the Democratic Party — has all but crumbled.

Staffers, donors, previous supporters, and his Democratic colleagues have fled from Fetterman’s orbit in droves as he’s aligned himself with Republicans on Trump’s war with Iran, U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, and funding the Department of Homeland Security amid a slew of killings, shootings, and misconduct by federal immigration agents.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported on his resistance to carrying out his daily responsibilities as a senator — which marked a stark contrast from his energy for showing up on Fox News, where he made more than 50 appearances in the first six months of this year. The senator has particularly alienated former supporters on the left with his hardline support for the Israeli government, which he has offered unconditional support throughout its genocide in Gaza.

Fetterman’s critics are looking for a candidate to primary him in 2028 as he fields questions about whether he plans to join the GOP — or run for reelection at all, given his sinking popularity among his own party and outrage from former supporters over his rightward turn. 

Fetterman’s coziness with — and popularity among — Republicans doesn’t necessarily mean he’s likely to join the GOP conference, said several former Fetterman staffers who spoke to The Intercept. They predicted that Fetterman might follow in the footsteps of former Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who consistently blocked their party’s more progressive measures and then became independent. That, according to one former staffer, would let him maintain the wildcard he’s curated over four erratic years in office. 

“He loves being the enigma,” another former staffer told The Intercept. “He loves the, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to see what happens.’”

As Fetterman’s staffers struggled in recent months to get him to do basic parts of his job — including fundraising — his office reached out to staffers for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to ask him to talk to Fetterman in an attempt to right what they saw as a sinking ship, according to a former staffer. The staffer said that Schumer agreed, but Fetterman refused to talk to him. Schumer’s office has said the two are in communication and met for dinner in August. 

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If there’s a lesson to be learned from Fetterman’s explosion onto the national stage and the trail of disgruntled staffers, organizers, and small-dollar donors left in its wake, it has little to do with political ideology and more to do with psychology, former staffers told The Intercept. Fetterman views himself as a renegade and an outsider above all else, according to his former staff. He has long struggled with depression, and while campaigning in 2022, he suffered a stroke whose effects led him to use assistive technology in the Senate and continue to be felt in other ways.

Notwithstanding any decision he might make about switching parties, the conservative world has welcomed Fetterman with open arms. In July, Fetterman attended a retreat in Montana hosted by Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media scion behind Fox News, at the network’s invitation, according to two former Fetterman staffers. At the retreat, Fetterman spoke on a panel alongside Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala. Fetterman’s attendance at Murdoch’s event came several days after he launched an unusual bipartisan fundraising committee with his Republican counterpart in Pennsylvania, Sen. Dave McCormick. 

While Fetterman’s campaign has previously used the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue for communications, including in a recent text for a joint fundraiser with McCormick, his campaign sent recent fundraising texts using another platform, including a link with the name “Save America 26.” 

Fetterman’s campaign also recently redesigned its website to use his antagonistic persona in its favor. The website boasts that Fetterman “thinks for himself. You should too.”

Fetterman isn’t an average Democrat, his new website reads. “John doesn’t look like a typical politician, and more importantly, he doesn’t act like one.”

The post John Fetterman Is Fundraising on GOP Donor Email Lists appeared first on The Intercept.

A quarter century after the September 11 attacks emboldened then-President George W. Bush to launch the “war on terror,” many Americans might like to think they’re wiser than the politicians and pundits who unleashed a flood of anti-Muslim hatred and eroded civil liberties through warrantless wiretaps and racist deportation campaigns.

But some of the most notorious Bush-era advents — like the Department of Homeland Security and the prison colony at Guantánamo Bay — don’t appear to be going anywhere. Nor does the phenomenon of Islamophobia, which is playing a major role in the current political cycle. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed — who, if elected, would be the first Muslim U.S. senator — has been called a terrorist, a radical Islamist, and a threat to national security, as pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs spend millions on ads that paint him as a terrorist sympathizer. In New York City, meanwhile, local media has suggested that the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, should not attend the commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, as if to do so would be an insult to the victims and their families.

“Islamophobia actually becomes more rampant during election season — not necessarily after a terrorist attack, but actually during election season in the U.S.,” journalist Rozina Ali tells The Intercept Briefing. “What’s happened over the last three decades is that Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics. … When you can’t actually discuss the policies, when we’re not willing to engage in facts, it’s really easy to throw racist rhetoric at people.”

“The fight that we’re seeing now is whether we are willing to accept all forms of religion in this country. And as much as I want to say this is just more of what we’ve seen in the past, I think what does frighten me is how quickly we are moving to a place where some governor or some local official might try to outlaw Islam altogether. And mind you, this is even a policy shift from 10 years ago when Trump called for a Muslim ban,” says Ali. “What has been happening recently is that the rhetoric … has been shifting toward, ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s a political ideology.’ This is not a new talking point, but it is becoming institutionalized. There are efforts to make it into law, which is a frightening place to be.”

This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Ali about how anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies are on the rise and have endured, or even worsened, in the post-9/11 world, as well as her new book, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.” Ali shares the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen, Arab American attorney Abdeen Jabara, as well as the story of imam Yassin Aref, a victim of a controversial sting operation who served 15 years in federal prison due to the ambiguous “material support” for terrorism law first passed in the ’90s. It was the same charge used to convict anti-ICE protesters at Prairieland Detention Center to decades in prison this year.

“This was something lot of civil rights lawyers and activists were warning about even back then, because they recognized that this law and this war on terror can be used to attack dissidents and eventually will be used to attack a lot more people than the Muslim community. And that is what we’re seeing now,” says Ali.

“Because we’ve given so much power to the executive branch, because we’ve given so much power to the government over the last 25 years, the government gets to decide who they consider enemies, who they consider terrorists, and what they consider support for terrorism,” says Ali. “The Trump administration can say, ‘I now consider leftists terrorists,’ and unfortunately, there are laws in the books that allow him to do that.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

AL: Jessie, it’s Labor Day weekend. Unless you’re a summer-truther like me, this marks the end of summer for most people. And accordingly, things are taking a hard pivot toward November. 

I’m going to run through a few things that caught my eye in the last few days: ICE is planning to pay $5 million to create a national voter database, per reporting from Wired. Nothing to see there, I’m sure. 

The Trump administration is also deploying hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents to conduct a witch hunt for unspecified voter fraud, despite lacking evidence that that’s a real issue. 

In Congress, Democrats are considering whether to punish two lawmakers who sided with Republicans this week to advance a key procedural vote. And they’re weighing new rules for the caucus that worry progressives and several other caucuses across the ideological spectrum. But progressives in particular are worried that these new rules, if passed, could ice out the new class of socialists who are on track to take office in January. Separately, but perhaps most importantly, the United Nations said we’ve basically lost any chance to stop the worst of global warming. 

JW: OK, I’m really going to avoid making a heat joke. But I will say that August in Washington is officially over and that means not only is the weather getting a little bit cooler, although, I guess, we’ll see. It also means there is a lot more news to cover. Although, I would say it is hard to argue we’ve gotten much rest this last month.

In Massachusetts on Tuesday night, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey easily defeated his challenger, Democratic congressman Seth Moulton. Moulton had run on his relative youth, but was hamstrung by people’s perception that he was both inauthentic and far too conservative for the state. After the 2024 presidential election, Moulton had made this very public appeal to the right, arguing that protecting transgender children had harmed Democrats electorally and that it made them seem out of touch. But as it turned out, from Tuesday night, Moulton ended up being the one who seemed out of touch with his voters in Massachusetts.

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In some more somber news, this week marks one year since the Trump administration began carrying out strikes on civilians in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Intercept’s Nick Turse reported that the United States has killed 227 civilians in the more than 65 attacks that have been carried out in the name of defeating so-called narco terrorists. There’s this one passage from Nick’s piece on the anniversary that really sticks with me.

“It’s been a year of murders,” said a defense official who was horrified by the first strike and has remained so as the U.S. has targeted scores of so-called “drug boats” in the year since. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.” The official added: “It’s absolutely criminal.”

And then of course, next week marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, so there’s a lot to reflect on when it comes to the legacy of that attack and how it fundamentally reshaped our society. 

AL: Yes, and while so much has changed in the last 25 years since 9/11, it also feels like a lot has stayed the same — or, in many cases, gotten worse. 

One of the major effects of 9/11 we’re reminded frequently of is the sprawling surveillance apparatus spawned by those attacks as we see its power put to use on almost a daily basis against immigrants, political dissidents, U.S. citizens, and particularly Muslim and Arab communities. We probably know only a small percentage of the destruction the post-9/11 wave of Islamophobia wrought not just in wars around the world, but here at home. 

Today, Islamophobia is seeing its own grotesque renaissance, particularly in this year’s midterms. We’re going to get into all of this with our guest today, journalist Rozina Ali. But first, I wonder if you could tell us the latest here, Jessie.

JW: We got a really great example of what you’re talking about this week from CBS News, perhaps unsurprisingly. 

AL: The shade. [Laughter]

JW: On Monday, the outlet, now led by conservative commentator Bari Weiss, published a story on Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed saying “Deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

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Now, the tweets were very innocuous; as many people pointed out, this is a non-story. In two of them, he asked Americans to take Covid-19 as seriously as the terror attacks. But it’s a familiar playbook from the right and their media apparatus: Weaponize 9/11 to stoke Islamophobic fear about a Muslim candidate, rinse, repeat.

You discuss the legacy of 9/11 and how Islamophobia has been weaponized with journalist Rozina Ali. Let’s hear that conversation now. 

AL: Yes, joining me now is Rozina Ali, a journalist and contributing writer at New York Times Magazine, a fellow at Type Media Center and at New America, and previously a senior editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Ali writes primarily about the war on terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, and South Asia. She has a new book out called, “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.”

Rozina, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Rozina Ali: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really nice to be here.

AL: Rozina, unfortunately, we are going to start with midterms. We’re approaching the 25-year anniversary of 9/11. You’ve covered the subsequent war on terror and the rise in Islamophobia. A quarter of a century later, Islamophobia is still not just alive and well, but playing a major role in our current political cycle. Why do you think that is?

RA: Over the last 25 years, Islamophobia actually becomes more rampant during election season — not necessarily after a terrorist attack, but actually during election season in the U.S.

What we’re seeing now isn’t unusual. Actually, what’s happened over the last three decades is that Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics.

That said, what we’re seeing now is so rampant, and the anti-Muslim vitriol is just so stark and prevalent, that it is shocking to people who’ve been following this for three decades, like myself.

AL: It feels, as you said, in some ways, like the Islamophobia of 2026 is even more explicit, in some cases, than it was in the post-9/11 world.

We’re seeing a rise in Islamophobic attacks in communities around the country. Three people were killed in an attack on a mosque in San Diego in May. And as you noted, all of this has taken a particularly ugly turn in midterms — specifically the Michigan Senate race, where Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been called a “terrorist,” a “radical” Islamist, and a threat to national security.

But we also saw a lot of similar rhetoric aimed at Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race last year. At The Intercept, this cycle, we reported on the record-breaking spending from pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs against El-Sayed amounting to about $60 million, much of which paid for ads that painted him as a terrorist sympathizer.

How are you seeing Islamophobia take shape this cycle, and how are people responding?

RA: What’s being thrown at Abdul El-Sayed is actually, again, not unusual. It’s the same playbook that we’ve been seeing. But what is interesting is the way in which the Islamophobic rhetoric somewhat differs between Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed.

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What’s interesting with Zohran is that a lot of the vitriol against him was that he was not American. That he was not born in the U.S., and there was a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric thrown at him too. There were calls to denaturalize him, suggesting that he was too foreign in many ways to be mayor of New York City.

You can’t quite do that with Abdul El-Sayed. He was born in Michigan. He was raised there; he went to school there. You can’t actually call for his denaturalization. But what Islamophobes have been doing and what the right-wing has been doing has been suggesting that he has alliances with foreign groups.

Specifically, that his family members have alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood or affiliations with them. The problem is that this has been a strategy that has been used over the past 25 years — suggestions that there are sleeper cells in the U.S., or that there are people who have affiliations with scary groups abroad.

Oftentimes, what the media did was just blare those headlines without really delving deeper into what does it mean to have such an affiliation, if it is true.

I think it’s really interesting that you brought up the San Diego mosque shooting that happened earlier this year, because one of the things that happened soon after was the New York Post did — and I know the New York Post has its flaws, and we should not take it seriously! But their headline when covering this tragic incident was saying, actually, the mosque had affiliations with some of the 9/11 hijackers. They chose to focus on that — as if the anti-Muslim attack was justified in some ways. 

Earlier when you asked why is Islamophobia so rampant now, one reason is because for 25 years, anti-Muslim sentiment and rhetoric has been justified over and over again, both by policymakers and media and the public in general.

AL: Your book touches on this, how the era that we’re living in right now with the attacks — particularly on pro-Palestine students, or surveillance of pro-Palestine activity in response to the genocide in Gaza — echoes the rise of the post-1967 surveillance state targeting Arab communities in the U.S.

A lot of this is encapsulated in the current obsession with leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. We just can’t seem to get away from him being a prominent feature in the news cycle. But I’m going to ask you about this anyway, because I think it’s relevant to the discussion.

In response to a segment on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash that spent six minutes on El-Sayed and Piker, Piker posted on X:

it sounds unbelievably stupid but i have become this media cycle’s “trans athletes” or “migrant caravan.” wild how much supposedly liberal outlets let fox news play the role of news desk editor.

odd how none of these outlets will have me on to interrogate my beliefs directly.

Over recent months, Piker, who has endorsed and campaigned with progressive candidates, has become a prime target of Democrats and Republicans and mainstream news.

Here, he’s pointing out this feature, as you’re describing it, Rozina — a feature, not a bug of our politics. Where rather than focusing on the issues actually impacting people’s lives, there’s this effort to distract attention and channel anger toward a minority group, stoke unfounded fears, and spread lies and disinformation.

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This is basically what led to the ICE surge in Minneapolis that killed two protesters, the target in that campaign being the Somali community.

I want to talk more about how you think about this dynamic and particularly why something that is such an obvious distraction can be so effective?

RA: This is what American media does, right? I will say I am part of the American media. We both are.

AL: We all are, yeah.

RA: We all are. There are journalists who are doing incredible work and trying to cut through the noise and trying to actually report on what’s happening.

But what I do find is that a lot of media coverage that revolves around conversations or opinions or talking points becomes so much about one thing.

This obsession with Hasan Piker actually reflects something that has been a long-standing issue, which is a lot of the reason he’s getting such vitriol is because of what he says regarding Palestine and Israel. Again, not something new.

This has been a problem for decades that the space to have a nuanced conversation about U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine has contracted over many, many years. Certainly after the 1970s, definitely after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

But we really saw that much more after 9/11 — that any space to criticize U.S. foreign policy abroad, whether it be in Israel–Palestine, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even critique the war on terror in general, that space was just contracted, and certainly for Muslims and certainly for Arabs. I think what we’re seeing now is basically a continuation of that.

I do wonder what would happen — if we would be obsessed with Hasan Piker and what he says — if there were more opportunities to actually discuss some of the things that he was bringing up, rather than shut it down.

AL: The space for this conversation on Israel and Palestine is getting smaller at the same time that it should theoretically be getting wider, right?

Because American sentiment is historically on the side of Palestinians for the first time in recent history. The number of elected officials campaigning on this issue and who have entered Congress over the last six or seven years is at a record high. And yet you see the space not just contracting, but being astroturfed at levels that we’ve never seen when it comes to political spending.

And I think that conversation is often really lost because we are so apt to talk about the historic achievements of this movement in the zeitgeist or public opinion, if you want to call it [that]. But the forces that are working to undermine that movement are stronger than ever at this point.

RA: Absolutely. It is fascinating to me the ways in which the pro-Palestine movement has gained steam over the last decade. Obviously, what happened after October 7 has really changed the momentum and increased the momentum, but there were a lot of attempts to actually shift the conversation from even a decade ago or a decade and a half ago.

A lot of these groups were working on the ground for much longer. It’s just become such a huge part of the public conversation, one, because of what Israel has been doing in Gaza; two, because of the U.S.’s — both Biden and Trump administration’s — full-hearted support for that; and three, because there have been a lot more politicians speaking out about it. There’s actually challenges to this. 

One thing to remember is that, yes, basically the pro-Israel lobby has had a lot of money for a long time, but they’ve been throwing money at local elections for the past decade while this movement has been ramping up.

What is interesting to me now compared to 10 years ago, or even, let’s say, after 9/11, is that there is such a discrepancy between what policymakers want or what these interest groups want versus public opinion on the ground, to your point.

That discrepancy is actually something that we need to be paying more attention to. I wish that [the] media would be talking about that a lot more, because if we continue the same policies we have been that the U.S. population does not agree with, we are going to continue to basically worsen distrust in the government, which has been a problem for the last three decades.

There has been waning trust in the U.S. government by the American public, and we have seen how that can be catastrophic. We have seen what happens when people stop losing faith in institutions and in their government. Obviously, this is one policy matter among many, but I do think that gap is something worth paying attention to.

Speaking of the lack of nuanced discussion about Palestine and Israel among U.S. policymakers, a few years ago, I did a profile of Rashida Tlaib for the New York Times Magazine, and I was surprised to learn that the House has about over 300 different caucuses. There is not one that is dedicated to Palestine or Palestinian rights.

That just illustrates how little we are willing to actually talk about this as a policy matter. It’s not shocking to me that the vitriol thrown at Abdul El-Sayed, or even Zohran Mamdani last year, had a lot to do with Islamophobia.

When you can’t actually discuss the policies, when we’re not willing to engage in facts, it’s really easy to throw racist rhetoric at people.

[Break]

AL: I want to talk about what’s been happening in Texas, because I think this is a poignant example of how this has spiraled out of control and seeped into a new form, almost, in 2026. Last year, a promotional video about a Muslim-friendly planned community went viral and sparked a wave of Islamophobic vitriol.

Since then, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law, “Banning Sharia Compounds.” He and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is also the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, ordered investigations against the development and other Muslim institutions across the state. The Department of Justice even launched an investigation, but closed it without finding wrongdoing, according to reporting from PBS. Now, Republican candidates in the state have been campaigning on “The Islamification of Texas.”

What has been your reaction to all of that?

[Rozina Ali laughs]

AL: You can have a range of reactions. [laughs]

RA: I did! I did go through a range of reactions, which was, “Oh, this is Texas doing its thing again.” Or, “Oh, people hate CAIR. That’s not new.” I hate to say it, but there’s a humor about it, too, because this anti-sharia sentiment is so absurd. One of the first times I heard sharia being used — and I grew up in a Muslim household — the first time I heard the word sharia was through Islamophobes in like 2009. I truly did not know what it meant. 

I don’t think that Greg Abbott or any of the other Republicans who are so staunchly against visible Muslims in Texas can explain what sharia means. They can say it’s Islamic law, which is against Western civilization.

But one, they have not been able to show what it means on a very practical level; and two, they haven’t been able to show how that differs from the ways in which other religious communities practice their own religion in the U.S., or how they seek moral guidance.

Ultimately, what it comes down to, what the fight that we’re seeing now is whether we are willing to accept all forms of religion in this country. And as much as I want to say this is just more of what we’ve seen in the past, I think what does frighten me is how quickly we are moving to a place where some governor or some local official might try to outlaw Islam altogether. And mind you, this is even a policy shift from 10 years ago when Trump called for a Muslim ban.

So within even 10 years, there’s a dramatic shift. We’re not even just saying ban Muslim immigrants from coming into the United States. We are now having conversations where officials want to ban Muslims or Islam altogether.

Just a little background: There have long been suspicions about Islamic institutions in this country. Islamic institutions have been surveilled going back to the ’80s and ’90s, and I mean mass surveillance, informants showing up at meetings, talking to and interrogating leaders.

After 2001, there was even an investigation into Muslim chaplains who would visit prisons because some policymakers were worried that they were radicalizing the prison population. There wasn’t really any criminal wrongdoing found actually, but this sense of Muslim institutions are suspicious has been, again, a feature of America for a long time.

But what does worry me is what has been happening recently is that the rhetoric in Texas has been shifting toward, “Islam is not a religion, it’s a political ideology.” This is not a new talking point, but it is becoming institutionalized. There are efforts to make it into law, which is a frightening place to be.

Texas has a huge Muslim population, and I wonder, what does that mean? Does that mean you shut down all the mosques? Does that mean that no Muslim can practice in public? 

I have conflicted feelings about the Muslim neighborhood that was being built, and I know it was open to non-Muslims. But I do think what it suggests and what we are seeing more and more in the U.S. is a desire to live in pockets and to live in silos because people feel more comfortable with their community.

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That actually is a marked difference from what we decided in the U.S., that we wanted to be a society of pluralism and tolerance, and that’s not what we’re seeing in Texas. You can blame the Muslim community, but very much so I blame a lot of the Islamophobes who not only suggest but say outright that Muslims do not belong in this country.

AL: As you’re talking, I can’t help but think about the irony of trying to frame Islam as a political ideology, while the rise of the Christian far-right as an actual political ideology is completely undergirding the Trump administration and its policy priorities across disciplines — and redirecting attention away from what is a very real manifestation of religion as a political ideology toward this scapegoated community that is not just a distraction, but is causing actual harm.

I wonder, has that come up in your reporting? The parallel between the attacks on Islam and this attempt to paint it as this radical, growing tendril that’s seeping into the American political ideology — while the far-right is actually doing that.

RA: So one of the things I wanted to do in my book is really place this history of Islamophobia in the larger context of what’s happening in American politics and what’s happening in the country. And those two things don’t live in a vacuum.

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What was happening to the Muslim community in the U.S. directly affected what was happening in the rest of the country and was affected by it. One of the things that was happening was that even as the media — for years after 9/11, for decades after 9/11 — even as the media covered cases of terrorism convictions or anyone who was charged with terrorism that was related to Muslims, covered the rise of ISIS, covered the rise of Islamic terrorism, it focused much less on the rise of right-wing extremism.

One study put it at over 300 percent more media covered Muslim terrorists than the far-right. What that did was really lull us into thinking that the biggest national security threat we are facing in this country comes from Islamic terrorists, rather than right-wing elements in this country. 

The other thing that’s happened is that a lot of rhetoric and policies over the past 25 years have actually tried to make Islam different. What’s ironic about what we’re seeing today versus 25 years ago is that after 9/11, the Bush administration tried in rhetoric — and I want to make that clear, in rhetoric, at least — tried to make this a not religious war. They really wanted to resist that this was a clash of civilizations. But the policies and the rhetoric that came out of those initial months after 9/11 actually suggested otherwise.

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What happened was that the U.S. government and U.S. authorities and U.S. law enforcement and then eventually “experts” and anti-Muslim hate groups kept positioning Muslims as different or as a group to be suspicious of.

Ultimately, you are creating a religious war by stating the reality of the country in those terms. It’s a natural byproduct of that that Christian fundamentalism would rise as a response to what is considered “foreign elements,” like Islam.

AL: Your new book, “Seasons of Fury,” documents the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. Can you tell us why you wanted to write this book, and how you started your work on it? Obviously, you’ve been covering this for a long time.

RA: So I was living in Egypt for a couple of years, and I was very much focused on wars abroad and how the war on terror has affected communities around the world. When I returned from Egypt, I was actually thinking a lot about terrorism convictions and how Muslims whose fathers or sons had been sent away to prison for decades, how they were faring.

I wasn’t actually trying to question these terrorism convictions, but while I was looking into these cases and speaking to families — this was around the time of the rise of Trump on the political stage, and I started noticing that there was a lot of anti-mosque activity around the country, not just in New York, but in New Jersey and Tennessee and Chicago, and it was shocking to me that it was happening in both blue and red states.

At the same time, after Trump was elected, people started calling his the most Islamophobic administration in U.S. history. I thought there was already a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment long before Trump came into power. I realized that all those threads that I was observing and starting to look into were actually connected.

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One thing I wanted to do with this book is, one, reclaim the history that I think we too often forget about how the Muslim community in the U.S. was targeted and what it went through. But two, I really wanted to situate the Muslim story in the wider American story to explain how we’ve changed.

I really approached this book as an investigative journalist because one of the questions I was really trying to interrogate is: Why is Islamophobia worse now than it was even after 9/11? Why has our country changed so much that we have elected a president who is willing to say, “Let’s ban all the Muslims”? I wanted to really present a history that could explain why we are where we are today.

AL: Through the stories of four families across eight decades in “Seasons of Fury,” you portray a range of Muslim experiences shaped by relentless suspicion and prejudice.

You write about Arab American attorney Abdeen Jabara, who “learned that the government had amassed an extensive file, covering his organizational affiliations, his travels through the country and abroad, transcripts of phone conversations, and notes from interviews with more than a hundred acquaintances, bank transactions, and summaries of speeches.”

It turned out that the U.S. government had been spying on him since 1967. Tell us more about Abdeen and how he became a target of the government.

RA: Abdeen’s history is so fascinating to me. One of the things that I wanted to do when I started this book was really actually situate Muslims as already part of America.

There’s such a predominant narrative that Islam and Muslims are foreign and they came into this country. I wanted to actually show the opposite, and it was very important to me to begin the book in the United States, rather than with someone’s arrival to the United States. Abdeen was born in 1940 in small-town America, in Michigan.

His father, who came from Greater Syria, he was a staunch Republican. He joined the U.S. Army and fought during World War I. He was so patriotic that every Memorial Day he would march in a parade through town. Abdeen became really obsessed with his parents’ homeland; he became obsessed with the Middle East. But what really shook him was what was happening both in the United States and in Israel–Palestine.

So he really came of age during the 1950s and ’60s. He moved to Detroit, and what he saw was an uprising — the 1967 uprising — and he saw police brutality against Black Americans. That same year, there was a war in which Israel basically grabbed more land, more Palestinian land, and those two things really shook Abdeen, and he became very politically active.

He started going to socialist meetings to talk about Palestine. He started to speak at rallies and forums. He helped start a group in the United States that was focused on Palestinian rights. He even took many trips to the Middle East. He was part of the progressive network of National Lawyers Guild. He took a lot of members to the Middle East to meet with Palestinian activists and prisoners and really try to capture what was happening on the ground, bring those facts back to the U.S. to really help shape and influence public opinion and policymakers’ opinion about Palestine, because the U.S. government at that point had backed Israel.

So in 1972, the Munich massacre happens, in which a Palestinian militant group kidnaps and kills the Israeli Olympics team. It caused a huge sensation. It was tragic, and it was blared across national headlines in the U.S. Almost immediately after, Abdeen started to notice that his colleagues, his friends, people he knew in the community were being visited by the FBI.

What immediately came to light was that the U.S. government had started a surveillance program to monitor what it thought were radical elements within the Arab community. This is an operation they called Operation Boulder. Now, ostensibly, the U.S. government said that they were only tackling immigrants, visa holders. It became very clear that it was not just them; it was actually also U.S. citizens of Arab heritage that people were targeting.

He was a U.S. citizen, born, obviously, in the U.S. When Abdeen decided to sue the U.S. government to figure out exactly what they knew and how much they knew because he was suspicious that they had also surveilled him, what he eventually found was that they had been surveilling him since after 1967. So not even since after Munich, but long before then. And that they had shared his information not just with other federal agencies, but also with foreign governments.

AL: This is the first case where the NSA admitted to spying on someone, right?

RA: It was the first case in which the NSA admitted to spying on a U.S. citizen, yes. And it was against an Arab. 

One thing that I find also interesting about Abdeen’s case and the entire surveillance program at that time is, Abedin grew up in a Muslim household. FBI and police notes noted that he was Muslim, that his family was Muslim.

They did not surveil him because he was Muslim. They surveilled him because he was Arab — which was the case for his other colleagues, too. They surveilled them because even if they happened to be Muslim, they were surveilled because they were Arab.

After 9/11, it was a similar sort of surveillance — except law enforcement surveilled Muslims because they were Muslims. And that really is a fascinating and damning shift that we see.

When I was doing this reporting and research, I was thinking to myself, I think this might be the first time in U.S. history that the government has targeted a religious group so widely and so systematically, which is, honestly, quite astonishing. And it is something that I wish we would talk about more and really reckon with.

AL: You said you started thinking about this book by thinking about convictions for terrorism charges, and we’ve seen the expansion of charges for “material support” for terrorism in a variety of protest spheres in recent years. I just want to zoom out a little bit because I think most of our listeners are familiar with the way that this apparatus exploded after 9/11.

We know that 9/11 gave way to George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror, the Department of Homeland Security, Guantánamo Bay, the erosion of civil liberties with the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretaps, and the acceleration of the unitary executive theory — resting more unilateral power in the hands of the president.

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All of that — all of those institutions — now rest in the hands of Donald Trump and his administration, who, as we know, have proven willing to push the bounds of government surveillance, extrajudicial killings, unilateral wars, and detention of perceived enemies of the state even further. You wrote for The New York Times recently about the Prairieland activists that the government charged with “material support” of terrorism.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how we got there, and how what constitutes terrorism and support for terrorism has evolved over the years.

RA: A lot of the structures and the laws that the Bush administration used to target terrorism were already in place in the United States. They were really expanded and founded during the Clinton administration in the ’90s.

This one specific law that you mentioned, the material support for terrorism, was actually passed in 1994, and then was expanded in 1996, ironically after the Oklahoma City bombing.

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What it did was allow the U.S. government to prosecute anyone charged with support for terrorism, either a foreign terrorist organization or support a terrorist activity. The problem was that even in 1996, what “support” meant was so broad and vague.

It was so broad that even some senior administration officials asked the State Department, “Does that mean $25 in dues can be considered material support for terrorism?” The State Department official said, “Yes, actually. I don’t think anyone would prosecute for that, but yes.” So basically, by 1996, we had a really vague and powerful law on the books.

After 2001, prosecutors recognized that they had this really useful law to go after terrorists. One thing to remember is that after 9/11, the guiding star for the U.S. government across the board was prevention. “We have to prevent another attack before it happens,” which means that law enforcement were looking for not just terrorists before they could do something, but potential terrorists, anyone who could become a terrorist. It was a broad mission.

That plus the material support for terrorism law, which was already vague, allowed the U.S. government to basically put a lot of people in jail who were not even connected to a terrorist group or who did not even commit an act of violence or who did not even have particularly detailed plans for violence.

One of the cases I mentioned in the New York Times piece was the case of Yassin Aref, who was an imam in Albany, Kurdish imam. He came as a refugee. This is what’s so fascinating to me about the U.S. war on terror, is that when Yassin Aref came as a refugee, the U.S. considered Kurds their allies. After 2003, they were suspicious of Kurdish militants. 

It was during that era, the post-9/11 era, that the U.S. government targeted Yassin Aref using an undercover informant. It’s not that Yassin Aref said, “I want to blow up something,” or “I have a plan,” or “I have a desire to kill someone.”

What actually happened was that the informant loaned money to one of Yassin Aref’s friends. Yasin Aref witnessed that loan. The informant said, “This money came from a foreign terrorist organization.” Yassin Aref did not really understand what this man was talking about and just nodded along. That was one of the pieces of evidence — the strongest piece of evidence — that U.S. prosecutors used to charge him with material support for terrorism.

Yassin Aref ended up in prison for 15 years. This is a case that illustrates, one, that material support was so vague and so broad, it really could mean anything and continues to mean anything. But two, what we consider terrorism has just broadened dramatically. We really have no good definition of what terrorism is.

And this was something that a lot of civil rights lawyers and activists were warning about even back then, because they recognized that this law and this war on terror can be used to attack dissidents and eventually will be used to attack a lot more people than the Muslim community. And that is what we’re seeing now.

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We are seeing that because we’ve given so much power to the executive branch, because we’ve given so much power to the government over the last 25 years, the government gets to decide who they consider enemies, who they consider terrorists, and what they consider support for terrorism. And unfortunately, we have the legal backing in the books to back that mission. The Trump administration can say, “I now consider leftists terrorists,” and unfortunately, there are laws in the books that allow him to do that.

AL: They basically said as much claiming that all the socialists are heralding communism, et cetera, et cetera.

RA: Yes, it is one of the more, again, funny if not scary bits about the vitriol thrown at Abdul El-Sayed, is calling him an “Islamic communist.”

It’s so interesting to me that now it’s — I think especially because of the rise of the DSA and socialists in office — basically the right wing is throwing everything at him. And Abdul El-Sayed is not a socialist; he’s said it himself.

AL: He’s not. [laughs] On this show, he’s said that, yes.

RA: Yes. And Zohran Mamdani is a socialist, but it’s the same vitriol thrown at both of them. I think it’s really interesting and actually quite chilling that the rhetoric is starting to join the word “Islamic terrorist” with leftists or with socialists or communists. That actually spells something a lot more nefarious and dangerous for wider American society than just the Muslim community.

AL: Rozina, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.

RA: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

AL: I want to remind everyone that Rozina’s new book is out now. “Seasons of Fury” documents Islamophobia in the U.S.. 

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music. 

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post 25 Years After 9/11, Muslims Are Still Politicians’ Favorite Scapegoat appeared first on The Intercept.

In the U.S., Rowan is simultaneously helping ensure a pro-Israel political project has no problem with money. Since the start of this year, according to Federal Election Commission filings, the billionaire CEO of Apollo Global Management has donated $1.5 million to the United Democracy Project, a super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spending a fraction of his vast wealth to preserve a foreign policy defined by support for Israel’s genocide and the flow of U.S. weapons to Israel. 

Rowan — who is worth more than $8 billion and reportedly consulted on his business with convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — is an executive member of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” a United Nations-approved body tasked with carrying out Trump’s stalled plan for Gaza. He made his first donation to UDP of the year in early March, giving $1 million, filings show, just as the group began spending aggressively against the now-ousted Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a loud critic of U.S. support for Israel. 

A second donation for $500,000 arrived on July 23. The same day, the AIPAC super PAC shelled out nearly $50,000 in campaign mailers in Michigan to attack the progressive pro-Palestine candidate for U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed. In Missouri, it dropped another $100,000 for phone banking services against former Democratic Rep. Cori Bush in her race against pro-Israel incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell. 

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It’s not clear which specific UDP efforts have been backed by Rowan’s largesse, and neither Rowan nor UDP responded to requests for comment. But Raed Jarrar, advocacy director with Democracy for the Arab World Now, connected Rowan’s position on Trump’s Gaza board and his major part as a donor to AIPAC’s super PAC as a matter of transparency. 

“Now he sits on a board that will decide Gaza’s future,” Jarrar told The Intercept. “Palestinians did not choose him, and neither did American voters. Americans and Palestinians alike deserve to know whose interests are actually being served.”

Rowan, a major donor to Trump’s failed 2020 presidential campaign, has long made his animus toward critics of Israel known. In recent years, he has been a fierce advocate against student protesters calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, broadly mischaracterizing their anti-genocide calls as “antisemitic,” and played a key role in ousting leaders at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, over their handling of the protests. In 2025, he served as a consultant to the White House in its recent attacks on higher education. He donated an initial $250,000 to UDP in 2022, the year the AIPAC super PAC was founded, and more than quadrupled his giving by 2024. Trump appointed him to the Board of Peace this past January.

“Marc Rowan has used his position to try to silence Palestinians and smear students protesting Israel’s genocide,” said Margaret DeReus, executive director of Peace, Accountability, and Leadership PAC, which launched this cycle as a pro-Palestine counterweight to the pro-Israel lobby. PAL PAC backed both El-Sayed and Bush, who have committed to cutting military aid to Israel. (El-Sayed prevailed in his Democratic Senate primary against Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, while both Bush and Massie lost their races.)

Rowan “gives millions to fund the now-fringe idea that billions of our tax dollars should fund the Israeli military and targets candidates who are calling to stop sending U.S. tax dollars to Israel’s genocide,” DeReus said. She added that his presence on “Trump’s corrupt board” lays bare the actual goal of the governing body: “the continued genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians living in Gaza.”

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As support for Israel among the American people has plummeted, and more leftist candidates run on promises to enact an arms embargo on Israel, AIPAC has broken its own spending records and set new ones, helping make El-Sayed and Massie’s primaries among the most expensive ever. In Congress, the lobbying giant has also worked to consolidate power among its pro-Israel base. In July, AIPAC lobbied members for the passage of a Pentagon program that further enmeshes military technological sharing between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Last week, Democratic leadership appointed three hawkish, pro-Israel, and AIPAC-backed Democrats to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In addition to his AIPAC super PAC spending, Rowan has also directly given to a host of pro-Israel candidates this cycle, including New Jersey Democrats Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Sen. Cory Booker, as well as Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig in her failed Senate bid.

The majority of Rowan’s spending, however, has been in favor of Republicans, including Mike Rogers, who is facing off against El-Sayed; Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, a vocal opponent of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement; and Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and former Israeli Defense Forces volunteer who famously wore his IDF uniform to Congress.

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AIPAC has long championed Trump’s plan for Gaza, which has included overt calls to displace Palestinians, and supports Israel’s hard line in its negotiations with Hamas leaders. Israel, which occupies nearly 70 percent of Gaza, has refused to withdraw its military from the Strip. Israel blames Hamas for refusing to disarm, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only surrender its weapons in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state — conditions the Israeli government has refused.

AIPAC also regularly celebrates the ongoing bombardment of the Strip, where more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since the so-called ceasefire was brokered, including this week when bombing killed two children.

In Rowan’s view, there’s money to be made from the carnage. At the meeting in Washington, D.C., this past February — when Trump also pledged $10 billion in public funds to the board — Rowan fired off property value estimates in Gaza, more than 80 percent of which lies in ruins. He cited a coastline valued at $50 billion; a housing stock, if rebuilt, worth $30 billion; and infrastructure projects worth another $30 billion. Rowan spoke next to generic renderings of glistening high-rise apartments, palm tree-laden highways, solar power plants, and coastal oil depots. Consolidating all of these assets under the supervision of Trump’s Board of Peace, Rowan said, would allow for “conflict-free management of the resources to benefit the Gazans.”

“One hundred fifteen billion of value,” he promised. “It just needs to be unlocked and financed.” 

The post “Board of Peace” Billionaire Backs AIPAC Fund Targeting Pro-Palestine Candidates appeared first on The Intercept.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey comfortably defeated Rep. Seth Moulton in his Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, in what the media — and Moulton himself — had described as a “generational” challenge.

The framing is understandable: In a country suffering under gerontocratic rule, Markey is 80 and Moulton is 47.

Age, however, was the least of what was at stake in Moulton’s run from the decaying center of the Democratic Party. Moulton ran on a conservative line, recycling right-wing talking points and echoing Donald Trump to suggest, erroneously, that Democrats have been failing because they have not been conservative enough.

Markey may be 80 years old, but his campaign did precisely what Democrats must if they want to appeal to progressives and bring in a broad working-class voter base: He ran on issues of economic inequality, taxing billionaires, green energy, and universal health care — all while refusing to jettison support for vulnerable minorities, especially trans people.

Meanwhile Moulton, claiming to represent a break in the status quo, repeated precisely the tired centrist playbook that has both failed America’s multiracial working class and failed to win elections. He punched left and, as Markey himself highlighted, threw trans kids “under the bus.”

In a risible misreading of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential election loss, Moulton suggested that his party had shown too much care for trans rights. (It had not.)

“I have two little girls,” Moulton told the New York Times just after the November 2024 election. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

It was only last month that Moulton offered a tempered apology for the anti-trans remarks — and only because Markey had lambasted him during a debate.

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“He just took the whole playbook of MAGA and Trump, and he blamed those kids for the loss,” said Markey, who has been consistent in his advocacy for trans rights. “We should have been loving those kids. There’s only 12 trans athletes in the whole of the NCAA. We should have been embracing them.”

Indeed, we should question the validity of this so-called “debate” entirely: Why did the moderator of a Senate primary debate even feel the need to ask a question about trans girls in sports at all?

This is not, after all, a political problem in need of addressing in Massachusetts, or anywhere else. It is a ghoulish far-right panic that has been baselessly elevated into a hot-button issue, with the help of Democratic cowardice.

Fox News, of all places, noted that Markey is “one of the few Democrats running this midterm cycle who is continuing to push for transgender rights, particularly in sports” — as if that were a bad thing.

“There is good evidence that transgender issues were a major part of Markey’s victory, too,” wrote reporter and trans advocate Erin Reed. “In the final days of the campaign, a UMass/Amherst poll asked primary voters how a candidate who embraces anti-trans positions or policies would impact their vote. In that poll, a whopping 67% stated it would make their vote less likely for that candidate.”

Markey, the longtime incumbent, was already at an advantage. And no doubt proselytizers for Democratic Party conservatism will stress that Markey’s victory in deep-blue Massachusetts cannot offer lessons for Democrats running in less progressive territory. This again would be to selectively learn the wrong lessons from Kamala Harris’s spectacular 2024 failure.

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It should not need repeating that Democrats in 2024 campaigned on Republican talking points, with Harris donning khaki for photo ops at the Arizona border. If Donald Trump’s campaign attacking trans people gained purchase, it is because Democrats roundly failed to answer it by demystifying right-wing anti-trans fearmongering. They also failed to offer a robust, class-focused platform to vote for.

Being nearly half someone’s age does not constitute a generational challenge; contesting the staid ways of a generational establishment does. Moulton did nothing of the sort.

Markey said it best on Tuesday: “Generational change isn’t about compromising.”

The post Seth Moulton Sold Out Trans Kids — and Lost His Senate Race appeared first on The Intercept.

This year, however, he’s facing a challenger attempting to flip that strategy on its head. A Democratic Socialists of America member, Oliver Larkin, is trying to win a primary against Moskowitz by running far to his left on both foreign and domestic policies.

The pair presents a striking contrast: Moskowitz has drawn heavy support from donors associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and an artificial intelligence super PAC, while Larkin, a 34-year-old union organizer, calls himself an anti-Zionist and leans on small-dollar funders.

Polls of the race have produced vastly different results, with one commissioned by Larkin putting him within striking distance, while another from Moskowitz’s campaign showing the incumbent far ahead.

Susan McManus, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of South Florida, said in an email that the race will be a significant tell of the mood in the Democratic electorate.

“Of all the Florida congressional districts, this one will be the biggest test of how deep is the generational and ideological divide in the Florida Democratic Party, and to what extent the socialism label may splinter the Latino vote,” she said.

Theory of Change

That label is one that Larkin wears proudly, describing himself on his website as an active member of the Broward County Democratic Socialists of America. He supports Medicare for All while opposing the embargo on Cuba and weapons transfers to Israel.

In an interview with The Intercept ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Larkin said he rejected the Florida Democratic Party’s tendency to lean right to win Republican and independent votes. That strategy has not worked, Larkin said, pointing to Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist’s big loss to Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2024.

Instead, Larkin argues that an openly leftist candidate can energize the Democratic base while winning over disaffected independents.

“I think another false choice that corporate Democrats make is that non-party affiliated or independent voters want to see candidates split the difference right down the middle. I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “They see the status quo politics as completely broken.”

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Moskowitz’s campaign did not respond to an interview request. On his campaign website, however, he leans heavily on his bipartisan bona fides, noting that he served in DeSantis’s cabinet as emergency management director until his election to Congress in 2022.

That credential could help win over voters in a redrawn district spanning much of the coast near Fort Lauderdale that would have voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Moskowitz already represents about half of the new district’s voters in his current 23rd Congressional District.

The new 25th District also has one of the nation’s largest Jewish populations, making Moskowitz’s outspoken support for Israel particularly salient. Last week, pro-Israel activists in south Florida pressured multiple venues to cancel a joint rally that Larkin was to hold with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of the Democratic Party’s most outspoken critics of Israel.

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Moskowitz has also accused Larkin — without offering any evidence — of running against him based on his religion, in a letter to the Sun Sentinel where he declined to participate in a joint interview with Larkin.

The South Florida newspaper called that charge “demonstrably untrue” and dinged Moskowitz for dodging opportunities to face off against his opponent.

“The Sun Sentinel has endorsed Moskowitz in all of his previous races. But in this case, his continued avoidance of Larkin shows a lack of respect for voters and can be viewed as an unwillingness to defend his own record,” the paper’s editorial board said.

Dollar Deficit

Larkin was born in Florida, but after his stint as a volunteer and staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, he worked for a consulting firm aligned with the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Sunshine State in 2022. During his run for office this cycle, he has posted respectable fundraising numbers for a first-time candidate taking on an incumbent. In an August 13 press release, his campaign said he had raised over $1 million.

Still, that puts him far behind Moskowitz, who reported receipts of nearly $3 million during this election cycle in his most recent campaign finance report, with $1.8 million remaining on hand.

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While some pro-Israel candidates have sought to avoid association with AIPAC this year, given the group’s increasingly toxic brand, Moskowitz has defended its donations to his campaign. His fundraising reports show that he has raised $953,000 from donors associated with AIPAC, according to the transparency website Open Secrets.

An artificial intelligence super PAC is also spending heavily on Moskowitz. The super PAC, Leading the Future, has spent more than $300,000 thus far.

Larkin believes he can make up the divide in spending on advertising with old-fashioned door-knocking. His campaign boasts of having made more than 200,000 voter contacts — and he says there has been little evidence that Moskowitz’s campaign is attempting to match their ground game.

“He’s got ads on TV. He’s got mail. He has no ground game to speak of. I don’t believe he is even attempting to knock on doors,” Larkin said. “He doesn’t have a volunteer base, because nobody wants to volunteer for him.”

The post A Democratic Socialist Aims to Oust a Top AIPAC Beneficiary in Florida appeared first on The Intercept.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley beat the odds to eke out a victory by less than 1 percentage point on election night, a surprise upset after Crowley, who would be Wisconsin’s first Black governor if he wins in November, dropped out of the race and then reentered with the support of outgoing Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers. 

The race became dominated in the final days by inane issues like whether Hong believed that Thanksgiving should exist, based on old tweets criticizing the holiday, echoing and accelerating the annual Fox News “War on Christmas” panic. The sudden fury over old tweets was a distraction from a concrete issue that Hong had made a key focus of her public talking points and likely drove her surge in popularity: data centers.

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Hong’s campaign repeatedly emphasized that she was the only candidate in the race to support a data center moratorium, which would pause construction of any new data centers, giving the state time to create regulations and study their environmental and energy impact. The moratorium would not extend to data center projects already underway in the state.

“It’s time to press control+alt+delete to put a stop to this AI data center crisis, a full moratorium until we have the new regulations we need to protect our energy costs, our economy, our environment,” Hong said in a campaign video.

By all indications, it’s a popular position: A Gallup poll in May found that seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area, and politicians from Maine to Texas have had to grapple with the public’s calls to bar the resource-hungry projects from their backyards.  

Hong’s narrow defeat is a loss for the data center moratorium movement, particularly in Wisconsin, which already has dozens of centers littering the state. Crowley, now the Democratic nominee, has called for more regulation of data centers, but has explicitly denounced a data center moratorium, calling it a “short-term” solution. “I don’t think he’s going to make [data centers] a front and center issue,” said Michael Ceraso, a democratic strategist and founder and director of Winning Margins. “It might pop up peripherally.” 

But Hong’s loss is far from a death knell for the anti-data center movement. While most voters would be hard-pressed to tell you what a data center was a few years ago, it has slowly become a major political issue that has helped to fuel the rise of insurgent progressives across the country. In this year’s midterm primaries, anti-data center candidates from Colorado to Kansas have been running and winning on the issue. 

The data center issue has distilled multiple grievances with establishment politicians into a simple message: The people who represent you are selling you and your community out to the highest bidder.

“It turns out that if you’re not taking money from Silicon Valley, you can fight hard for a federal moratorium on data centers,” said William Lawrence, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, in a victory speech last week after he won his House primary race in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. 

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In his Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed won after vehemently opposing the construction of new data centers. At a rally in front of a massive new OpenAI and Oracle data center campus in Saline Township, Michigan, El-Sayed denounced the proliferation of data centers. “I stand with local and state elected officials saying that we cannot approve any more of these until we have federal-level guardrails,” El-Sayed told the crowd.

In Kansas, Democratic state Sen. Cindy Holscher won her Democratic gubernatorial race after calling for a moratorium on data centers. Holscher had previously voted for a bill that would have expanded the centers. And in Colorado, Melat Kiros unseated a 15-term incumbent, Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., while running on a data center moratorium platform. 

Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of the political recruitment group Run for Something, told The Intercept that Hong’s formidable campaign underscored how motivating data center opposition is for voters.

“Francesca Hong went from unknown state legislator to within a half point of winning the Democratic nomination in large part because she clearly spoke to the frustration and fear people have about what’s happening in the economy, especially around data centers,” Litman said.

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The Sunrise Movement, which has backed anti-data center candidates, including El-Sayed, Lawrence, Kiros, and Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who won his House race last week, said that Democrats need to be at the forefront of this issue. 

“The fight against unchecked data center expansion is quickly becoming a defining political issue,” said Denae Ávila-Dickson, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement. “Democrats must be the party that stands up for people over the corporations profiting from data center expansion in our backyards, and progressive candidates are leading the way in that fight.”

The post Francesca Hong’s Loss in Wisconsin Is a Win for AI Data Centers — for Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, Democratic voters have expressed dissatisfaction with their party over what many view as an inability to stand up to the president and his broader movement. That dissatisfaction with the establishment has manifested in primaries in coastal cities across the country, where the progressive movement appears to be ascendant. On Tuesday, that test played out in Midwestern states, Michigan and Missouri.

Within roughly two hours of polls closing, The Associated Press called the closely watched rematch between Cori Bush and Rep. Wesley Bell for the incumbent. In 2024, AIPAC and other outside groups spent more than $18 million to oust Bush from her Missouri district, and her defeat, along with New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s, has served as a warning sign for Democrats not to be too progressive or too pro-Palestine.

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But by Wednesday morning, Abdul El-Sayed, who ran on Medicare for All and ending military aid to Israel for its continued genocide in Gaza, narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by less than 20,000 votes. According to AdImpact, the Michigan Democratic Senate primary saw $98 million in ad spending and reservations. At least $60 million was spent boosting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed, with more than $30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, United Democracy Project — its largest spend in a single race ever, nearly double the then-record-breaking amount spent on Bowman’s 2024 primary race.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Akela Lacy and Jonah Valdez discuss what results from Tuesday’s primaries signal for progressives and the broader left in the Democratic Party, especially in swing states and outside of coastal cities.

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter.

Jonah Valdez: And I’m Jonah Valdez. I cover politics and U.S. foreign policy.

JW: We’re in your feed a bit early this week to talk about two major primaries we’ve been reporting on at The Intercept.

Over the nearly two years on this podcast, we’ve been covering voters’ dissatisfaction with Democrats over what many view as an inability to stand up to President Donald Trump and his broader movement. That dissatisfaction has manifested in primaries in cities across the country, from New York to Colorado and California, where the progressive movement appears to be ascendant.

That test came to the Midwest on Tuesday in Michigan and Missouri. In Missouri, former squad member Cori Bush lost her rematch against Rep. Wesley Bell, who received the bulk of outside spending, primarily from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In 2024, AIPAC and other groups poured a collective $18 million into the race to defeat her.

In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in a win for progressives after AIPAC-aligned super PACs and others poured close to $100 million into the race, according to AdImpact. This week on The Intercept Briefing, you’ll hear what the results from Tuesday’s primaries signal for progressives and the broader left in the Democratic Party, especially in swing states and outside of coastal cities.

Jonah, Akela, I really want to get your reactions to El-Sayed winning the Democratic Michigan Senate primary.

JV: Well, it was a long night, and AP called it pretty early — at least here where I am on the West Coast. And I think my initial reaction is, a win’s a win. I think results were a lot closer than what the polls had showed leading up to it.

I think it’s worth noting that Abdul El-Sayed was massively outspent in this race. Overall, nearly $100 million in the Senate primary. It’s the most expensive Democratic primary ever, but the majority of which was spent in outside spending to either attack El-Sayed or boost the campaign of Stevens.

Yet El-Sayed pulls off this very close win with a vote total, I think it’s worth noting, that’s greater than the more moderate Elissa Slotkin got in her primary in 2024. More similar to closer margins we saw in the presidential primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

JW: For our listeners at home, Elissa Slotkin is the senator who beat Mike Rogers in 2024. Mike Rogers is the presumptive Republican nominee who El-Sayed will be facing in the November election.

JV: And you’re already seeing online, all this talk from moderates as far as where El-Sayed may have failed, as if to show progressive policies still don’t do well, or, all this talk of how can El-Sayed moderate more in the general.

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But I think if Dems are serious about getting a Senate majority, I think it’s more so on moderates to appeal to what the majority of voters in Michigan decided today. And that’s that it’s the politics of the El-Sayed campaign.

AL: My reaction, obviously NBC projected overnight that El-Sayed would win, and so his campaign claimed victory overnight, and everyone was waiting well into the morning for the final results.

But in that interim period, you basically saw the shift in conversation go from everyone having that election-night anticipation to everyone churning out takes about why the polling that showed El-Sayed up by double digits in the final weeks of the race had been so far off. Making conjectures about counties where Stevens outperformed him and extrapolating that to the November general election, making claims that El-Sayed is going to have to make up a lot of ground with Black or working-class voters in counties that Stevens performed better in.

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But I think that immediate pivot is really telling in a lot of ways because this was the most expensive [Democratic] Senate primary in history, and we saw the most spending ever from not just the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, but all of these other corporate PACs to boost Haley Stevens.

She came into this race in the first spot with backing from the Democratic Party and lost. And I think to ignore the massive failure on the part of the party in that vein and to instead put those failures on El-Sayed is a really backwards reading of what happened last night.

JW: Akela, to your point about the money, and Jonah, I want to bring you into this, did the money make a difference? It was the most expensive Democratic [Senate] primary in history, and did the spending here change the outcome? Obviously, El-Sayed won anyway, but, did this have an impact?

AL: I think it would be folly to argue that it didn’t have an impact. It’s still very early. We don’t have all of the information, but there’s anecdotal reports of voters saying that they thought that Obama endorsed Haley Stevens. I actually haven’t seen anyone talking about individual responses to the AIPAC attacks, but that narrative out there that Abdul El-Sayed is the biggest threat to the U.S.–Israel relationship or to American Jews or Jewish voters in Michigan, that’s been out there this entire race.

And so I think that certainly had an effect. But I’ve also seen some people saying, “Oh, you can’t just make the argument that voters who voted for Haley Stevens or who were swayed by these ads are stupid.” I don’t think anyone’s saying they’re stupid. But it’s unrealistic to try to make an argument that this money had no effect in this race.

JV: Yeah, it absolutely made a difference. Speaking with people in Michigan throughout the summer and really starting, early July, just like a flood of attack ads against El-Sayed. They were pretty much omnipresent if you were watching TV. Mind you, this was around the World Cup, so people were seeing this on primetime television immediately after a game ended. 

Someone I spoke to said the second ad right after is an attack ad calling Abdul El-Sayed, I think, hateful toward women, and other ones painted him as a terrorist sympathizer trying to tie him to Hasan Piker and comments he made. Painting this whole vision that he is too radical for Michigan. It is the outside spending propping that up, but on top of that, like trying to make this ideological argument. 

JW: And just for anyone who doesn’t know Hasan Piker is the popular Twitch streamer who’s been campaigning with progressives and who Republicans and Democrats have been weaponizing against progressives implying with, I would argue, pretty Islamophobic attacks that these candidates are anti-American and that they believe everything that Piker believes.

JV: I think it’s worth remembering that there was a point in this race when it was essentially a three-way tie between El-Sayed, Stevens, and Mallory McMorrow, who would eventually drop out. The conventional thinking at the time was that the more that voters see of Stevens, the more it would consolidate around McMorrow and El-Sayed, that Stevens would back off and would drop off in the polls because of AIPAC being such a big issue in the race.

Around the same time as polls were reflecting that, that’s when AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, dropped in tens and tens of millions of dollars. This is the correlated result that you get. 

Stevens also has this history with AIPAC as far as the why they spent for her. AIPAC and corporate groups saw Stevens as a candidate that aligns with their policy positions. Stevens of course in 2019 took that freshman trip sponsored by AIPAC to Israel. And worth mentioning in 2022 she received millions in support in her race against former congressman Andy Levin, who was attacked over his support for a Palestinian state.

On the other side of that coin, of course, is AIPAC saw a candidate in El-Sayed who opposes their positions on Israel.

JW: Akela, I want to turn to you for a second. I know that the United Democracy Project, a super PAC backed by AIPAC, as you both have mentioned, spent a ton of money in this race. I know that came up in your conversation with El-Sayed last week. Now that you’ve had some time to reflect on that conversation, were there any takeaways for you about how he was thinking about money and politics, and specifically the massive amount of money that was spent on his election?

AL: The core of El-Sayed’s argument this entire race was that he was the antithesis to big money in politics. Not just spending on a race, but talking about money in politics being the reason that we don’t have policies like Medicare for All, that we can’t change sort of the status quo on U.S. military support for Israel, that being a driving factor for why many voters ended up supporting somebody like Donald Trump.

Looking back on the way that El-Sayed messaged on these things, he was right. The question was, like, how much do voters actually care about that thing? And I think the breakdown came between voters who support a candidate like Stevens and don’t necessarily care about the money coming in to support her. 

People talk a lot about the enthusiasm gap — that supporters of El-Sayed were much more enthusiastically supportive of him in a positive way than supporters of Stevens who might have been supporting her because they were familiar with her, they felt like she was more of a predictable candidate, or because they didn’t want to vote for somebody like El-Sayed.

That enthusiasm gap is why you see that kind of money coming into the race. He made the point over and over again: “If your candidate is so electable, why do you have to spend $60 million to put them in office?” Part of that is his campaign strategy, but I think it’s a pretty unimpeachable argument, right? If they didn’t need that kind of boost to put their candidate in office — and obviously it didn’t work — why would you make that kind of investment? 

Coming out of this, there’s all kinds of people trying to spin this to say, “Oh, the money advantage has changed this cycle.” We’ve seen other candidates who had the money advantage lose, but I think that sort of discounts exactly how much money went into this race. I think there was almost $100 million spent in total on the Michigan Senate race. Which is crazy! Just on its face. If you’re on the opposite side of that spending, the obvious question is, “OK, if your candidate is so good, then why do you have to do all of this to help them win?” 

The takeaway that a lot of people have from this, whether they’re supportive of El-Sayed or whether they’re upset about Haley Stevens, is that, I don’t think the era of big money in politics is over, but obviously the ground is shifting.

JW: Jonah, I want to come back to the Islamophobia in the race that you reported on. Obviously, we saw these attacks both from Democrats and Republicans, and as we head into November, we can only imagine that these attacks are going to intensify and I would argue become more Islamophobic as Republicans pick up some of these attacks that Democrats had dropped in the primary.

What do you think is going to happen in the general election, and how are you anticipating Islamophobia to show up in this race? 

JV: We’re already seeing it this morning. The Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, they released their first ads this morning, and of course, they refer to Abdul El-Sayed by his full name, they are tying him again to Hasan Piker, using phrasing that El-Sayed is too radical. These are all out of the playbook from the primary that the Michigan GOP had rolled out that Mike Rogers had rolled out. 

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And on top of that, I’m glad you noted that it’s not just the Republicans who have been weaponizing Islamophobia, it’s also the Democratic establishment and AIPAC through its, again, super PAC, [United Democracy Project], just pouring and pouring all these ads that are again painting Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim and Arab, as a sympathizer to terrorism. That, on top of these unfounded claims of his hatred toward women. Speaking to several leading experts in Islamophobia, they were identifying these as pretty troubling anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tropes that have been around in American politics for years now.

One person mentioned that it reminded them of the early attacks on Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, and that leaked photo that Hillary Clinton’s campaign at the time put out showing him in traditional Somalian elder attire. And so, I think we could expect these kinds of attacks to only accelerate, especially at a time when Islamophobia is pretty common in GOP rhetoric right now.

We saw it leading up to the campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York for his mayoral seat. We see it very regularly from representatives in the House like Randy Fine, who folks like him in his part of the world essentially believe that no Muslims should serve in Congress at all.

They’re drawing these hard, very bigoted lines. They’re successful politically in a lot of spaces. Republicans are still betting that these old tactics can still work before a broader electorate. Today’s victory, though, in spite of all of the attack ads in the primary, kind of shows that those older tactics may not be as effective as they were, say, a decade ago or 20 years ago.

What we’re seeing this morning with these new ads, is a preview of what’s to come. It’s only going to get worse as the GOP plays to its MAGA base. But El-Sayed has shown that he has the capacity to overcome this, and I think that boils down to just how far the electorate has evolved on this and just aren’t as susceptible to such blatant racism.

JW: One thing I’ve been wondering is whether or not, as we head into November, establishment Democrats are going to protect El-Sayed and actually stand up against these Islamophobic attacks.

We’ve seen Democrats dance around these attacks on Ilhan Omar, sometimes defending against them, but often adding fuel to the fire. So I think come November or before November even, it’ll be interesting to see if Democrats actually intervene and do something about these kinds of racist, Islamophobic attacks.

AL: It’s a good question, Jessie, and already this morning we’ve seen Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who run the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee endorse El-Sayed. We saw the Senate Majority PAC come in and endorse him. Even Haley Stevens endorsed him. But lest we forget, four days ago, Haley Stevens was saying that El-Sayed blamed all of his problems on Jewish voters with the backing of many of these people in the party.

So yeah, I think the question of whether they will specifically address the Islamophobic attacks is a totally different question from whether they are going to consolidate around him, which they are, because they obviously need the seat.

[Break]

JW: Obviously, this was a really interesting race, and we’ve all been watching it, but I want to talk about some other races that happened last night as well.

So Akela, I know you’ve been watching House District 7 in Michigan, where William Lawrence, founder of the Sunrise Movement, won the Democratic primary. Akela, can you tell us a little bit about him and the dynamics of that race?

AL: Will Lawrence — many people may remember him because of the late-breaking oppo story about him saying that the left had been defanged by Black members of Congress. But prior to that, Will Lawrence had run a pretty textbook progressive campaign from the left, but he really was one of the first candidates this cycle who we saw center their campaign around the issue of data centers.

And I think in some of the analysis that we’ve seen coming out of his win, which was one of the early calls last night is that that is a winning argument particularly for progressive campaigns, but also in states where communities are fighting data centers.

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We’ve seen this, I don’t want to say people are treating the data-center issue as like a panacea, but we have seen that come up in a lot of campaigns and a lot of analysis, suggesting that’s potentially a through line where progressives can overcome some of the obstacles that they might have faced around other “controversial policies,” and that data centers is, like, this reasonable policy that progressives are adopting that’s helping to boost their campaigns.

I think that’s a narrative that’s really coming out of Will Lawrence’s race. I will also mention that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee backed Lawrence shortly after he won, which is a pretty big deal.

JV: And just to add with Lawrence, he is in the 7th Michigan district, which is considered a purple district, and it’s currently held by a Republican incumbent. So I think moving ahead to the general, I think similar to El-Sayed’s race against Mike Rogers, is that, a lot of people will be looking at this as a test of how these anti-corporate, anti-data center, and unabashedly pro-Palestinian politics play in a general election in a district that is very much considered a swing district.

JW: Yeah. No, I can definitely see that. 

I want to turn to another state, Missouri. Within roughly two hours of polls closing, The Associated Press called the closely watched — for me at least, probably a little bit less for the rest of the news ecosystem — but the closely watched rematch between Cori Bush and Rep. Wesley Bell in Bell’s favor.

So in 2024, AIPAC and other groups had spent more than $18 million to oust her from her Missouri district. Akela, we’ve both spoken to members of Congress who have seen her defeat as a warning sign to not be so progressive, to not be so pro-Palestine. We’ve been chatting in the newsroom in our politics meetings about whether or not this race says anything about progressives and the progressive movement right now, or does it just say something about Bush and her campaign?

AL: I don’t think that this race says anything about the viability of pro-Palestine candidates. To make that argument, you would have to close your eyes to all of the last three months, basically. I think this was a race about Cori Bush and Wesley Bell. And for all the criticisms of Wesley Bell, people like him in this district. 

Turnout in the city of St. Louis, Cori Bush’s base, was pretty high. It was 30 percent. That was around the levels that we saw when she won reelection in 2022, and that was not enough to counteract the support that Wesley Bell got from St. Louis County, where more older Black voters who support him tend to live.

What I heard from supporters of Bush was that some people thought she was going to lose, but they didn’t think it would be by this much. A lot of people thought she was going to win; they were obviously wrong. I don’t think you can make the argument that the AIPAC money in this race is the only reason that she lost.

There was a pretty effective campaign to saddle her with baggage from these stories about what happened to the tornado relief money that she raised, and her husband being probed over a pandemic loan fraud, and all of these things we talked about and she chalked up to political attacks.

But I think people in the district were not necessarily swayed by those issue, but it left a bad taste in their mouth. And it’s the kind of thing where I’m not sure that Wesley Bell would’ve won if a different candidate was was challenging him, just given the frustration both with incumbents and with AIPAC money.

Bush’s campaign also suffered because she didn’t have the marquee progressive support that we’ve seen boost candidates in other races, like rallies with Bernie Sanders and AOC. Bernie Sanders endorsed her, but nobody came to campaign with her. Justice Democrats endorsed her, but they didn’t spend money on the race.

The money that was spent in favor of Bush was just around $200,000 — that means that progressive groups didn’t take this race seriously. And for one reason or another, it’s kind of a chicken or the egg thing. Had they taken it seriously, could she have won, or did they not take it seriously because they didn’t think she was going to win?

At the end of the day, this was more of a race about Cori Bush and Wesley Bell than it was a bigger test of all these other issues. And Wesley Bell is the kind of person who has, aside from taking AIPAC money, you can’t really say a lot else about him because he doesn’t really do a lot — and I think that works in his favor, for better or for worse.

JW: And Jonah, I wanted to get your thoughts as well. If you’ve spoken to Cori Bush, she is unlike any other politician. She very much speaks and feels like an organizer. Just watching her navigate the political system and struggle to navigate the political system has been really interesting. But Jonah, I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about this race as well? 

JV: I think it’s worth noting that she was very much ahead of the curve on a lot of the politics that we’re seeing succeed in this midterm primary elections. And, I think to Akela’s point, seeing the success, like the massive success across the U.S. on, the same platform that she’s running on, and something that she’s ran on since she was first elected, and was among the early politicians to call the genocide in Gaza a genocide.

As yours and Akela’s reporting had noted in 2024, was very early with the ceasefire resolution, as we know there’s still no ceasefire in Gaza. These are things that she was very much ahead in the curve on and is still very much a leader in that space. Her losing in this election doesn’t necessarily mean that those values don’t do well before the electorate.

JW: Akela, to your point, I’ve seen some analysis suggesting that a lot of progressive attention was spent on Michigan. Do you think that played a role in why there wasn’t as much spending or attention or any on-the-ground mobilization from progressive groups? Was all of their focus on Michigan?

AL: I wouldn’t say there was no on-the-ground mobilization. [Democratic Socialists of America], the St. Louis DSA endorsed her, and the St. Louis chapter was canvassing for her, and they had a pretty well-run canvassing operation to what I understand. But that’s not enough. I think they potentially miscalculated because of the boost that DSA gave to other candidates in New York and Colorado, I think they assumed that would be enough to put her over the edge.

But yeah, in conversations with progressive strategists who work on these races, the reason that they didn’t put as many resources into this race is absolutely because they put all of them into Michigan. The caveat here is that even while groups like Justice Democrats or the new pro-Palestine PAC, American Priorities, are spending more than they ever have on these races — in part because of how much money corporate PACs and the pro-Israel lobby have spent against their candidates in previous cycles — is that there’s still only a handful of these groups.

They simply do not have the capacity to triage every race in a cycle or even every race in a week. People were like, “I wish another group bucked up and came in and put more money in this race for her.” But it wasn’t going to be [Justice Democrats] because they had Donavan McKinney. It wasn’t going to be American Priorities, probably because they didn’t want to sully their positive track record so far by making a massive investment in a race where the candidate already had a lot of problems.

All of these calculations went into the fact that the focus on Michigan probably affected this race, but again, I don’t think you can say, one way or the other, if all these groups came in and spent a bunch of money for her that it would’ve changed the outcome. We just don’t have enough information right now to say that.

JW: I want to talk about democratic socialist Francesca Hong, who is currently having clips about her takes on Thanksgiving and raising a biracial child taken, I would argue, a little bit out of context.

But I do want to talk about that race because she’s a democratic socialist who is currently leading in the polls for governor in Wisconsin against the more moderate candidate, David Crowley, and that race is coming up next week. Akela, can you just briefly talk about the dynamics at play here?

AL: Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist state lawmaker in Wisconsin who has been leading the polls in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. This is a situation where, I mean, why is CNN asking this woman about a tweet about canceling Thanksgiving? That’s my question. I don’t care what she thinks about Thanksgiving. That’s not a policy that the governor of Wisconsin has power over.

The fact that this is what this race has come down to at this point is a reflection of how much these outlets and mainstream forces are working to tear down and poke holes in what is clearly a substantive movement against the Democratic establishment. I’m not saying Francesca Hong is perfect, but I think these interviews and these clips of her making these comments are less about her than they are about how much fear she strikes in the heart of the establishment apparatus. 

I’ve talked to a lot of people in Wisconsin, people who are supporting Hong’s campaign and see this race as a real opportunity again to put this question of can progressive politics win in the Midwest? This is what Perry Bacon Jr. wrote about the New Republic earlier this week. I thought this was a really great piece, and we’ve talked about this, Jessie. Pointing to people like Tammy Duckworth and Barack Obama and Sherrod Brown who were progressives prior to their races in the Midwest, and then won those races, whether or not they fashioned themselves as a progressive or not.

The polling that has shown her ahead — a lot of people have questions about that now, given how blown out of proportion the polling was for El-Sayed. But I think, pairing that question with the criticisms of “Oh, she’s talking about her proximity to whiteness and marrying a white guy and having a biracial child and talking about canceling Thanksgiving.” There’s a reason they’re not talking about her actual policy platform.

It’s frustrating because like what happens when you have real “working-class” candidates or candidates who are running on policies to help the working class elevated to this level of national attention, you don’t get the polished Abdul El-Sayed soundbite answers that we were seeing in the Michigan race. People take that and run with it in a way that is pretty hollow in a lot of cases, and that’s what we’re seeing with Francesca Hong.

JW: I’d have to agree. What I think about — and I am a former debate kid, so this is no shade to debate people — but there is an extent to which our politics just feels like how good are you at giving a speech and essentially being a good debate kid, and has nothing to do with your policies.

I also don’t understand why we’re focusing on her attitudes about her child and how she’s planning on raising them, or how she thinks about Thanksgiving and whether or not it should exist. It’s not like she said anything completely out of left field. 

But as we begin to pivot from primaries to midterm elections, what do you make of progressive’s chances in places outside of the coast in November? I know that we already talked about Perry Bacon’s piece, which, by the way, people should read. It’s called “Can Progressive Candidates Win in Swing States? They Already Have.” But what are you thinking about progressives’ chances? Jonah, I want to actually take this question to you and see what you’re thinking.

JV: Yeah, as Michigan has shown us and as possibly looking ahead to Wisconsin next week, the margins are still very close and these races are very embattled and bitter.

But I think the success that we’re seeing with Abdul El-Sayed, with Will Lawrence, who we talked about, and as well as Donavan McKinney, who we haven’t talked about yet. These are folks who are running on very progressive, unabashedly pro-Palestine campaigns. And I think it’s worth mentioning Donavan McKinney was also endorsed by the Detroit Metro DSA chapter as well and mobilizing for him.

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DSA also mobilized very heavily for El-Sayed, even though he himself is not a member of DSA and has called himself a capitalist and someone who wants to regulate capitalism and not necessarily stands for socialist policies. But I think that’s proving the theory right that it’s not just confined to the coasts, and this is less of an ideological battle when it comes to voters. 

A lot of experts and analysts will say that people don’t vote based on ideological lines. They vote on their pocketbooks. The adage of, it’s the economy. And these progressive platforms are playing directly to that on top of people’s dissatisfaction with the establishment.

I think to Akela’s point, right-wing media, corporate liberal media like CNN, can play up all of these culture war questions constantly of Thanksgiving, holidays. For the case of El-Sayed, it was a question of why he felt the need to have sympathy for some of his Muslim constituents in Dearborn or would-be constituents in Dearborn. It’s questions like this that have nothing to do with actual legitimate policy questions. In that case, it’s like there was zero questioning, we’re talking about Iran and the killing of Iran’s leader. There were zero questions about should we be in this war with Iran? Should we have killed how many civilians we’ve killed in that war? Or backing Israel’s war in Lebanon and continued war in Gaza. These are the kind of policy questions that a lot of Americans are fed up with. Polling also shows total dissatisfaction with military spending, as opposed to spending it on healthcare and education.

Progressives, regardless of the coasts or in the Midwest, are continuing to hammer that in, of, your taxpayer dollars can be spent and should be spent in way more effective ways that meet your needs and not the needs of the greater American empire, if you will.

JW: Yeah, and just for everyone listening you referred to state Rep Donavan McKinney, who defeated U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar, the incumbent candidate in Michigan’s 13th District on Tuesday night. 

And that’s honestly all of the time that we have here. But thank you all so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing, staying up late, waking up early, putting in the real work.

AL: Thank you, Jessie.

JV: Thank you.

JW: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcast@theintercept.com or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278

That does it for this episode. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slipstream provided our theme music. 

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts.

Do leave us a rating or a review. It helps other listeners to find us. 

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Most Expensive Democratic Senate Primary Has a Winner appeared first on The Intercept.

Voters in the key swing state chose El-Sayed over the establishment’s choice of Rep. Haley Stevens, whose campaign received about $60 million in support from pro-corporate and pro-Israel super PACs, making the race the most expensive Democratic primary ever. El-Sayed won by a margin of around 1 percentage point, according to The Associated Press, which called the race in his favor Wednesday morning. 

The victory of El-Sayed, a former public health official endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is the latest sign of the growing influence of the Democratic left. And it’s the most staggering illustration yet of the party establishment’s waning grip on power and the unpopularity of the pro-Israel lobby giant, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, amid shifting American sentiment on Israel and Palestine. 

Through its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, AIPAC broke its own single-race spending record by funding $30 million in attack ads against El-Sayed. Ads that dominated airwaves, flooded streaming services, and stuffed mailboxes in the final month of the race misrepresented El-Sayed’s previous comments about Michelle Obama and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to allege misogyny, and attempted to paint El-Sayed as a terrorist sympathizer. 

El-Sayed’s platform, boosted by an army of 12,000 door-knocking volunteers, centered on policies such as Medicare for All policy, addressing cost of living issues in the state, and removing corporate spending from politics. But it was the two candidates’ stances on Israel and Palestine that came to define the race. El-Sayed condemned Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and committed to ending U.S. military aid to Israel. His criticism of Israel also extended to its joint U.S. war on Iran, which he decried as military glut that could be spent instead on healthcare and education in his state.

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Stevens opposed any conditioning of military aid to Israel. She has consistently voted in favor of weapons transfers since first assuming office in 2019, including last month when she sided with Republicans against an amendment in a Pentagon budget bill that would have cut military spending for Israel. When AIPAC began pouring money into the Stevens campaign, El-Sayed effectively turned those millions of dollars into a key campaign issue, pointing to Stevens as an illustration of the danger of lobby spending and corporate money in politics.  

It’s not the first race in Michigan shaped by AIPAC money. Former Rep. Andy Levin — who was considered the most progressive Jewish member of the House because of his support for Palestinian statehood — lost his seat after redistricting forced a showdown with Stevens in 2022. In that race, Levin was also dramatically outspent by outside money, with AIPAC buying $4 million in ads to attack him and boost Stevens. 

El-Sayed’s success, however, shows a major shift in politics since the start of Israel’s most recent war on Gaza. Cutting off military support to Israel has become a mainstream position among Democrats. And AIPAC has since become a politically toxic entity — “a four letter word in Democratic politics,” Levin told The Intercept.

“Most people still don’t vote on Israel and Palestine, they vote on their pocketbooks,” said Levin, who endorsed El-Sayed. “But if you’re not willing to say that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, Democratic primary voters are like, ‘OK, you’re bought and paid.’ The kind of truth-telling about Israel and Palestine is tied into the truth-telling about the economy, and people wanting real solutions.”  

Leftists have claimed victories against establishment picks throughout this year’s midterm primaries, running on similar platforms addressing affordability and support for Palestine. But those wins have so far been in House races, mostly in metropolitan areas where leftist progressive politics have gained a foothold in recent years, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Jersey, and California. In House races in Michigan, leftists also found success with wins for Donavan McKinney, a state representative who defeated the AIPAC-backed incumbent Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar, and Will Lawrence, a progressive climate activist who beat a pair of moderate Democratic opponents. 

Both McKinney and Lawrence, a co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, had an endorsement from Sanders and a mutual endorsement from El-Sayed. And both ran on a similar platform of lowering the cost of living and opposing war — including Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and for Lawrence, opposing AI data centers. While McKinney is expected to win the general election in a solid blue district, Lawrence now faces a Republican incumbent, Rep. Tom Barrett, in a purple district that had previously been held by Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin.  

El-Sayed’s win is the first leftist victory in a Senate race this election cycle. 

Unlike other leftist wins so far in the midterms outside of Michigan, El-Sayed faces a difficult challenge in the general election from a formidable Trump-endorsed opponent. Polls have shown El-Sayed neck-and-neck with Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman and FBI agent who ran unopposed in Tuesday’s primary. In 2024, Rogers ran for Senate and lost to Slotkin by less than 20,000 votes. In Michigan, where voters swung for Trump by about 1 percentage point over Kamala Harris in 2024, the November election is expected to be the most significant midterm test for the left. An El-Sayed win in November is essential to the Democratic effort to regain control of the Senate.

Electability has been among the largest criticisms from Stevens and her supporters against El-Sayed. Conventional establishment thinking maintains that progressive policy is not popular among most Americans. To beat Republicans, the centrists say, Democrats need to run a more moderate candidate who can appeal to more conservative voters. Late last month, the Stevens campaign circulated a quote from Rogers, who called El-Sayed “radical” and claimed “I don’t think he likes America.” Stevens suggested Rogers would prefer to face El-Sayed because of his leftist platform.  

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Last week, Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., a Stevens surrogate, said El-Sayed was so polarizing that she could not back him against Rogers in the general election. “I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue,” she said, a reference to his campaign events in April where political streamer and commentator Hasan Piker stumped with El-Sayed at university campuses. Despite efforts by the Stevens campaign, AIPAC, and corporate media outlets to play up Piker’s comments faulting U.S. foreign policy for 9/11, there’s little evidence that criticism has resonated with voters.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee released its first attack ad against the “radical” El-Sayed on Wednesday, referring to him by his full name and referring to Piker’s 9/11 comments, a preview of the continued anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tactics that are expected to ratchet up in the general.

The progressive left has long argued that its platform will perform better in front of a broader electorate hungry for political and economic change. Michiganders have paved the way for El-Sayed to try and prove just that. His fate in the general election might reverberate into the 2028 campaign cycle, as the Democratic Party looks to decide what type of candidate to nominate for president. 

Soon after NBC News made its call, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow — who dropped out of the U.S. Senate race in July — offered her endorsement to El-Sayed. On Wednesday, Stevens — along with Democratic minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand — endorsed El-Sayed. Stevens said she had spoken with El-Sayed and was “proud to offer my support as he takes on Mike Rogers in the general election.”

“We’re gonna build a movement that reaches out to everybody — I know not everybody’s gonna agree with me on everything, that’s not how this works. But I know they agree with me on the need to beat Mike Rogers and the need to hold Donald Trump accountable, and the need to provide people healthcare, and the need to address the affordability crisis,” El-Sayed said at the Wednesday press conference, flanked by McMorrow and Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel Jr. “I’m looking forward to unifying together,”

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El-Sayed argues the same anti-corporate messaging that has appealed to his progressive base translates to all voters, transcending partisan political framing. A week before Tuesday’s primary, El-Sayed told The Intercept’s Akela Lacy, “Most people don’t walk around asking, ‘Where do I sit on the left–right spectrum?’ Most people are walking around asking, ‘What the hell’s going to happen if I get sick? What’s going to happen if I lose my home or I lose my job?’ … I think those are the things that unite most Michiganders … I’m looking to build a movement that pushes back on the bipartisan consensus that we ought to build a politics that is paid for by corporations.”

Levin said that voters want a candidate who is “authentic,” “brave,” and “speaks truth to power.” He pointed to Michigan’s historic embrace of progressive Democratic politics, such as the nominations of Jesse Jackson’s presidential candidacy in 1988 and Sanders’s in 2016. 

It was in Michigan where Democrats in 2024 started the Uncommitted Movement as a protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel during its genocidal war in Gaza. El-Sayed voted “uncommitted” in that primary. Stevens and her surrogates have attacked his “uncommitted” vote to try and show El-Sayed’s lack of loyalty to the party, despite his immediate endorsement of Harris one day after Biden dropped out of the running.

Levin describes Michigan as the “ultimate swing state,” but cautioned that many political pundits misunderstand what that says about the state’s electorate.

“People act like it means we all must run to the mushy middle. But that’s not what a swing is at all. If a swing just sat in the middle, you would never get on it. It’d be boring. That’s not what it’s about,” Levin said. “We have to realize that ‘swing’ means that people go back and forth. And people in both parties right now — this is national — they are so sick of politics. They are so sick of the money in politics. They are so sick of the rich people and the corporations and the special interests [that] basically do whatever they want in American politics.”

Update: August 5, 2026, 1:22 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include news of Donavan McKinney’s victory, a National Republican Senatorial Committee attack ad, Haley Stevens’s endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, and remarks from El-Sayed’s victory speech.

The post Abdul El-Sayed Beats the Democratic Establishment and AIPAC in Michigan appeared first on The Intercept.

The race in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District was one of several contests on Tuesday pitting the left and democratic socialists against establishment Democrats in a midterm cycle defined by competing visions for the future of the party. Just over an hour after polls closed, The Associated Press called in Bell’s favor.

Before polls closed on Tuesday evening, Bell brushed off Bush’s criticism of his support from the pro-Israel lobby.

“What we’ve seen over and over is talking about an issue that is not impacting folks right here in St. Louis, and while we take those issues seriously, you know, the M in Missouri doesn’t stand for Middle East. It stands for Missouri,” Bell said.

The question going into Tuesday’s primaries, including the widely watched Michigan Democratic Senate race, was whether progressives could win in the Midwest. Despite a decent track record in the region, it was unclear if the energy that boosted progressives in other primaries from New York to Colorado would be enough to help Bush, a former member of Congress and another democratic socialist, come back from a bruising loss two years ago.

Outside groups opposing Bush poured money into the rematch, spending $4.6 million against her or backing Bell. In comparison, Bush drew just $200,000 in outside spending in her favor. Most of that money came from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group that took credit for ousting Bush last cycle. The group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent $3 million against Bush this year, far less than the $8 million it poured out against her in 2024 as part of a historic investment targeting elected lawmakers critical of Israel. 

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In response to that kind of spending, progressive groups put much more money into this year’s primaries, though they were still heavily outspent. But while groups like Justice Democrats and American Priorities, the new pro-Palestine super PAC, pumped record-setting sums in races in Michigan, Colorado, and New York, they did not spend in Bush’s race. Justice Democrats, which backed Bush in her 2020 election, gave Bush its endorsement this cycle but instead concentrated its resources on Tuesday in Michigan in support of state Rep. Donavan McKinney, another democratic socialist, in his bid against Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich. Another new pro-Palestine PAC, the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, spent $20,000 in support of Bush.

With its funding, United Democracy Project recycled attacks that had helped topple Bush in 2024, hitting her for voting against former President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill and claiming she had been an ineffective member of Congress. In line with that attack, a spokesperson for United Democracy Project, which ran the ads, recently described Bush as “a terrible member of Congress who didn’t do her job and didn’t deliver for St. Louis.” 

Bush’s critics, including AIPAC and Bell, painted her as failed experiment by the left, pointing to past positions on defunding police and criticism of Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Bush went on to endorse Harris, and many Democrats have come to share her views on Israel. But her opponents cast her as an “extreme” in the party’s left flank who was out of step with voters. 

Even some of Bush’s backers worried that the damage done last cycle would be enough to tank her attempt at a comeback. 

Although Bush won reelection by a wide margin in 2022, the pro-Israel lobby started laying the groundwork to oust her shortly after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. Bush, a vocal critic of Israel, drew ire from AIPAC and other pro-Israel actors after she introduced a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza less than 10 days later, alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. AIPAC’s super PAC and other groups spent close to $20 million to oust her that cycle, hitting her for her vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill. Bush said she took that vote, along with five other leading progressive Democrats, because the measure did not do enough to expand funding for social services.

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One Bush supporter said they heard frequently from St. Louis residents about the vote — despite the fact that she easily won reelection shortly after taking it. They suggested that voters only started caring about the vote after AIPAC told them to.

Bush said voters were frustrated by attacks from AIPAC after having been saturated by similar ads in 2024.

“People have been coming up to me apologizing,” Bush told The Intercept in an interview ahead of the primary. “Saying, ‘Cori, I just didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the ads. I didn’t understand what was being said about you. I didn’t know who AIPAC was.’”

The post Wesley Bell Again Defeats Cori Bush — With Plenty of Help From AIPAC appeared first on The Intercept.

Hawley was at an event in St. Louis, Missouri, celebrating the inclusion of expanded funds for victims of nuclear radiation in President Donald Trump’s signature economic bill. In the photo, the far-right Republican smiled down on former Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who had worked with him on the measure, as he embraced her.

Bush was no longer in Congress at the time. She was ousted from her St. Louis seat in a Democratic primary the summer before, after facing more than $18 million in spending from outside groups, including the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Bush’s AIPAC-backed replacement, Rep. Wesley Bell, stood in the background of the photo, off to the side.

“Cori, thank you,” Hawley said. “We would not be here without you and your work.”

It was a rare show of camaraderie between two officials who rarely saw eye to eye. Bush previously called for Hawley’s removal from office in 2021 and said he had blood on his hands after making a show of solidarity with rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6.

“One thing that we both respect is fight,” Bush told The Intercept.

Though they might disagree on a swathe of other issues, they worked together to deliver the package because it was something they both believed in. Bush said the acknowledgment from Hawley was an honor, particularly because she was no longer in Congress when the bill was finalized. Zero Democrats in the House voted for the bill, though Bell said he supported the provision.

“He decided that he wouldn’t forget about me,” Bush said. “And he said that with the current congressman standing behind him. He didn’t acknowledge him.”

Asked recently about the event, Bell said: “I never take it offensively when Josh Hawley does not give me credit.” (Bell’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Beyond sparking internet memes speculating that there had been a romantic bent to their embrace, the event and the subsequent photo distilled the heart of Bush’s argument in her campaign to win back her seat on Tuesday in a rematch against Bell.

Bush told The Intercept this cycle is completely different from her last race.

“This cycle, the momentum met me,” she said. “The community asked me to run. The community came to me and said, ‘Cori, where is our fighter?’”

Two Paths From Ferguson

In many ways, the protracted fight between Bell and Bush started long before either of them ran for Congress.

It was the summer of 2014. Bush was working as a nurse and a pastor. Bell had just lost his first campaign for a seat on the St. Louis County Council.

Four days after Bell lost the race, a Ferguson police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. Protests erupted that would rock the city and launch a nationwide movement against police brutality and overpolicing in Black communities.

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Bush drove to Ferguson on the second night of demonstrations. She provided mental health support to people in the community. Her work in Ferguson and her ascendance in the Black Lives Matter movement would eventually lead her to run for federal office.

At the time, Bell was an assistant professor of criminal justice at St. Louis Community College, in addition to gigs as a municipal judge and a prosecutor. After he lost his 2014 race in St. Louis, Bell soon set to work on his next campaign for another council seat. This time, though, Bell ran in Ferguson in the city’s first election since Brown’s killing.

Ferguson was a majority-Black city with a largely white government, and Bell, the son of a police officer, was at the time one of four Black candidates running to reshape the city council. One supporter compared him to former President Barack Obama and speculated that he might eventually make it to Congress.

Bell would eventually do just that, though perhaps not in the way some of his supporters envisioned it. Bell moved from the Ferguson City Council to the office of the top prosecutor in St. Louis County, campaigning as a reformer and toppling the three-decade incumbent who’d failed to indict Brown’s killer. He transformed the prosecutor’s office, ending cash bail for misdemeanors and launching a unit dedicated to reviewing wrongful convictions and addressing police abuse.

Four years later, Bell launched a primary to unseat Bush. He initially ran for Senate in Missouri, but saw an opening to take on the incumbent after she introduced a resolution for a ceasefire in Israel’s assault on Gaza shortly after the October 7 attacks. Two weeks after the legislation was introduced, Bell dropped his Senate bid and announced his campaign against Bush.

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It soon looked like Bell had made a sound political judgment. The pro-Israel lobby made Bush one of their top targets, with AIPAC pouring more than $8 million into the race, and Bell vanquished her in the primary.

Before resigning from office to enter Congress in 2025, one of his last acts as a prosecutor was slapping Ferguson protesters with felony charges.

Grassroots Energy

In a Democratic primary cycle that’s been largely defined by frustration with incumbents, Bell is aligned with two political forces that the party’s base increasingly views as enemies. He’s an incumbent with AIPAC on his side — though the group has invested just a fraction of its 2024 spending, with its super PAC United Democracy Project putting more than $3 million into the race this July.

One thing Bell does not have is Bush’s grassroots army. Though he’s far outraised Bush and has outside spending in his corner, Bush is buoyed by organizers with the St. Louis chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. The group, of which Bush is a member, has helped power insurgent candidates and topple incumbents from New York to Colorado this cycle. She also has endorsements from the progressive group Justice Democrats, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. (Bush told The Intercept she has not spoken to her former Squad colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.)

Facing that insurgency from below, Bell, who previously challenged Bush to televised debates, has not shown up to a series of candidate forums, frustrating Democratic organizers who say they rearranged schedules to accommodate him. One of the only polls in the race, released this spring, showed Bell just 4 percentage points ahead of Bush, with 17 percent undecided.

After being saturated with negative ads and mail from AIPAC and other groups that spent on the 2024 primary, St. Louis residents are slightly more prepared this time around, said organizers backing Bush’s campaign, including Jessica Montgomery, co-chair of the St. Louis DSA chapter. Montgomery said she joined DSA in 2021 because of her experience volunteering on Bush’s 2020 campaign, when she toppled a half-century political dynasty on her second attempt at the seat.

“A lot of people have buyer’s remorse,” Montgomery said. “Wesley Bell was selling himself to be a certain way, and now that he’s been in office, I don’t think he’s lived up to what he was selling people.”

Even with those factors on her side, Bush is still facing headwinds.

There’s the obvious problem: She lost her last primary.

She’s also facing a recently launched investigation by the Missouri attorney general, an unelected Republican official, over allegations that funds she raised for tornado relief were moved to a political committee. There’s been reporting on her using PACs not connected to her campaign to legally pay salaries to herself and her husband totaling $25,500. Her husband was the target of charges for pandemic loan fraud in a case that was dismissed earlier this year.

And she was the subject of an investigation launched by the Department of Justice in 2024 into using campaign funds to pay her now-husband for campaign security services, an issue the Office of Congressional Ethics had previously investigated and dismissed. (A conservative group had originally filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about the spending in 2023, claiming that Bush had used campaign funds for personal use.)

Bush has said all those claims, including her husband’s pandemic loan probe that started under former President Joe Biden, were politically motivated attempts to discredit her. The person who eventually signed her husband’s indictment was the former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, who at the time led the federal prosecutor’s office that brought the charge.

“What they’re talking about is less than what someone would be paid for a part-time job,” Bush said of the salaries she and her husband drew from PAC money. She added that the investigations into her husband were part of a broader effort to tear her down. (There has been no public update investigation by the Department of Justice investigation, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“The DOJ investigation against me did not go anywhere,” Bush told The Intercept. “There was someone that is no longer with the DOJ who we were told said, ‘Well, we just have to keep looking. Let’s look into her husband now,’ because the target was me.”

A Perfect Foil

In many ways, Bell is Bush’s perfect foil.

Asked if she looks back on her time in office and wishes she’d done anything different, Bush said, if anything, she would have done more.

“Before I felt like I was there flipping tables, sometimes. I was flipping them one by one,” she said. “This time, I’ll have to do two at a time.”

In contrast, Bell has largely kept his head down in Congress. He’s sponsored around 30 bills, including just one that passed the House in March that allowed the National Park Service to host private events at a national landmark in St. Louis.

At times, Bell has seemed to side with party centrists or, worse, Republicans. In June 2025, Bell voted with 74 other Democrats for a measure to express “gratitude” to ICE, explaining after Bush criticized him that the resolution included a condemnation of a thwarted terrorist attack in Colorado.

Montgomery, the St. Louis DSA co-chair, also pointed to a measure in Congress to back-burner an effort to impeach President Donald Trump; the majority of Democrats opposed the resolution, but Bell was one of 47 Democrats who voted present.

“There’s a lot of very progressive voters in St. Louis who don’t like the fact that he voted to thank ICE,” said Montgomery. “I think they want someone who will be more adversarial and will fight back against the Trump administration.”

Bree Bowen, president of the 6th Ward Democrats in St. Louis, helped to organize a recent forum where Bell canceled a planned appearance at the last minute that had more than 100 people in attendance, many who had come to see Bell speak. Bowen started working on Bush’s campaign shortly afterward.

After the group changed the date of the forum to accommodate Bell’s schedule, he canceled and sent a surrogate instead, Bowen said.

“The wards that were there have the highest turnout in the whole city,” Bowen said. “A lot of people that were there I think were very disappointed — not shocked, but disappointed that he wasn’t there because they came to see him.”

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Today, there’s a higher level of literacy around the source of many of the most salient criticisms of Bush. She took heat for being one of six Democrats to vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill in 2021 over concerns that it didn’t include more spending for social services. And critics said Bush didn’t show up for work at a time when she said she had Covid.

Those attacks nevertheless stuck with many voters, said Keith Rose, another St. Louis DSA member who also helped on the 6th Ward candidate forum Bell skipped.

“Whenever you say ‘Cori Bush’ to so many of our voters, those are the first things that come to their mind,” said Rose, whose role as the Missouri organizer for Our Revolution, launched by supporters of Bernie Sanders after his 2016 presidential primary, is dedicated to supporting Bush’s campaign.

Still, Rose pointed out that Bush won reelection the next year by more than 40 percentage points the year after the Biden infrastructure bill vote. The difference two years later? Rose said it was AIPAC’s prodigious spending.

“These exact same humans” — those critical of Bush — “voted for her afterward because they hadn’t been told yet by AIPAC to care about that other vote,” Rose said. “They’ve really just defined the terms of the fight so effectively just through repetition and spending.”

Bush said she wouldn’t change the infrastructure vote, where she sided with the heads of Missouri unions in the effort to secure social welfare provisions along with the physical infrastructure funding.

“I put myself on the line with that,” she said. “But history recorded that, and now we can look back and say, maybe if we had those things right now, we wouldn’t be looking at a president who some people voted for because of the price of eggs.”

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