Tapper was pressing Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator, on a right-wing outlet’s story exposing that he had expressed a desire to tread carefully because of potential differences of opinion among his would-be constituents. On a leaked campaign call, El-Sayed had said after Ali Khamenei’s February assassination that “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” referring to the southeast Michigan city that is home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the country. Given the ayatollah’s brutality, Tapper’s question implied, how dare El-Sayed consider that possibility?

As Michigan’s August 4 Senate primary between El-Sayed and Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens draws near, he has faced a barrage of Islamophobic attacks ranging from thinly veiled policy critiques to outright racist caricatures. The two Senate hopefuls seem to embody the forked path facing the Democratic Party ahead of the 2028 presidential cycle, with 43-year-old Stevens representing the old guard thanks to her backing by the party establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, and 41-year-old El-Sayed representing an insurgent movement skeptical of long-standing U.S. foreign policy interests and corporate capture of American politics. With the latter vision comes a form of fearmongering that’s been endemic to American politics for decades.

Nancy Khalil, an anthropologist who researches Muslims in America at the University of Michigan, called Tapper’s interview “sloppy and offensive” and pointed out that the anchor’s questions implied an assumption that because El-Sayed is Muslim and Arab, “he needs to have an opinion on this, and the opinion needs to align with whatever the media wants it to be.” That assumption is “completely racist,” Khalil said.

It was only one example in a deluge of attacks El-Sayed has faced in recent weeks that peddle in Islamophobic tropes. The pro-Israel doxxing account StopAntisemitism shared a post in June claiming that a hijabi woman arrested by the Trump administration for allegedly making pro-Palestine graffiti was a former staffer of El-Sayed’s, prompting right-wing agitator Laura Loomer to reply: “BAN Muslims from holding office in the United States.” Replies to El-Sayed’s campaign account often call him a “terrorist,” “radical,” or “jihadist,” and deploy racist memes, including one, likely AI-generated, showing El-Sayed and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wearing vests strapped with explosives and green headbands to signify Hamas. The Michigan GOP has called El-Sayed “a terrorist sympathizer,” emphasizing his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.

The attacks aren’t limited to right-wing reactionaries and obsessives on the internet. Many are issued by one of the leading groups backing El-Sayed’s Democratic opponent, Stevens: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has poured nearly $30 million into the race via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project. One UDP commercial alleges baselessly that El-Sayed “expressed sympathy for a terrorist,” and a mailer shared with The Intercept parrots the same. Others mention his decision to stump with political commentator and streamer Hasan Piker.

Scholars of Islamophobia and Muslim American communities told The Intercept that both parties and their allies were resorting to Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes in a race where Israel and Palestine has remained an animating force. El-Sayed has committed to ending military aid to Israel, drawing a stark contrast to Stevens, who famously said: “Israel comes to me in my dreams.”

The attacks against El-Sayed reminded Hatem Bazian, a leading scholar of Islamophobia at the University of California, Berkeley, of a critical moment in 2008, when Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was accused of leaking a photo showing Barack Obama wearing garb of a Somalian elder during a visit to Kenya, fueling conspiracies that Obama — who is Christian — was hiding his Islamic faith. Whenever an actual Muslim candidate is involved, especially if they oppose the Israeli government’s policies, Bazian said, their opponents try to associate them with terrorism. 

“In the election in Michigan, we’re seeing the same type of playbook being played out,” Bazian said. “And what you’re also seeing is that much of the Islamophobia gets to be expressed in the corners of the web.” 

Yet some prejudice has also been expressed in real life. 

At a meet-and-greet in Detroit with Stevens and Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a school board member said she supports Stevens because she “represents all of us, not just one race.” When pressed by local reporter Sam Robinson, who recorded the viral remarks, the Farmington school board member elaborated: “The other candidate [El-Sayed] doesn’t work a room. … Don’t come out speaking only Arabic, don’t come out with your Arabic music on.”

The Stevens campaign has tried to distance itself from the most egregious attacks. When asked about the Smith remarks, a spokesperson for the campaign referred to a statement given to The Detroit News in which Stevens said she did not share Smith’s views and called her campaign “a diverse and multicultural best of Michigan coalition” She further claimed to have “repeatedly stood up for and defended our vibrant Muslim American community.” 

Yet Stevens’s campaign has also capitalized on bigoted rhetoric used by Mike Rogers, the Republican likely to face whichever Democrat wins next month. The campaign drew from a private call between Rogers and supporters during which he said of El-Sayed, “I don’t think he likes America, candidly.” The Stevens campaign sent out a parody of a news release designed to look like it was from El-Sayed campaign, claiming that Rogers had endorsed El-Sayed and reproducing the Republican’s quote: “I think he’s so radical. I think he’s going to lose big parts of the west part of the state. We think we can do well in part of the southeast part of the state. I think we’ll do well if he in fact is the nominee.” 

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for CNN defended Tapper’s question on El-Sayed and Khamenei’s killing, which Tapper asked regardless of “background or ideology.”

“In this case, he asked Dr. El-Sayed about his comments regarding Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei’s death because he believed they warranted explanation as part of the public debate,” the spokesperson wrote. “Providing interview subjects the opportunity to address and clarify their views is a fundamental part of responsible journalism, and we reject the implication that there was any malicious intent or bias behind the question.”

The El-Sayed campaign declined to comment on this story, but told The Intercept in April: “I am not running to be ‘the Muslim’ anything.”

“I’m running to be able to serve people in my role as a U.S. senator,” El-Sayed said at the time. “I want people to have healthcare. I want them to be able to work a dignified job that pays a living wage. I want them to have childcare and senior care. I want them to be able to know that the things that they need in their lives are affordable. So, at the end of the day it’s not about me. It’s not about my faith.”

Race and religion aren’t the only identity-related fault lines at play in the Michigan Senate race.

El-Sayed has “a long history of disrespecting women,” asserts another AIPAC-backed ad launched in early July. According to the Detroit Free Press, a mainstream local paper that fact-checked each of the ad’s claims, the TV spot misrepresented El-Sayed’s comments on figures like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom he ran against in 2018, by framing his critiques of Whitmer’s ties to the healthcare giant Blue Cross Blue Shield as inherently misogynistic. Whitmer, who is serving her second governor term, endorsed Stevens’s Senate run on Friday with a little more than a week from the election.

Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, a Stevens supporter known for going after critics of Israel online, called El-Sayed’s criticisms of Stevens and former opponent state Sen. Mallory McMorrow “sexist” with little evidence beyond their respective genders — a comment that has since appeared in another UDP ad. (Watts has said she didn’t give the super PAC permission to quote her public social media comments.)

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The new ad began its run within days of Graham Platner suspending his U.S. Senate campaign in Maine after he was accused of sexual assault. Centrist and pro-Stevens operatives have also tried to link El-Sayed with the Platner campaign, implying a guilt-by-association with left politics. Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich. recently told Semafor that “Abdul has a problematic record with women” without providing any evidence, then repeated the claim on Tapper’s show on Wednesday, parroting the Whitmer example from the AIPAC-funded commercial and saying his rhetoric carries “a uniquely sexist bent.” Scholten also claimed that El-Sayed and Platner campaigned and fundraised together, though the two never held a joint event and sent a total of two split-raise fundraising emails.

Khalil, the University of Michigan anthropologist, situated the ads as part of a long history of prejudiced tropes that paint Arab and Muslim men as controlling of women, and likewise stereotype Arab and Muslim women as subservient and docile.

“We’re seeing it come from within his own party,” she said, “reproducing tropes that have just been around for centuries.”

Earlier this month, El-Sayed called on his supporters to stop making “fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics,” likely a reference to superficial mockeries of Stevens’s voice, calling the comments “unkind and unhelpful.” Some journalists and advocates for Palestine observing the race wondered why El-Sayed made the request when Stevens had not done the same amid the wave of Islamophobia.

“Muslims are always labeled as terrorists, we’re always stereotyped, and our patriotism is always called into account,” said Adam Hamawy, a former Army surgeon who volunteered in Gaza and recently won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District. Speaking to The Intercept, he recalled an episode while treating patients from the World Trade Center attacks on September 11 when one of his colleagues at the hospital blamed Hamawy for the attacks. When Hamawy ran for Congress this year, one of his Democratic opponents called him a “radical extremist” because he gave a brief testimony at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted of planning terror attacks. A series of articles in mainstream and conservative outlets also played up the connection. 

Because El-Sayed, like Hamawy, is Muslim, his opponents are pushing the notion “that he’s radical — they’re questioning his loyalty, they are not talking about issues,” Hamawy told The Intercept. “And that was the same thing here as well: They didn’t attack me on issues, they attacked me for who I was.”

In addition to their criticisms of the Israeli state, El-Sayed and Hamawy have both run on progressive agendas that vow to lower the cost of living and fight for Medicare for All, which both have cited as key priorities owing to their experience as medical professionals. The agenda has proven popular this midterm cycle — with insurgent candidates on the left toppling incumbents and establishment favorites in state after state.

In some ways, Islamophobic attacks can be seen as “a marker of success,” said Moustafa Bayoumi, an author whose books trace the experiences of Muslim and Arab Americans after September 11 amid the war on terror. “The more successful Muslim candidates become in American politics, the greater the degree of Islamophobia that we’re going to witness in attacks, trying to take them down.”

Bayoumi, who teaches English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, also compared the attacks on El-Sayed to those against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Despite — or perhaps because of — his popularity, Mamdani has been called a “terrorist lover” by one of his colleagues in City Council, while another local lawmaker compared his rise to the office as “Islamic conquest.”

“It’s not just an identity thing. It’s because those Arab Muslim candidates are representing the progressive ticket, and it does put some fear in a certain type of the establishment in this country, whether it’s Republican or Democratic,” Bayoumi said. “They tend to fall back on Islamomophobia and Islamophobic tropes.”

The fearmongering is amplified when it comes to Israeli policy. As Israel’s favorability has cratered globally and among U.S. voters since the start of its genocidal campaign in Gaza, the public relations battle has only intensified. The Israeli government this year approved a public relations budget of $730 million, nearly five times the budget compared to the previous year. A Drop Site News report shared polling in Europe and the U.S. commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs that concluded that highlighting “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism” are most effective in reversing unfavorability toward Israel. 

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“The reality of it is that you can’t divorce anti-Palestinian racism from Islamophobia,” said Khalil. “The anti-Palestinian industry is what fueled the emergence of the Islamophobia industry. They’re funded by the same sources.”

Stevens, meanwhile, has used El-Sayed’s proximity to Michigan’s Arab and Muslim community to question his loyalty to the Democratic Party. In 2024, El-Sayed supported the Uncommitted Movement, which started in Michigan and coordinated hundreds of thousands of protest votes in that year’s presidential primary to send a message to the Biden administration over its continued support for Israel and its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

“Make no mistake, Trump is an existential threat,” El-Sayed wrote at the time. “And that’s why we have to send a clear message to this administration that it is the height of folly to try to force people into choosing between innocent lives in G@za or our democracy here at home in November.”

He went on to endorse Harris one day after Biden dropped out of the race.

Discounting the Muslim and Arab voting population bears the risk of backfiring. Michigan, which swung for Trump in the last presidential election, was decided by just 1 percentage point. For the first time in two decades, a plurality of voters in Dearborn voted Republican. 

The post Abdul El-Sayed Faces Islamophobic Attacks From GOP and Democratic Establishment appeared first on The Intercept.

William Lawrence is running a very different campaign.

In a purple congressional district in Michigan, Lawrence, a co-founder of the progressive Sunrise Movement, is calling for a moratorium on new data centers and labeling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

The approach mirrors that of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has endorsed Lawrence.

Both men are making strong showings in the polls, and now the centrists are fighting back. A shadowy group is running misleading ads that question Lawrence’s progressive bona fides.

The line of attack is telling, Lawrence told The Intercept.

“People are sick of the status quo,” he said. “We have seen this in many cases in other elections this cycle — that corporate centrists are attacking progressives for not being progressive enough. And it shows you what voters are hungry for is change.”

An unabashed progressive, Lawrence breaks the mold of the typical candidate to run for a seat like Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, which is centered around the state capital of Lansing and the college town of East Lansing.

The district was previously represented by centrist Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who now serves in the Senate, and is currently held by Republican first-term Rep. Tom Barrett.

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The other two candidates running in Michigan’s August 4 primary hew closer to Slotkin’s mold. Bridget Brink is a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who quit in protest of President Donald Trump’s policies on the war with Russia, and Matt Maasdam is a former Navy SEAL who served as a military aide to President Barack Obama.

Unlike Lawrence, both declined to call Israel’s war on Gaza genocide at a debate.

Lawrence also comes from a starkly different background: While Brink and Maasdam traveled the corridors of power in Washington, Lawrence focused on building grassroots power, first through his role co-founding the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which backed the Green New Deal, and more recently helping found the Michigan Rent Is Too Damn High coalition.

Mutual Endorsements

On July 7, Lawrence and El-Sayed announced that they were endorsing each other. Like Lawrence, El-Sayed is running in the progressive lane in his primary while arguing that it will not hurt his electability in the general.

“We have a lot of people who want to back both of us,” Lawrence said. “Given that the two of us both prioritize having a very robust, grassroots campaign rather than just relying on tens of millions of dollars in dark money like our respective opponents, it is especially beneficial for us to be able to integrate our grassroots operations.”

Although no independent polls of the race have been released, Lawrence’s campaign commissioned one showing him leading the pack. Another commissioned by Brink’s campaign showed her ahead.

Now that Lawrence has demonstrated that he has a shot at winning, the attacks have begun.

The Congressional Black Caucus is targeting him over a podcast episode in which Lawrence remarked to a Black anti-war activist during a conversation on organizing that he was frustrated with the position of some older Black political leaders backing “capitalist, imperialist American power.”

Lawrence says his comments have been misrepresented while apologizing for his choice of words.

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Meanwhile, a super PAC called the Crush MAGA PAC is targeting Lawrence, rather than the Republican holding the seat. The group has plowed more than $500,000 into a highly misleading ad that accuses Lawrence of investing in “Wall Street, big oil, and data centers” and campaigning against Democrats for supporting the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which sought to pressure party candidates over Israel’s war on Gaza.

The investments highlighted in the anti-Lawrence ad make up a small portion of the $11,000 Lawrence has invested in a mutual fund; the mutual fund, not Lawrence himself, chose them. And, for his part, Lawrence eventually supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

The source of the ad campaign against Lawrence is unclear, but he has speculated that it may be powered by pro-Israel donors.

Crush MAGA PAC is affiliated with another group called the Save Democracy PAC, which has received money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, United Democracy Project. United Democracy Project, however, denied getting involved in the Michigan congressional race. (Neither Crush MAGA PAC nor Save Democracy PAC responded to requests for comment.)

If Lawrence succeeds in the primary, he will have to win in a general election in a purple district. He believes he can show that progressive candidates can win in split districts, pointing to the election and reelection of Congressional Progressive Caucus member Rep. Chris Deluzio in a swing district in Pennsylvania.

“He’s not throwing people under the bus, and he has joined the progressive caucus, and he has now turned that into a more comfortable district. He has been winning with healthy margins,” Lawrence said. “That is what I hope to be able to do as well.”

The post William Lawrence Is Running in a Purple Michigan District — on His Pro-Palestine Credentials appeared first on The Intercept.

Connie Chan, a progressive member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, already has the backing of establishment Democratic figures such as Pelosi and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., along with influential local labor groups. But the endorsement from Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, the political advocacy offshoot of TrackAIPAC, is a notable move to further differentiate Chan from her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener. Wiener came out 11 percentage points ahead of Chan in California’s June primary election, sending the two to a general election runoff that excluded Saikat Chakrabarti, then TrackAIPAC’s preferred candidate. 

“In Congress, we will oppose any aid to Israel and do everything in our power to stop their government’s genocidal actions against the Palestinian people,” Chan said in a statement to The Intercept. “We are proud to stand with groups like End Citizens United and Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption to fight to fix our democracy.”

Israel and Palestine have featured heavily in the race to replace Pelosi, who is retiring at the end of the current congressional term. Days after Chakrabarti’s defeat, he dedicated his remaining campaign funds to form a PAC to support Chan, citing her position on sending U.S. weapons to Israel and her vow to “vote to end all military aid to Israel – offensive and defensive.”

To earn TrackAIPAC’s endorsement, Chan filled out the group’s questionnaire, in which politicians seeking the group’s backing swear off money from pro-Israel lobby groups like the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, agree that Israel’s war in Gaza amounts to a genocide, and promise to oppose all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, consistent with positions Chan had taken earlier in the race.

Last week, the majority of House Democrats voted in favor of cutting military aid to Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act legislation, which sets the budget for Pentagon spending. The measure failed, but the vote marked a dramatic shift in a Congress that has long granted military aid to Israel with scant opposition. With the recent endorsement and arms embargo pledge, Chan signaled her position among the changing tides in the party. She also is against U.S. involvement in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and said on her website that she would have voted in favor of the failed House resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. support for the war. 

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“We heard from many of Connie’s constituents in San Francisco, as well as supporters around the country, who wanted a clear statement of her positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and America’s role in both,” a TrackAIPAC spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement. “We were proud and pleased to offer her that opportunity through our endorsement questionnaire, an opportunity her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener, has not taken.”

For his part, Wiener makes a distinction between offensive and so-called defensive weapons to Israel. He says that he would vote in favor of the Block the Bombs Act in the House, which seeks to halt arms transfers of certain munitions to Israel, but that he backs providing U.S. support for Israel’s missile interceptor systems Iron Dome and David’s Sling. Earlier in the race, Chan had taken a similar position, telling Mission Local in January that offensive weapons should be banned while U.S. support for defensive weapons should be paired with humanitarian aid to Gaza. In recent months, she has shifted toward an arms embargo on all U.S. weapons to Israel.

Positions Wiener held earlier in his political career, such as opposing local resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and supporting state legislation that free speech advocates have said censors pro-Palestine expression in schools, continued to follow him on the campaign trail. Wiener has remained an opponent of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, while Chan’s platform calls for sanctions on Israel over the genocide in Gaza and its expansion of West Bank settlements and asserts the free speech right to boycott. The TrackAIPAC endorsement pledge also opposes efforts to pass laws that punish people who participate in the BDS movement.

Last month, Wiener was chased out of the San Francisco Trans March by attendees who called out his record on Palestine, with one attendee yelling, “I think your policy on genocide in Gaza is terrible — you do not belong here anymore.” Days earlier, another person filmed his confrontation with Wiener at a bar during a World Cup match, calling him out on his support for Israel and his housing policy. 

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Wiener decried the incidents as harassment, a line that both Chan and Pelosi also held, condemning both confrontations. Chan said she understood the role of public disagreements, but added, “As someone who has been a target of hate and threats of violence I stand firm and threats of violence and hate speech.”

Chan also came under fire just days from the primary election for supposed connections with the pro-Israel lobby. Reporting from Drop Site News revealed that Chan had received support from Pro-Choice Majority Action, a PAC with funding ties to AIPAC’s super PAC and Democratic Majority for Israel, formed as an alternative to AIPAC amid Democratic disillusionment with the flagship pro-Israel group. At the time, Chakrabarti used the revelation to claim that AIPAC had attempted to keep him out of the general election because of his support for Palestinian human rights. Chan rejected the claims and said she encouraged any groups supporting her to reject funds tied to AIPAC.

Now, with support from both Chakrabarti and TrackAIPAC, which made a name for itself by running fierce social media campaigns against lawmakers who received money from the pro-Israel lobby, Chan is trying to put allegations of coordination with the pro-Israel giant to rest.  

“Big corporations, billionaires and special interest groups are using their money to try and buy our elections,” Chan said. “But we know San Francisco is not for sale. We have never taken money from AIPAC or their affiliates, because we serve San Francisco and no one else.”

The post Nancy Pelosi’s Pick for Her SF House Seat Takes Anti-AIPAC Pledge appeared first on The Intercept.

Two-thirds of the money Thanedar raised in the last quarter came from AIPAC, which collects money from multiple donors and funnels it to the pro-Israel group’s preferred candidates, according to his campaign’s most recent FEC filing. Less than a quarter of those donors listed Michigan as their state of residence. Thanedar, who is facing a challenge from a democratic socialist in next month’s Democratic primary, was in the minority of House Democrats who voted against cutting $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel from a State Department spending bill this week.

“They’re not raising a lot of money from donors at this point,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at the watchdog campaign finance group OpenSecrets, about Thanedar’s filing. Asked about the investment losses Thanedar listed in the filing, Glavin said, “That’s a lot of money for a campaign to be losing, especially when the market is at record highs.”

Thanedar — who has made his money building, buying, and selling off companies — has heavily self-funded his campaign to stave off Donavan McKinney, a Michigan state representative aiming to maintain a wave of socialist success that’s seen challengers from the left topple establishment favorites in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado so far this midterm cycle. Thanedar gave himself $800,000 in June, the latest in more than $12 million he’s loaned his campaign since he first ran for Congress in 2021. He outraised McKinney last quarter, though Thanedar’s campaign carries his personal loans as debt.

In his most recent campaign filing, Thanedar reported more than $3.9 million in investment income losses this cycle.

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The August 4 Michigan primary is among the next races to pit a democratic socialist candidate against an incumbent. McKinney — whose endorsers include Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the Metro Detroit chapter of Democratic Socialists for America, several major unions, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — is running on Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a national homes guarantee, opposing President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, and ending military aid to Israel. He has hit Thanedar for buying his seat in Congress, paying campaign expenses with taxpayer money, and spurning his constituents.

Deep-pocketed donors “get a massive return on investment when Shri Thanedar votes with 99.9% of Republicans and against a majority of Democrats to keep spending our taxpayer dollars funding Israel’s genocide, or when he votes for Trump’s crypto corruption, or even when he simply refuses to answer his constituent’s calls during a crisis,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi, calling Thanedar’s service in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District “representation for the 1% at the expense of one of the poorest districts in the country.”

“We cannot be the party of the working class when we’re represented by multimillionaires, bankrolled by AIPAC donors, doing the bidding of corporate interests,” he added.

It’s not unusual for candidates to put campaign funds into investment vehicles, but Thanedar’s decision to invest campaign funds in the cryptocurrency industry in 2024 was notable, said Glavin. At the time, the pro-crypto lobby was ramping up its spending on elections. 

“There are examples of candidates who have lost significant funds in putting their money into the market,” Glavin said. “But you’re usually going to find that they’re going to put it in something a little less volatile than the crypto market.”

The campaign’s investment losses were only partly offset by contributions from AIPAC bundlers. Glavin said the debt incurred from Thanedar’s loans to the campaign and the share of his most recent fundraising haul boosted by AIPAC suggest the campaign isn’t doing much on the fundraising front. 

“It’s not like the campaign is actually going out and soliciting those funds,” he said.

Thanedar was a target of AIPAC during his first congressional run; the group endorsed his opponent and its super PAC spent millions against him in 2022. Since then, however, Thanedar has faced scrutiny for his increasingly cozy relationship with the pro-Israel lobby. AIPAC endorsed him during his 2024 reelection campaign, and a pop-up political action committee funded by AIPAC’s super PAC spent more than $2 million against his opponent that cycle. 

The Michigan congressman is featured on AIPAC’s political portal for donors, which it uses to funnel contributions to its preferred candidates. As the primary election nears, Thanedar’s critics have recirculated a video he filmed while on an AIPAC trip to Israel in 2023. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Thanedar is facing a potential upset as some members of the Congressional Black Caucus reportedly consider endorsing McKinney against him — an unusual move given that the group tends to side with incumbents. Outside groups have spent just over $2 million on the race so far, all backing McKinney or opposing Thanedar. It’s not clear whether any other groups plan to spend for Thanedar in the final weeks of the race. 

In May, Thanedar requested an extension on this year’s financial disclosure until August 13, after the primary. Members of Congress are required to file reports each May, though it’s not necessarily unusual to ask for an extension. Thanedar also filed his last disclosure in August. 

At the end of 2025, Thanedar reported to the FEC $11.5 million in debt from loans he’s given his campaign since 2021, when he first ran for Congress and initially loaned himself $5 million. 

It’s becoming more common for candidates to spend upward of $1 million self-financing their campaigns, Glavin said. The massive spending of personal wealth became less risky after a 2022 Supreme Court ruling lifted limits on how much campaigns can spend to pay back a loan from a candidate.  

Before, candidates understood themselves to be on the hook for the money they use to self-finance, Glavin said. Now, they figure that with the power of incumbency, “I can start raising money, and then I build up a donor base, and then I can get some of that money back, even if it’s five, six years down the road,” Glavin said. “A campaign committee can carry that debt for any amount of time.”

The post Two-Thirds of Shri Thanedar’s Campaign Cash Came Through AIPAC as He Lost Over $600K appeared first on The Intercept.

Marlene Galán-Woods, who was a registered Republican until 2018 and is the widow of the state’s former Republican attorney general, picked up the endorsement of the Democrats’ powerful House campaign arm in May, raising eyebrows in a cycle dominated by anti-establishment sentiment. One of the three main super PACs spending in the Democratic primary for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District is backing her, while another is touting businessman Jonathan Treble as “the only lifelong Democrat” in the race. All three PACs are opposing the district’s former Democratic nominee Amish Shah, whose critics say that he briefly registered as a Republican to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. (Shah’s campaign said he thought it would help boost Hillary Clinton but added that he never publicly disclosed who he voted for, without denying the Trump vote.)

The finger-pointing in the toss-up district suggests that candidates are walking a line between touting their abilities to work with Republicans and distancing themselves from the GOP before Democratic voters pick their nominee next Tuesday. Democrats consider the district — which includes wealthy exurbs northeast of Phoenix whose residents are mostly white and around 20 percent Hispanic — an example of a true median among voters and a bellwether for other competitive races.

“It’s what I call the old playbook,” said Rick McCartney, another Democratic candidate in the race, referring to the Democrats’ choice of a former Republican to appeal to swing-district voters. McCartney, himself a former Republican who mentioned his own ability to work with all parties, said it’s reasonable for people to question whether they align with a party’s values, but it’s also reasonable for voters to want transparency. Navigating both can be tricky.

For Galán-Woods, the balancing act rests in part on her commitment to reproductive rights. Of just under $4 million in outside spending on the primary this cycle, more under $1.3 million came from Pro-Choice Majority Action, which formed in May and says it works to elect women who support abortion. The PAC is primarily funded by its affiliate, the Democratic group EDW Action Fund, which received $1 million from United Democracy Project — AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC — in the spring. The PAC for Democratic Majority for Israel also gave $37,750 to EDW Action in April.

Abortion is a critical issue in Arizona, where voters passed a constitutional amendment codifying it as a right in 2024. Galán-Woods’s major backers are a mix of the Democratic establishment, women’s rights organizations, and pro-Israel interests. In addition to Pro-Choice Majority Action and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which gave Galán-Woods its biggest investment on primary ads so far this cycle, she’s backed by EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the PAC for Democratic Majority for Israel, and BOLD PAC, the campaign arm for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Lenny Young, a spokesperson for Pro-Choice Majority Action, said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the group’s conversations with its partners, but it doesn’t pick candidates based on Israel policy. “Correlation is not causation,” Young said. “We support women. And our priority is women who can help us take back the majority.”

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“Marlene is a mother and a grandmother, who will never back down from defending reproductive freedom and stand up to any effort to strip away fundamental rights,” said EMILY’s List spokesperson Amelia Fox. Her critics point out that before she left the GOP in 2018 — saying it was “driven off a cliff” by President Donald Trump — Galán-Woods long voted for anti-abortion Republicans, including former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed into law several of the nation’s most extreme abortion bans in the early 2010s; former Arizona Sen. and presidential candidate John McCain; and former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. 

Galán-Woods’s campaign declined to comment.

Treble’s deep-pocketed supporters, meanwhile, are lifting up the businessman as the only truly committed Democrat in the primary race. He’s backed by a super PAC called Crush MAGA, which has spent over half a million dollars opposing Shah and backing Treble, and says it’s focused on opposing Trump and his allies. 

“Jonathan Treble is the only lifelong Democrat in this race, and the candidate best prepared to win this critical seat in November,” Crush MAGA spokesperson Sophie Mestas told The Intercept. “Crush MAGA is committed to electing strong Democratic leaders who stand up to Trump, protect the right to vote, and defend our fundamental freedoms.”

But Crush MAGA, too, is an affiliate of a PAC that received $100,000 from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project. That group, Save Democracy PAC — which backs Democrats and says it wants to get big money out of politics and protect the right to vote — has used Crush MAGA as a vehicle to target progressive candidates in other primaries. Save Democracy PAC, also known as SD PAC, has given directly to Democratic candidates this cycle but has spent little so far on primaries. Most of its independent expenditures in previous cycles were made during the general election.

Treble, who did not respond to a request for comment, has said he launched his campaign to fight for Medicare for All after he almost died from a vascular brain growth two years ago. His critics have pointed out that he did not vote in recent elections and did not register in Arizona until 2025, after moving there in 2022. He runs a company that sells printers and coffee machines to offices and has self-funded his campaign to the tune of $2.3 million, making him the top fundraiser in the race with $4 million in total. Galán-Woods is in second with $2.2 million, followed by Shah with $1.8 million, and McCartney with $1.3 million.

The outside spender in the race isn’t explicitly backing any candidate. BOLD America — which was founded by former Congressional Hispanic Caucus members and supported New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat before he lost his primary last month to a democratic socialist challenger — has spent just under $1 million opposing Shah.

In May, BOLD America received $650,000 from UDP. 

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for United Democracy Project said, “UDP has no involvement in any way in AZ-1.”

It’s been a tough midterm cycle for the Democratic establishment and some of the PACs that have emerged to prop it up. 

Pro-Choice Majority Action spent $1.5 million to help outgoing Rep. Diana DeGette’s campaign before she lost to democratic socialist Melat Kiros in the June primary in Denver, Colorado. It backed Jasmeet Bains, who lost to progressive Randy Villegas in California; Julie Johnson, who lost to Collin Allred in Texas; and Shannon Bird, who lost to Manny Rutinel in Colorado. Two more of its candidates — Connie Chan and Melissa Hernandez — came in second in their California primaries and are headed to runoff elections. 

Crush MAGA PAC has had more mixed results. In California, the group spent against Ammar Campa-Najjar and in favor of Lauren Babb Tomlinson, both of whom lost. In addition to spending against Shah, the group also launched ads last week against progressive Will Lawrence in Michigan that attacked him for having a savings account.

Despite the establishment’s blunders, in a race where so many candidates have dabbled in Republicanism, many were quick to assert their commitment to the Democratic Party line. McCartney, who has no known Super PAC support, was previously registered as a Republican but his campaign said he has supported Democratic presidential candidates from Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris. Shah’s campaign said he’s voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every presidential election he’s voted in, since Clinton in 1996 — and supported the other Clinton in 2016, as was the goal of his alleged Trump primary vote.

Some Democratic voters, as McCartney pointed out, may still feel stung by a former Democratic Arizona senator.

“Particularly based on Kyrsten Sinema and how she went to Congress as a Democrat and walked out of there as an independent, I think people have every right to be focused on what it means to be a part of their party,” McCartney said. 

It’s unclear who’s likely to win next Tuesday’s primary: Galán-Woods has the establishment backing, Treble has the campaign cash, and Shah was up 22 percentage points in the only public poll released on the race back in February. (House Majority PAC declined to share information on any more recent polling.)

Shah was also the district’s Democratic nominee in 2024, when, as his spokesperson Colin Lauderdale pointed out, “the DCCC stayed out of the primary election and only endorsed Dr. Shah in the general election, when they were joined by several other Democratic PACs and organizations.” He lost by less than 4 percentage points to incumbent Rep. David Schweikert, who is now departing to run for governor, leaving the Republican nominee unknown, too.

Democrats haven’t won this seat since the Obama administration. McCartney, who held a fundraiser for Galán-Woods last cycle and worked to elect Shah after he won the primary, pointed to party leadership as responsible for the failure. 

“When the DCCC wants to come into this community and tell these voters who they should be focused on before they’ve even sat down and talked with somebody like me, it’s the old way of doing things, and people are tired of it,” he said. “It hasn’t worked for us, by the way.”

Update: July 15, 2026, 3:57 p.m. ET
This article was updated with new spending numbers from Pro-Choice Majority Action in a new filing Wednesday and to include a new comment from the Shah campaign.

The post Democrats Are Desperate to Flip an Arizona House Seat. They’re Rallying Around a Former Republican. appeared first on The Intercept.

The crypto industry is putting hopes for its revival in a long-awaited bill, under debate in the Senate, called the Clarity Act, which could open the doors to Wall Street investments.

But there is one thing ironically standing in its way: Trump’s giant crypto haul.

The naked self-enrichment has turned crypto into a prime example of presidential corruption.

The result is that even crypto’s most staunch Democratic allies will find it hard to back a crypto wishlist like the Clarity Act, which will need support from at least seven Senate Democrats to overcome a filibuster.

Take crypto stalwarts like centrist Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who issued a statement demanding that any crypto bill include ethics provisions to stop Trump’s crypto profiteering.

With the industry poised to spend tens of millions more on the midterm elections, however, Gillibrand and other centrist Democrats may yet be tempted to sign off on window dressing instead of a crackdown, said crypto critics.

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“Sen. Gillibrand and too many of her colleagues prioritize and spend enormous time pushing crypto’s special interest agenda, which is to get legitimized by the weakest possible law and regulated by the smallest, most underfunded, least capable, and most capture-able financial regulator,” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, said in a statement last Monday. “That is presumably because the crypto industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns to buy friends and attempt to get crypto’s special interest agenda enacted.”

Gillibrand has dismissed those criticisms. In a statement of her own last week, she expressed her desire to both advance the bill and crack down on Trump.

“We cannot let self-dealing destroy an opportunity to strengthen consumer protections, crack down on illicit finance, and expand economic opportunity for the millions of Americans our financial system has left behind,” Gillibrand said. “The time to act is now — and that must include ethics reforms that prohibit members of Congress, the president, and their spouses from cashing in on their office.”

Declining Sector Hangs Hopes on Clarity Act

For crypto, the numbers are sobering. Bitcoin soared from roughly $60,000 just before Trump’s election to about twice that by October of last year. Since then, it and other digital assets have cratered. Bitcoin now trades back around $63,000 a token.

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The market’s gyrations did not stop Trump and his family members from profiting handsomely off the $TRUMP meme coin and other ventures. His roughly $1.4 billion of crypto profits last year meant that he cleared more than the largest publicly traded company in the industry, Coinbase, according to crypto commentator Scott Melker. The White House has defended Trump’s crypto windfall as legal, a point even his critics concede is likely true.

Crypto’s fortunes now appear to hinge largely on whether Congress passes the Clarity Act, which is intended to create an overall regulatory framework for the industry.

“If the bill passed, you would probably see a bump for the industry,” said Mark Hays, the associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. “So much of crypto rides on sentiment, and if the bill were passed and signed into law, you would likely see an increase in prices just based on that sentiment alone.”

One sign of how much of the industry is placing its bets on Congress came in a recent quarterly earnings call held by Coinbase. Analysts asked the company’s executives several times how the Clarity Act would affect their bottom line. The company’s executives said that it could mean that Wall Street, which has been reluctant to dive headlong into the industry, will finally start to spend on crypto.

Passing the law, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said, would “just unlock a lot of institutional capital that’ll flow into the space broadly.”

That is one of the outcomes that crypto skeptics fear most. If crypto becomes integrated with the economy rather than a speculative sideshow, they say, it risks taking down the entire system in a crash.

Democrats Holding the Keys

The only thing standing between crypto and its top priority are Senate Democrats. The House of Representatives, where crypto needs only a bare majority, already overwhelmingly passed last year a version of the Clarity Act with Democratic support. In the Senate, however, there are enough Democrats to block passage of the law with a filibuster. The question is whether they will.

Crypto needs to win over seven Democrats to beat a filibuster, or eight if Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., remains absent due to illness.

Progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have expressed broad concerns that the law could lead to the next financial crash. Centrists like Gillibrand, meanwhile, have voiced narrower concerns. One of their biggest hang-ups with the legislation, they say, is the question of whether it will rein in Trump’s crypto ventures.

Gillibrand occupies a powerful position in the party: She serves as the caucus’s top fundraiser as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And she has positioned herself as a leader in Clarity Act negotiations, despite not serving on the relevant committees.

Asked last month about the negotiations over the bill at the Aspen Ideas Festival — a cozy gathering of politicos and business executives in the Colorado mountain town — Gillibrand said she was working hard to overcome the ethics obstacle.

“We’re working hand in glove with Republicans,” Gillibrand said. “We’re negotiating with staff from the White House so that everyone is clear about what the bill is going to say, and we’re going to do our best to land that plane.”

Gillibrand’s public statements have repeatedly telegraphed her desire to see some version of the legislation passed. Gillibrand says it is urgent to get consumer protections on the books. Observers say the urgency may also be motivated by the industry’s massive campaign war chest.

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Over one-third of the corporate money spent on this year’s elections so far has come from the crypto industry, according to a recent report from the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen. That amounts to $189 million, including $82 million routed through a single industry super PAC called Fairshake, which is backed by Coinbase.

Rick Claypool, the research director for Public Citizen’s president’s office, said that as chair of the DSCC, Gillibrand is keenly aware of crypto’s campaign spending potential.

“I’m sure it’s top of mind,” Claypool told The Intercept. “Part of the whole goal of the corporate crypto spending is to make sure that lawmakers in general, but also in particular those who are in fundraising, leadership positions, think of the industry before they think of voters.”

Other Democrats tipped as maybes on the bill include Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who last month nudged other Democrats on the banking committee to vote for a draft of the bill, along with a swath of the caucus’s more centrist members.

What Ethics?

It’s unclear what sort of ethics restrictions Republicans and Democrats have been working on behind closed doors.

The final text of the bill has yet to drop, despite a promise from Bitcoin evangelist Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., that it would be released over the July 4 weekend. The industry’s deadlines for passing the law keep slipping. Its best chance may be to secure passage before the Senate leaves August 10 for an extended period of work in their home states.

Hays said senators should ignore the industry’s artificial deadlines. His group recently released a poll suggesting that most voters are concerned about the crypto industry’s influence in Washington.

“Yes, Democrats are looking over their shoulder, but I think they should be reading the room and saying, ‘Wait a second, is this really a priority?’” Hays said. “Or, is this the kind of pay-to-play politics that have gotten so many voters frustrated in the first place?”

Correction: July 13, 2026, 8:59 a.m. ET
An earlier version of this article stated that Donald Trump disclosed his $1.4 billion in income from crypto last week; it was disclosed on June 30.

The post Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Wants to Save Crypto — But Trump Windfall Is a Political Obstacle appeared first on The Intercept.

As of Friday, at least six candidates have officially declared that they will enter the race, with others still considering their options. All of them have been wary of aligning themselves too closely with Platner, who had already been plagued by scandal before being accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend. But they run the risk of alienating Platner’s energized base if they distance themselves too much from his policy commitments such as fighting military spending, ending the genocide in Gaza, advocating for Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and strengthening protections for unions.

In the running are at least six candidates, three of whom who lost in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in June. Former state Sen. Troy Jackson, whose gubernatorial campaign was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was the first to enter the race. Next came Dr. Nirav Shah, who previously directed the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

Brewery co-founder Dan Kleban, who dropped out of the Maine Democratic Senate primary and endorsed Gov. Janet Mills in October, also entered the race this week, as did social worker Paige Loud and former Capital Hill staffer Jordan Wood, both of whom lost the primary for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.

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Of the first three candidates, Shah has faced the most skepticism of his progressive bona fides, despite what he says is his long-standing support for universal healthcare, dating back to his time as a public health official and his career as a doctor, and his stance against the genocide in Gaza, expressed during the gubernatorial campaign. His critics have painted his declarations of support for Medicare for All and focus on criticism of Israel amid his Senate launch as an effort to pivot to the left after taking a more measured approach as a candidate in the gubernatorial primary.

He told The Intercept that those criticisms are a mischaracterization of his record.

“Critics who are suggesting that this is a newfound policy position, they are putting politics over the facts,” Shah said.

Asked if he would echo Platner’s call to abolish ICE outright, Shah said the agency is “out of control” and “cannot continue to exist” in its current form. “Whether we reform ICE, whether we disband it and start from scratch, or whether we transfer their duties to CBP, ICE, as it currently is constituted, cannot continue to exist,” he said.

Like Shah, Jackson and Bellows are now doing their best to prove to Platner’s base that they will carry out his policy vision. 

While Platner was a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Jackson faced criticism for not mentioning Israel or Gaza in his Senate launch on Wednesday. But a day later, he issued a statement denouncing the genocide in Gaza as “unconscionable” and saying he would “never vote in favor of US taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel.”

Bellows, who differentiated herself from Shah on issues from labor to renter protections during the gubernatorial primary, has said she’s running on Medicare for All, workers’ rights, and to “protect our neighbors.” She and Jackson both criticized Shah’s gubernatorial campaign for ads backing his campaign run by a group pushing school voucher programs. Maine Education Association, a union of educators, endorsed all three candidates for governor but ranked Shah third.

After challenging Sen. Susan Collins in 2014 and losing by more than 35 percentage points, Bellows was elected to the state Senate in 2016. Bellows has previously led the ACLU of Maine as well as the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine. She has not made many public comments on Israel, but signed a proclamation from Mills recognizing Israel’s 75th anniversary and its “friendship and cooperation” with the U.S. in April 2023. 

Shah has also faced claims that he’s taken money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, though the group does not spend in state-level races. He is endorsed by 314 Action, a group that backs candidates with a background in science, which took $1 million from the super PAC for AIPAC in 2024. On Friday, in response to claims that Shah had taken AIPAC money, 314 Action’s executive director said it hadn’t taken money from AIPAC this cycle and would not. He characterized the criticism as “worse than the MAGA scare tactics.” 

Shah told The Intercept he has never taken AIPAC money and would not accept it if offered. He also said that he would not support any form of military aid — offensive or defensive — to Israel. He also pointed to a digital ad his campaign ran toward the end of his gubernatorial primary that highlighted “standing against the genocide in Gaza.”

In a campaign kickoff on Thursday, Shah opened the event with remarks from two former Platner volunteers before highlighting what he said was “little daylight” between their platforms. He ended the event by telling a reporter he would not seek Platner’s endorsement. 

“I spent most of my life watching decisions get made by people who will never have to live with the consequences of them, and my generation is expected to just accept that,” said 18-year-old Liv Drewniak, co-founder of the group Midcoast Youth Activists and a former youth organizer and volunteer for Platner’s campaign. 

“I thought that my time of feeling powerless had come to an end when I started working with the Platner campaign, but the last few days of news have been heartbreaking, and I saw all the hard-fought and harder-won progress that I was so invested in crumble before me,” Drewniak said.

“But then I remembered why I was so excited for that change in the first place. It was never about one person. It was about a movement, a movement hand-built by the people of Maine. And that momentum has not stalled, and that energy will never fail. It will now have a new leader.”

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A senator from a different state weighed in on the new crop of candidates on Friday. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said Shah should not be the nominee due to his handling of veterans’ health issues in her home state. Duckworth and her Senate colleague Dick Durbin called on Shah to resign in 2018 over his handling of a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at a veterans’ facility.

Shah said the attack was “recycled” after his critics raised it during his gubernatorial primary campaign. He said he had addressed voters’ questions about the outbreak, and his campaign noted that Collins had complimented his response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Maine.

“I have deep respect for Senator Duckworth and the sacrifices she has made for our country. I’m the outsider in this race, and outsiders get attacked, so I want to speak directly to the people of Maine, because they’ve seen this playbook before,” Shah said in a statement to The Intercept.

“Voters can judge my record by this: a Democratic Presidential administration reviewed my record and then hired me to help lead the U.S. CDC. … Mainers made up their own minds and that’s why they gave me more first-choice votes than any other candidate in the gubernatorial primary.” 

“The people of Maine saw with their own eyes who I am during the pandemic, when I stood at that podium every day and told them the truth, even when it was hard,” he said. “I’d invite people to ask when Susan Collins last did the same. Every day Democrats spend attacking Democrats is another day Collins doesn’t have to answer for her record. I won’t take that bait, and I don’t believe Mainers will either.”

The Maine Democratic Party will hold a nominating convention to choose one candidate; it must submit its pick by July 27.

The post Maine Senate Candidates Claim They’re Just Like Platner — But Entirely Different appeared first on The Intercept.

“We, the undersigned, call on DSA candidates and elected officials to no longer contract or work with Morris Katz or Fight Agency, his political consulting firm,” the letter reads. 

Katz is not a member of DSA.

The letter also noted consultants at the agency like Rebecca Katz, who is not related to Morris, were also behind the campaign of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and said they continued to advise him even after he made a hard-right turn after entering the Senate.

Two sources with knowledge of the letter confirmed its authenticity.

“Morris Katz is one of the chief parties responsible for the catastrophic campaign of scandal-ridden Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner,” the letter says. “Billed as a top adviser to the campaign, Katz helped recruit Platner and supercharged his candidacy with slick video production, friendly media placements, and political connections.”

The letter circulated as pundits and observers pinned the failures of Platner’s campaign on Katz and others at Fight Agency, including Rebecca Katz. (A spokesperson for DSA’s national organization said they had not seen the letter. Neither Morris Katz nor Rebecca Katz immediately responded to requests for comment.)

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The agency is also currently working with Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is not affiliated with DSA. The Democratic socialist group has reportedly shifted resources to Michigan, where DSA is backing congressional candidate Donavan McKinney.

Katz’s Timeline

In a statement posted to X on Thursday, Katz said, “As soon as the team became aware of the rape allegations against Graham Platner we advised he suspend his candidacy, and in the following days worked to wind down the campaign.” 

CNN said the Platner campaign first denied the allegation in response to questions after an interview with the accuser, Jenny Racicot, whose allegation was first reported by Politico. The DSA members’ letter disputed Katz’s account.

“According to reports, Katz and others on the campaign were aware of at least some of Platner’s disturbing history,” the letter reads. “Yet even as the scandals mounted, Katz continued to put the full weight of his consultancy behind Platner’s candidacy, foreclosing the possibility of replacing Platner with another candidate before the primary election. Katz also reportedly threatened a former Platner staffer for helping verify allegations and controversies surrounding the campaign.” 

The alleged threat, first reported by the Bangor Daily News, targeted a Platner campaign staffer who had publicized an earlier sexting scandal and later left the campaign over Platner’s controversial Reddit posts.

Progressive Defenders

Some Democrats and progressives have pushed back against the criticisms of Katz and Fight Agency, arguing that Democratic consultants who worked with candidates they knew faced credible allegations of sexual misconduct, like former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. — or even former President Joe Biden — did not face the same kind of blacklisting. 

“Did we go knives out for Eric Swalwell’s consultants?” said one progressive strategist who requested anonymity in order to speak freely.

Some of the moderate Democratic critics of Katz’s role in the Platner campaign worked for politicians with their own scandal-ridden histories.

“This is not a problem unique to the left,” the strategist said. “This comes down to holding candidates accountable, and I think it’s no surprise that the same consultants who have laundered even worse politicians through the Democratic Party are the loudest ones right now.”

“The political world is chock full of useless consultants. Nobody cares when they fuck up a race,” said another progressive strategist. “The knives are out for Morris and Fight, because they’re actually good at what they do.”

Fellow Traveler?

Fight Agency’s most notable work for a DSA candidate was creating ads for Zohran Mamdani’s successful run to become the mayor of New York City, a race where Katz served as a political adviser. Katz also worked on the campaign of state Assembly Member Claire Valdez, the DSA candidate who won a New York Democratic primary for a House seat last month.

In the wake of Platner’s downfall, the letter says, liberals and conservatives have tried to claim that Katz represents the left as a whole.

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The letter said, “Katz is linked in the mind of the media and political class to NYC-DSA,” the local chapter that boosted winning, Mamdani-backed congressional primary candidates like Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier.

The letter noted that such claims were bad for DSA, its candidates, and its movement. 

“Men like Platner must not represent the American Left, and those like Katz who push such candidates should have no role in our movement.”

“Our movement must be both ethical and strategic,” it says. “Katz has not shown an ability to be either. Any movement for democratic socialism in this country must be rooted in feminism and the multiracial working class, not archaic ideas of what constitutes a ‘worker.’ Allowing Katz an outsized influence in our movement undermines these ideals.”

Correction: July 10, 2026, 3:48 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated the state where Abdul El-Sayed is a Democratic Senate candidate; it is Michigan, not Maine.

The post DSA Members Urge Campaigns to Ditch Platner Consultant Who Advised Mamdani appeared first on The Intercept.

Platner suspended his Senate campaign on Wednesday evening, and there is no clear alternative to his candidacy. His campaign’s swift downfall has presented Democrats and his primary supporters with several bad options: The party establishment could pick a candidate and inflame an already frustrated base that scoffed at its efforts to anoint Gov. Janet Mills as the nominee, or it could bend to Platner’s past demands and let him influence the selection of his successor.

In either case, a base already exhausted by months of Platner scandals is at risk of fracturing and failing to consolidate behind a potential replacement — and Democrats are at risk of once again losing a key seat they need to pick up for control of the Senate to Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

With so much blame and anger to go around, the fear of poisoning the selection process was on display in the anonymity of the Google Doc pushing Jackson, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed third-place candidate in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Jackson, who has already been discussed in national progressive circles as a possible ideological successor to Platner, was first to file paperwork on Tuesday to take the candidate’s place. But the anonymous document, shared with The Intercept by a source who said its origin was unclear, was quick to distance him from Platner.

“In a state where Democrats have hemorrhaged rural support and where Collins has consistently overperformed, Platner has attempted to sell himself as the populist solution. Jackson doesn’t need to sell; his career tells the story,” it says, citing a claim from centrist writer Matthew Yglesias that Jackson is more genuine than Platner.

There are still Platner supporters — and one progressive political operative close to the Platner campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by his employer to discuss the race publicly, said they were divided in their reactions to the rape allegation against their once-powerful candidate.

“There are some people who just immediately decided that they believed his accuser and who feel very betrayed and are just like, ‘Fuck this guy, now we’re screwed,’” the operative said. “And then there are some people who don’t believe her, and there are some people who think that he can continue to run, and some people who think he should run as an independent.” 

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Platner announced he was dropping out of the race in an 11-minute video posted on X Wednesday evening. In it, he claimed the rape and sexual assault accusations against him were false and drummed up by an establishment leading a plot against his rise as an outsider in politics.

“I think it’s really important to understand why this is happening in the timeline,” Platner said, asserting that past scandals that dogged his campaign had broken at key political junctures. “There is a reason that this is happening now. I only have until July 13th until I am officially the nominee. This was the last week to try to get me off of the ballot. And that’s why this is occurring.”

The Maine Democratic Party announced that it would hold a nominating convention to pick Platner’s replacement, though its exact shape and timeline remain unclear.

The party has publicly feuded with Platner’s campaign, releasing a statement and an unusual video post on Tuesday saying that the campaign had tried “to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like,” after people close to Platner’s campaign told reporters that he would only drop out if he could ensure that the new candidate shared his ideological and policy stances.

In a mass text sent out before Platner dropped out on Wednesday, his campaign manager Ben Chin claimed that the campaign had been told it would have no role in helping to select a new candidate and that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had sent staffers “to plan a potential nominating process behind closed doors.”

A DSCC spokesperson called the assertion “false” in a statement to The Intercept. “The Maine Democratic Party has made it clear that they are working to put forth an open process to select a nominee. Graham Platner — who was credibly accused of rape — needs to drop out immediately so that Maine Democrats can begin the process of fielding a new candidate and focus on defeating Susan Collins,” the spokesperson wrote.

Platner’s campaign did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Other potential picks being floated to replace Platner include Jackson’s Democratic gubernatorial opponents Dr. Nirav Shah, the former director of the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who came in second in the final round of ranked-choice voting in the June primary, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who ranked fourth. 

A source familiar with the matter told The Intercept that outgoing Rep. Jared Golden, a Blue Dog Democrat who represents Maine’s Second Congressional District is not seeking reelection, had been getting calls about running, but on Tuesday night a spokesperson said he had removed his name from consideration.

The progressive political operative warned against the idea that a middle-of-the-road candidate like Golden would be the safest bet to replace Platner against Collins. A “generic Democrat,” the operative said, would find themselves up against a deceptively formidable incumbent, with little chance of mustering the energy that made Platner, for a time, such a threat to Collins.

“People always underestimate Susan Collins, and that’s why I think a lot of us in the progressive movement are saying that you have to give a reason for people to turn out, because turnout in the midterms is everything,” the operative said. “I think a lot of that’s coming from the national Democrats and national pundits who have no friggin’ clue about — I don’t know if I’d say popular — but about how entrenched she is in Maine politics.”

Shah said Tuesday that he had few details about what the state Democratic party plans to do. 

“This should be a process that is open, robust, and transparent, not something where the torch is handed from one person to another, because that will undermine faith in that nominee,” Shah told The Intercept. He said his campaign has not yet decided if he’ll file paperwork to enter the race, and that while he had received calls from hundreds of supporters urging him to jump in, he had not heard from any national Democrats.

Jackson, for his part, now has to toe the line between seizing the progressive mantle and being publicly tied to a candidate who lost massive public trust. In a statement Tuesday, he called the allegations against Platner “serious, credible, and deserving of full accountability,” and called on Platner to step down for the sake of the movement that supported him. Jackson did not address his own intention to run, but his spokesperson told The Intercept that he was the person to beat Collins.

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“Working Mainers need someone who will take on the wealthy and powerful and give them a voice in D.C. It is clear that Troy Jackson is that person,” said Christine Kirby, the spokesperson. “Since the recent news broke, Troy has been flooded with calls to run for U.S. Senate. He is clearly the strongest option to take on Susan Collins and has consistently won in deep-red Northern Maine.”

The document making the case in Jackson’s favor emphasized his appeal among working-class voters, whom Platner had tried to cultivate but lagged with compared to Collins in recent polling.

Platner reiterated his commitment to working-class politics and repeated his assertion that his campaign represented people who’d been locked out of the halls of power in his departure announcement on Wednesday.

“We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish,” Platner said. “That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.”

In a statement released before Platner suspended his campaign on Wednesday, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson sought to thread the needle between castigating Platner and courting his voters.

“While we may be frustrated with Graham Platner’s continued efforts to manipulate this process, we are so thankful for his supporters and all of their efforts to defeat Susan Collins,” Murphy-Anderson wrote. “They are a vital part of our Party and deserve to participate in an open process to select Platner’s replacement.”

A new candidate has to be submitted to the Maine secretary of state by July 27 to qualify for the ballot.

In Shah’s view, anyone picked by Platner would be dragged down by his baggage, while anyone picked by the state party might not have buy-in from the base that Platner helped activate.

“If there is a torch-passing or anointments,” Shah said, “whoever that nominee is will be hobbled out of the gate.” 

Update: July 8, 2026, 8:55 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with news that Graham Platner has suspended his Senate campaign.

The post Graham Platner’s Exit From Senate Race Leaves Maine Dems “Hobbled” in Scramble for New Nominee appeared first on The Intercept.

The Democratic Party is rife with internal caucuses and factions. There’s the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Blue Dog Coalition, the “Squad,” and so on. But since 2019, when Elissa Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger first took seats in the House of Representatives, the party has had another, more sinister emerging faction: the CIA Spook Caucus. 

In the last seven years, the Spook Caucus has only gained in strength. Both of its core members have graduated from the House to higher office, with Slotkin elected to the Senate in 2024 and Spanberger elected the governor of Virginia the following year. Soon afterward, Spanberger was selected by the Democratic leadership to deliver the rebuttal to Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union Address, which elevated her to the national stage. Slotkin, meanwhile, has floated the idea of a 2028 presidential run.

And in the 2026 midterms, the Spook Caucus might expand further: In the Democratic primary for Virginia’s 8th Congressional District, former CIA officer Adam Dunigan is running for the opportunity to challenge GOP nominee Anthony Sabio, who is also ex-CIA. But if you happen to care about concepts like “human rights” or “democracy,” this influx of intelligence operatives into our elections is extremely bad news. 

Spanberger’s honeymoon period with the Virginia Democrats is already over. Less than a year into her tenure as governor, she has vetoed 31 of the General Assembly’s bills, including “high-profile Democratic priorities” like collective bargaining rights for public workers and protections against ICE agents making warrantless arrests inside courthouses. On the labor bill, local unions say Spanberger betrayed a campaign promise she’d made to them. After vetoing two bills to limit ICE arrests, the ACLU of Virginia said her actions “constitute a voluntary surrender” to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

But this about-face shouldn’t be surprising, because the public doesn’t really know who Abigail Spanberger is or what she believes, deep down. That’s the problem with electing a CIA officer: They’re professionally trained liars. In a 2025 interview with the Washington Post, Spanberger said she used to have five different passports and identities: “I would travel in ‘true name,’ but then I would meet people not in ‘true name.’” The profile explicitly calls this spycraft “interpersonal skills transferable to politics.” In other words, this is someone who was accustomed to saying whatever people want to hear while concealing her true intentions. So whenever she speaks to Virginia voters, they have no way of telling whether she’s “in true name” or not. The unions found that out the hard way.

As usual, then, we have to judge by actions over words. With this spring’s veto spree, Spanberger’s actions are wildly out of step with the wishes of the voters who elected her, who overwhelmingly support unions and are growing more distrustful of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Seeing your fellow Americans shot dead in the street will do that.) But the vetoes are perfectly in tune with the interests of the national security state, from the drug enforcement agents who still want to make weed busts to ICE itself. Those are Spanberger’s colleagues, and the former CIA agent has moved to protect their power to surveil and police the people she supposedly represents.

Instead, she’s reserved her harshest attacks for socialists. In 2020, after Joe Biden squeaked his way into the presidency, Spanberger told party leaders, “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” a clear shot at rising left-wing leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was an intervention in the ongoing conflict over the future of the Democratic Party, intended to prevent it from ever becoming a truly progressive one — as the Bezos-owned Washington Post also noted with approval.

Hostility to socialists is baked into the institutional culture of the CIA. It’s practically the agency’s reason for existing, and over the course of the 20th century, the CIA and its handpicked dictators massacred countless socialists around the world, from overthrowing President Salvador Allende in Chile, to sponsoring terrorist attacks against Cuba, to the mass slaughter of Indonesian communists via the “Jakarta Method.” Today, though, Spanberger’s anti-socialist stance is directly at odds with the will of Democratic voters, who now approve of socialism at a higher rate (66 percent) than capitalism (42 percent).

What about Slotkin, who now says she won’t rule out a run for president? Like Spanberger, her track record with the CIA is a black box. On her official biography webpages, we’re told only that she chose to join the agency shortly after 9/11, and served “three tours in Iraq alongside the U.S. military” as a “Middle East analyst.” In a 2020 interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, she volunteered that she was specifically an “Iraqi Shia-militia expert.” After that, it was on to a role as a national security adviser for both the late Bush and early Obama administrations, a few years as an acting assistant secretary of defense, and then the House and Senate.

This raises some nasty questions. Exactly what information was Slotkin “analyzing” in Iraq, and how was it obtained? We know that one of the primary ways the CIA gathered “intelligence” about “Iraqi Shia militias” was by grabbing and torturing people it suspected of being militants at black site prisons like Abu Ghraib. We know, too, that only a small fraction of those people actually had anything to do with terrorism. So it’s plausible that at least some of Slotkin’s “analysis” was based on the supposed “intelligence” gleaned when you subject a random Iraqi farmer to waterboarding, stress positions, or “rectal rehydration.”

Worse, Slotkin graduated to an adviser to the Bush/Cheney administration in its last days. In that role, she might have known about some of the CIA’s abuses before the infamous “torture memos” came out in 2009. She might have had the opportunity to blow the whistle. It feels highly unlikely that we’ll ever know for sure.

Slotkin’s more recent statements about the Middle East don’t exactly inspire confidence, either. Like many liberals, she’s willing to criticize the GOP’s war-mongering, but only on tactical grounds, not basic moral principle. For instance, she has said the Bush administration “completely misread how difficult it would be to try and be the government for another country.” Similarly, she told Chotiner that Trump’s 2020 assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani might be unwise and provoke a “strong reaction.”

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What she doesn’t say is that invading other people’s countries and killing their leaders, and then trying to “be the government,” is inherently illegitimate and criminal. But she can’t, not really, because having worked for the CIA, she’d be condemning her co-workers — and her own record of service. 

We can see the same pattern play out with more recent cases of U.S. aggression. When the Trump administration attacked Iran and Venezuela earlier this year, Slotkin moved in lockstep with the majority of the Democratic Party, voting for war powers resolutions against hostilities with both countries. (This, to her credit, makes her more reliable than John Fetterman, who has voted to preserve Trump’s power to attack Iran on multiple occasions.)

But her public statements tell another story. When the Trump administration made a request for $50 billion in additional funding for the Iran war, Slotkin was open to the idea, telling Politico reporters only that “I need to know the goals and the plan. … I don’t rule anything out.” And when Trump deposed and kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, she criticized him for working with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez’s “illegitimate government” rather than following through on his promise to “[get] rid of that administration” entirely. Again, there’s no indication that waging regime-change wars is wrong in itself; only that Trump had bungled the job by not going far enough.

China, though, is Slotkin’s biggest bête noire. Like a lot of centrists who have taken the wrong lessons from the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Slotkin has taken to making short-form video content. She calls these videos her weekly “Intel Briefings,” and they’re skin-crawling to watch, like something you’d see on a TV in the background of a Paul Verhoeven movie.

Beating the drum for conflict with China is a constant theme. In one representative “briefing,” Slotkin tells viewers about “an issue that a lot of Michiganders know about: China and the threats that they pose.” (The “threat” turns out to be that China may buy computer chips from Nvidia, which is apparently “the equivalent of President Truman giving Russia some of our best nuclear blueprints.”) In another video, she condemns Trump for putting out a national security strategy that fails to “go hard against China.”

It’s all like this. We’re told that China has a worrying “chokehold” on the supply of “critical minerals” like lithium and cobalt; China “often undercuts our ability to sell our products,” so we need to “clamp down on what the Chinese are doing in international trade”; Chinese military technology could “make us go blind, deaf, and dumb in the first moments of a conflict,” perhaps over Taiwan; Chinese cars in particular are a “national security issue” that can’t be allowed to enter the country.

The tone is always slightly condescending: At one point, Slotkin tells us about “the leader of China, Xi Jinping,” as if we’ve never heard of the guy before. The content is pure paranoia, with a new Cold War accepted as a normal and even desirable state of affairs.

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To be clear, the American people do not want conflict with China. In the most recent Pew polls from April, only 28 percent of respondents said they considered China an “enemy,” and China’s favorable ratings have been rising since 2023. 

But the CIA and the broader “intelligence community” needs global conflict, in the same way that cops need crime, priests need sin, and the Orkin man needs termites. It justifies their existence, and their mammoth, ever-increasing annual budgets. So every week on YouTube, we get a former CIA agent pushing what’s good for the CIA and bad for everyone else.

More basic than any of this, though, is that the concept of “the intelligence community” is elitist to the core. Its first principle is that the American public, unwashed reprobates that we are, aren’t even qualified to know about the most important decisions being made in terms of foreign policy, let alone influence them at the ballot box. Only the “intelligence community” with its experts and analysts should do that, and always behind several layers of official secrecy. It’s a fundamentally anti-democratic notion, and it comes from a set of agencies which have overthrown a long list of democracies over the years. So there’s no reason to expect they’d respect our democratic choices at home, either. If you’re the Democratic Party, you can’t really position yourself as champions of “our democracy” and also embrace the CIA Spook Caucus as an unalloyed good. 

As the maxim goes, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” To that end, the purpose of the CIA is to lie, manipulate, torture, and kill, all to preserve the existing global power structures, not to mention the agency’s own power and prestige. That’s what it does; that’s what it’s for. There’s no way anybody, anywhere should trust a former CIA officer within 100 miles of elected office. Personally, I’d vote for a Satanist or my local weed dealer before any member of the “intelligence community.” We should look at would-be Democratic politicians like Slotkin, Spanberger, and now Dunigan with the same horror as if Allen Dulles had run for Congress as a Democrat in 1965. Under no circumstances should we trust these people — and if we offer them our votes, we do so at our own peril.

The post Why Would Anyone Trust Ex-CIA Agents in Elected Office? appeared first on The Intercept.

The Democratic Party is once again in upheaval as Graham Platner, its unconventional nominee to knock out longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, faces a rape accusation that threatens to end his once-powerful campaign and endanger Democrats’ chances of flipping a key seat in the November midterm elections.

Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer whose anti-establishment campaign had already weathered a series of scandals, has denied the rape allegation from ex-girlfriend Jenny Racicot, which Politico first reported on Monday. His campaign said the allegation was “coached and coordinated by out-of-state establishment operatives,” though it was supported by messages Racicot sent in 2023, long before Platner had a political profile. 

Despite Platner’s denials, a cascade of Democratic politicians, operatives, and organizations have called on him to drop out of the race by 5 p.m. next Monday, in time to be removed from the general election ballot. Platner has said he would only drop out if he’s allowed to pick his successor to face Collins in November. If Platner withdraws, Maine Democrats would have to pick a new candidate by July 27.

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That’s set off a scramble to find a replacement nominee and point fingers over the darkest chapter yet in a race that had already drawn national attention for a series of controversies — including accusations that Platner had twisted another woman’s arm behind her back and trapped her in a room; a sexting scandal; a Nazi tattoo; and a series of Reddit posts in which he belittled sexual assault, asked why Black people don’t tip, and disparaged white and rural voters. (Platner has denied that he mistreated women and apologized for the tattoo, text messages, and Reddit posts.)

Where does the Democratic Party — and the insurgent movement that saw Platner as a powerful rebuke to the establishment — go now? 

We’re bringing you an extra episode of The Intercept Briefing this week to cover Platner’s downfall and where Maine voters might look next. In this episode, host Akela Lacy speaks with Adam Carlson, a Democratic strategist and founding partner of the polling firm Zenith Research who supported Platner through all the other scandals until Monday — and now says he was wrong.

“We — as in, the people who were looking for something different — looked at past nominees against Collins and wanted to try something different,” Carlson told The Intercept Briefing. “An outsider, someone who could appeal to white working-class voters, appeal to disaffected Trump voters, independents, Republicans, maybe someone who didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines, progressive economic populist, but also pro-Second Amendment. A bit more heterodox.” When Platner launched his campaign, “it’s, like, here comes this guy who epitomizes what we are lacking.”

The story has reanimated the age-old feud between Democrats loyal to the party establishment and a surging cohort of progressive and leftist candidates bucking the party line. But while competing factions rush to use Platner’s downfall as evidence of their own political prowess, Carlson says, they’re learning the wrong lessons.

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“Yes, you should have better vetting. Yes, having people who are in public office who have faced some level of media scrutiny are less likely to have these kinds of things appear. Not foolproof: Look at Eric Swalwell,” Carlson said. “But I think you can overlearn the lessons from this and try and turn this into a factional win. And I think that all this is subtext for the conversation that we’re about to have in 2028.”

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.

We’re bringing you an extra episode this week because there has been a serious and troubling update in the Maine Democratic Senate race. Candidate Graham Platner was accused of raping a woman in 2021, according to reporting from Politico on Monday.

The woman, Jenny Racicot, came forward after having previously told the New York Times that Plattner had displayed “reckless” and “unsettling behavior” toward her in a story last month. She reportedly told the Times off the record about the rape allegation, but it was not publicly reported before Politico broke the story on Monday.

In a campaign video Platner released after the story published, he denied the allegation and called it, “troubling, serious, and false.” 

Graham Platner: I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false.

AL: Platner has said his campaign is considering its next options, and observers expect him to drop out in the coming days after a flurry of Democrats and organizations that had endorsed him called on him to do so. But as of this recording on Tuesday evening, he has not dropped out.

In a separate statement, Platner’s campaign claimed the rape allegation, which was supported by multiple accounts, including messages from 2023, well before he launched his Senate campaign, was “coached and coordinated by out-of-state establishment operatives.” 

For listeners who might have forgotten, the rape allegation comes after Platner already had another women claim he was physically aggressive with her apologize for having a Nazi tattoo and authoring a series of Reddit posts belittling sexual assault, asking why Black people don’t tip, and making other controversial statements about white rural voters and police.

How did Platner get away with all those blemishes for so long? What does this mean for Democrats’ chances in Maine? To discuss all of this, I’m joined by Adam Carlson, who was a Platner supporter until the most recent news broke. Carlson is a founding partner of Zenith Research, a political polling firm that works with Democrats.

Adam, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Adam Carlson: Thanks for having me.

AL: You are someone who supported Graham Platner through all of his other scandals. When did you first learn about this allegation, and what was your reaction?

AC: I first learned about this specific allegation that came out on Monday about the alleged sexual assault when the story came out. There were all kinds of rumors buzzing around, potentially other oppo that may have been dropping later. Maybe Republicans were planning on dropping it after the dropout deadline on July 13. I heard about it when Politico broke the story.

AL: You published a long post on Tuesday morning with some reflections from this fallout. You wrote, “There are a lot of people who bear responsibility for this. The team that didn’t vet him properly. The people (like me) who bought his schtick hook line and sinker and used their platforms to not just promote him early on, and stuck with him after just an insane amount of obvious red flags for months on end — I should have known better, and I for one will be doing a lot of introspection (and hopefully lesson-learning) on how I got to that place of cognitive dissonance.”

You also talk about the blame on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for trying to foist Gov. Janet Mills on the electorate. I want you to walk us through this a little bit and explain what you’re talking about with respect to that cognitive dissonance here.

Why do you think so many people fell into that?

AC: I’ll speak to what I fell into. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I can’t imagine I am alone just given the meteoric success that Graham had coming out of the gate. I think the Democrats have been struggling for a long time, at least since 2016, probably before then. 2016 is when it really kicked into high gear with white working-class voters.

Maine is a very white state. The general electorate is very working-class, low-college-educated, a bit older – representative of a lot of groups that Democrats have struggled with of late, and that we’re looking to get back.

Susan Collins is a very formidable challenger, always overperforms her polling, her benchmarks, wins in tough environments. I think that we — as in, the people who were looking for something different — looked at past nominees against Collins and wanted to try something different. An outsider, someone who could appeal to white working-class voters, appeal to disaffected Trump voters, independents, Republicans, maybe someone who didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines, progressive economic populist, but also pro-Second Amendment. A bit more heterodox. And here comes this guy who is, on paper, perfect. Outsider.

AL: Heterodox. The definition of heterodox. [Laughs]

AC: Exactly, yeah. He’s a sharpshooter, he’s an oysterman, he was a town harbormaster, he was a combat veteran. This gruff speaking voice. And I think that a lot of us — I live in a fairly working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. But much different than I’d say white working-class voters are in somewhere like Maine, particularly rural Maine. 

In my head, and I think the heads of a lot of people, it’s, like, here comes this guy who epitomizes what we are lacking. People who can speak authentically — or what we thought was authentically — and can reach beyond our traditional messaging of like a Sara Gideon or people that have run against Susan Collins and fallen short in the past.

AL: Sara Gideon being the party-backed candidate who lost to Susan Collins previously.

AC: In 2020, who led in nearly every poll right before by a fair amount — and still lost pretty handily. So I think there’s a lot of trauma [laughs] among people like myself who every six years or so think that we got Susan Collins or people of her ilk in the party who take moderate votes, who cross party lines, who have independent bonafides in the state.

I was looking at someone like Janet Mills, who was rumored to be jumping in, and I was like, “This feels like another one in that same line.”

AL: Another wrong choice.

AC: Yeah, an establishment-backed traditional choice, a safe choice. Someone who doesn’t really excite people, who can’t really appeal to the middle. You’re trying to do just like a partisan Democratic strategy that’s been done before.

So I think a lot of it came from the trauma of losing to Trump a second time, and the trauma of Collins continuing to over-perform, and really needing that seat in order to have a chance to take back the Senate. Here comes Graham Platner, gruff-speaking voice, lifting kettle bells in his launch video.

A lot of us, I’ll put myself in this category of coastal elite types, were like, “Yeah, this is the working class-type candidate that we need.” Turns out he wasn’t working-class. That was implied but not actually true, given his upbringing. I don’t think there’s any outright lying about that, but definitely some misleading about that and just the image he was trying to portray. 

This is the risk, right? It’s a high risk, high reward, as we’ve seen with Republicans over the years nominating these outsiders, because they’re untested, unvetted.

They have that kind of appeal: “I’m not part of the Washington system,” or whatever euphemism you want to use, the swamp, et cetera. But there is a downside potential, and I think we’re seeing that now.

AL: Part of that appeal was very early on in this cycle tapping into what we’re seeing now borne out, which is a widespread anti-incumbent sentiment and a bias — warranted or not — against older politicians and people who have been in office for a very long time.

We’re talking about Janet Mills, someone who was not only the governor but was almost 80 years old and was again, this archetype of exactly what the left has said for such a long time is the reason that Democrats are failing at the national level.

But you’re talking about another big storyline coming out of these primaries, which is like, who is the real working class? Who has the authority to speak for the working class, and how do we draw those lines?

I was struck by an interview that I had with Amanda Litman of Run for Something back in October when the Nazi tattoo fallout was happening, and she said something that really struck me on this, which is talking about who is deemed authentic and who can credibly speak as the voice of the people. And she touches on the same thing that you’re talking about.

Again, Platner’s aesthetics. The first ad that his campaign put out was that he’s an oyster shucker, from the shores of Maine who can hobnob with farmers and fishermen and people who work on their feet all day. She said, “This particular type of brawly white dude with tattoos who can speak the visual language of what we associate with the working class. This is really a moment for us to collectively gut check — who gets permission to be seen as authentic? And who gets permission to be a little unkempt?”

And that was nine months ago at this point. And obviously now it’s more than being unkempt; he’s been accused of rape. But again this constant pursuit of working-class voters that Democrats, in some cases, I think in New York, this narrative was debunked with the gains that, that people saw with Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, although they did also excel in the white coastal elites neighborhood, and that’s something that we’ve been doing a lot of reporting on.

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Avila Chevalier being the candidate who ousted Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat in New York last week, and Claire Valdez who won the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez against her chosen successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, both of whom are headed to the general election in November but are likely to enter Congress given the safety of those blue seats.

But I think one storyline on this working-class question that at least I missed coming out of Maine was from Greg Sargent at The New Republic that looked at some less favorable polling for Platner that showed him trailing against Collins [in voters] who did not have a college degree, which is often a proxy used for the working class.

There are liberal commentators, I saw [former Biden domestic policy adviser] Neera Tanden seizing on that as evidence of the left’s folly here in putting up what they say is an unvetted populist who clearly was unvetted, rather than going with the party pick. The counterpoint to that being that Mills did so poorly in this campaign that she had to drop out before the primary. That was the party’s pick here.

So everyone wants to use this scandal as evidence that proves that their strategy is the best one. But is anyone actually right?

AC: I think everyone’s a little bit right and a little bit wrong. I know that’s a cop-out, but I’ll explain.

AL: [Laughs] OK, I’m listening.

AC: I’ll start with my wing of the party, which — I wouldn’t consider myself a leftist, but definitely an establishment skeptic who is now aligned with the left because we share those goals. I think that we felt, as I mentioned before, wanting to have our cake and eat it too.

Maybe being the most progressive kind of economic-populist candidate is the most electable in the general election. There’s this little bit of a proxy war as we’re seeing in the Michigan Senate race between now just between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, on the left and the center, respectively.

AL: Yes, the other news over the weekend in the Michigan race is that Mallory McMorrow, one of the Democratic primary candidates dropped out, setting up another progressive versus centrist test between El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens.

AC: That’s a really good point in that the story of McMorrow — who I supported initially, so I’m really doing great here, 0 for 2 — is she was kind of the Goldilocks candidate between the kind of left-progressive candidate in Abdul El-Sayed and the more centrist and AIPAC-friendly candidate, establishment, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee favorite Haley Stevens. And she got squeezed. I think that was part of it.

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It’s just like the electorate — the Democratic electorate — is so angry and so desperate to win, and there are two competing theories of the case, not just for 2026, but this is a dress rehearsal for 2028 when this conversation will kick into overdrive. Regardless of whether AOC runs [for president], there will be somebody on the left standard-bearer who will be making that argument.

I think that Graham Platner — I would personally separate these two, but they’re lumped together for, for good reason sometimes at least in terms of the electability argument — Abdul El-Sayed and Graham Platner. Where these two examples of more progressive, economic populist candidates, can they win in a swing state or a swing seat or a blue-leaning seat to defeating a Republican incumbent?

I would argue Abdul El-Sayed is squeaky clean, at least so far in comparison to Graham Platner or anybody. But I think you see the Stevens’s campaign trying to tie them together, and I think you see the Neera Tandens of the world trying to make the case, “We were right about Platner. Listen to us about Haley Stevens as well.”

AL: And forget about Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Cal Cunningham.

AC: Oh, Eric Swalwell and Andrew Cuomo. Eric Swalwell.

I took last night off of social media. I was like, “I’m good. I’m gonna reflect and sleep on it.”

AL: Keep it in the drafts. [Laughs]

AC: Exactly. Oh, you should see my drafts.

So, that’s one side of it, right? To summarize, the left-progressive whatever, populist coalition faction, whatever you want to call it, was right about Platner being able to tap into that anger and that enthusiasm and that passion that clearly Janet Mills was unable to tap into.

I’m of the opinion that she was never really viable. Not in this cycle. Maybe if it was 2018, maybe if it was a less angry, desperate Democratic electorate — maybe she would’ve had a chance in a different cycle.

But someone of her archetype, again, very accomplished, very experienced, not just a two-term governor, but two-term attorney general, has been in public office for decades. A long list of accomplishments. Stood up to Trump on trans stuff, although that’s not the best issue, popularity-wise, to stand up to. But still — was seen as a fighter, and it wasn’t enough. So I’m not of the opinion that if Platner didn’t come around, Mills would’ve waltzed to the nomination.

I think there would’ve been somebody to fill that void potentially. So the left got that right. What they got wrong is that — and what I got wrong — is that believing in white-knuckling it and negative polarization against Chuck Schumer and the establishment and all the naysayers about Platner throughout all these abhorrent scandals.

The Nazi tattoo thing really threw me at the time, and I stopped posting about that race for a couple of months after that, after really backing him very publicly. And then jumped back on the horse because the primary’s heating up.

You’re right, there is a desire to notch that as a win, but obviously he wasn’t the right candidate. And I think that Abdul El-Sayed is now the next test of this, in about four weeks from now.

Now, the other side of it is, yes, the Neera Tandens of the world, the Third Ways of the world, people on Bluesky, et cetera, were yelling and screaming about Graham Platner for months and months and months before even the scandals.

They were like, “This guy’s untested. We shouldn’t rock the boat. This isn’t the time.” And the rest of us were like, “Look at him! He’s great! He’s going to break the archetype, break the mold.”

AL: Look at him go.

AC: And they were right. They were 100 percent right about Graham Platner.

But I think that they’re learning the wrong lessons from this, in my opinion. In that, just go with the establishment candidate. Yes, you should have better vetting. Yes, having people who are in public office who have faced some level of media scrutiny are less likely to have these kinds of things appear. Not foolproof: Look at Eric Swalwell.

But I think you can overlearn the lessons from this and try and turn this into a factional win. And I think that all of this is subtext for the conversation that we’re about to have in 2028. This is JV compared to what we’re about to experience in about, I don’t know, six to eight months.

[Break]

AL: Backing up a little bit to the midterms, which are looming in the background here the big takeaway being that both parties have a consistent problem with candidates credibly accused of sexual assault. This news, as you mentioned, came after McMorrow dropped out in Michigan, and Maine was a pickup that Democrats really needed to ease an already extremely difficult path to winning the Senate.

Do you think their chances in Maine are completely shot now? We’re anticipating news that Platner drops out in the next day or two. The deadline to do so would be on July 13, which is the coming Monday. There’s been reporting that Maine Democrats are going to rush a new convention process to potentially pick another candidate. There are several names being floated right now, most of the candidates who lost in the gubernatorial primary. But do you think Democrats’ chances in Maine are shot now?

AC: I would say it’s the opposite. I spoke with a bunch of Republican operatives, strategists, pollsters yesterday when I was taking my social media hiatus — my very brief social media hiatus, my dopamine hit hiatus — to ask them, “How you feeling?” And they’re like, “God, I hope he stays in.” They’re like, “Oh, what’s in it for him to drop out? Like at this point, might as well just keep going.” When his video dropped yesterday of him saying, “We’re taking time to evaluate next steps,” it felt to a lot of us who are in this industry who’ve seen these kinds of things before, as a prelude to a dropout.

I’d be shocked and appalled and angry if he didn’t drop out. I think what he’s trying to do right now is use his leverage to get his ally Troy Jackson, former state Senate president, I believe, who ran and came close to winning the gubernatorial nomination this year — who was also backed by Bernie Sanders, close with unions, the same type of archetype, but is an elected official. Again, fairly aligned in a lot of ways with Platner’s vision and kind of economic populist message. I think he’s trying to maybe use that as leverage to get his guy to take his place. So he’s not replaced with an “establishment-type” candidate. Although we’ll see if we’re getting into uncharted territory with this rapid convention.

As we saw in 2024 with the Biden to Kamala swap, right? That wasn’t a convention. It was like an insider elite’s rapid turnaround here. And who knows what’ll happen coming out of the convention.

But I think the consensus is, among Democratic and Republican strategists that I’ve spoken to, that Democrats have a better chance of holding the seat now. And I think that one of the arguments is that, “Oh, they won’t have any money.” The money will come. This is a must-win seat, and now that Platner, who was already struggling with fundraising — he put out a thing, I think, last week, I think a few folks like Matt Yglesias were, like, making fun of him for trashing the establishment and then asking the establishment for money because he’s getting swamped on the airwaves.

So I think the money will come to whoever replaces him on the ballot. But I do think that Democrats are in a better position, although we’re in uncharted waters. So it’s going to be tricky, and Susan Collins is no slouch. But someone with less baggage running in this kind of environment does have a really good shot still.

AL: One question that keeps coming up for me is it really possible that the people who vetted Platner missed this? I could see a plausible scenario where he blacked out and Jenny Racicot, the people that she told, weren’t going to go spreading this around because he wasn’t running for the Senate. But do you actually think the campaign didn’t know about this, or what do you think happened there?

AC: I don’t know. I know that Graham knew about all these things. He knows what he posted. They were deleted, whether it was the Reddit posts or whatever else was was unearthed. 

AL: And the claim that he didn’t know about the Nazi tattoo has pretty much fallen apart at this point.

AC: Yeah, I think it fell apart a while ago. And I don’t think that the people who vetted him and recruited him to run knew about all these things before. I think Graham Platner said throughout the campaign —

AL: But like how? Especially the Reddit posts. Like how?

AC: The Reddit posts, that was a vetting failure. No doubt about it. Anything that has a digital footprint that you don’t unearth now, even if it’s deleted in the archives, like KFile, whoever’s going to do it, they’re going to unearth it. Oppo firms, they know how to do that. We saw with Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York 13.

AL: Right.

AC: These things don’t stay deleted. The internet is forever, which we’re going to see that coming up more and more with millennials and Gen Z politicians who grew up on the internet, who posted dumb stuff when they were younger — or even when they’re older.

So that was a vetting issue, and that’s something that should be addressed structurally, not just with DSCC establishment type backed candidates, but with all viable candidates. Like, the party apparatus or outside groups need to do a better job of doing self-vetting, self-oppo on these kinds of things.

In terms of things that don’t have a digital footprint that were verbal, other accusations from people — Graham knew. There’s no doubt about that, right?

AL: Yeah, and I’ll just say for our listeners, because Platner’s accuser says that after the night that she says that he raped her, she followed up with him because she was worried that she was pregnant to tell him that she wasn’t pregnant, and they had communications after the fact.

AC: I think there’s no real way of knowing when you’re vetting somebody about that unless the candidate comes forward, right? You can talk to people in their life, you can talk to their exes, you can do this. Maybe they didn’t think that Platner would be viable. Maybe they weren’t ready to talk about it yet. At the end of the day, that’s not on the vetters necessarily. That is on Graham Platner. 

I think what’s getting lost in a lot of this in the blaming of people like the vetters or people like me who help prop him up, or Schumer for that matter, or the voters, or whoever it is you want to blame — and I think there’s plenty of blame to go around — is that this is on Graham.

He kept saying repeatedly throughout the campaign — and every time he did it, I would wince, even earlier on when I was standing by him — “Oh, nothing more is coming out. They’ve emptied the tank.” I spoke to Democrats, Republicans who are in the know who are like, “Yeah, more’s coming.”

A lot of us were like, “If he survived Nazi tattoo stuff, then he can survive anything.” Little did we know that — obviously, something like this is objectively even more serious than that. 

AL: Yeah, there’s no question. 

AC: But the fact that he kept saying nothing more is coming out speaks to either, you’re in denial, or you think that it’s never going to come out, and it’s hubris that you think you can can hide it well enough or people won’t speak out against you. But I don’t know. I’ve been following politics and working in politics for a long time. This stuff always comes out, and to think that you are the exception never works out well.

Maybe it happens once you’re in office. At some point the bill comes due. And if you’re not being forthright with people that are putting their entire reputation on the line, not talking about me, people who worked on this campaign, who got him in the race, vetted him, et cetera, and then all the fallout that extended out from that —

AL: And all the people who are withdrawing their endorsements of him right now.

AC: Exactly. There’s just so much collateral damage, and clearly there’s something appealing about his candidacy that both the people inside and outside of Maine saw something in him, and I think there is something real about what he tapped into. The ideas of his campaign can live on, but if you’re not forthright about these kinds of things, what else aren’t you being forthright about? 

There were all these [Sen. John] Fetterman comparisons throughout the campaign, this gruff, unconventional guy. And I was one of the people who was like, “No, you’re just stereotyping these types of people,” but we don’t know what would’ve happened if he had won and was in the Senate, and maybe, who knows what positions he would’ve taken or what else would’ve come out.

Then maybe we [would] have a special election on our hands. There’s all kinds of implications, and I do hope that he does drop out — both to work on himself and for the sake of the party and the sake of the Democrats’ chance of having a window to take the majority. Because if Democrats lose that seat, it’s almost impossible for them to flip the Senate.

AL: I’ll just mention also that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democrat-aligned Majority PAC have said that they will not spend on this race if Platner does not drop out. 

Adam, we’re going to leave it there.

Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing. Great to have you on.

AC: Thank you for having me.

AL: Is there something you’re concerned about and want to see more reporting on? Let us know. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-PODCAST. 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.

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. 

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Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post The People Who Stood By Graham Platner — Until He Was Accused of Rape appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s true that the four victorious socialists running for Congress — Chris Rabb in Philadelphia, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York City, and Melat Kiros in Denver — won in major cities where progressive politics are more likely to be popular than in the country’s many more rural, poorer, and less educated districts. But before this cycle’s big surge, the Democratic Socialists of America had spent the past decade backing and recruiting candidates in down-ballot races across the U.S., multiplying the number of people in office by a figure of eight and electing mayors, city councilors, state lawmakers, and other local officials in 39 states.

“Everybody is feeling the crunch. Everybody is deeply concerned for their families, for their security,” said Becky Cooper, campaign manager to Francesca Hong, a Wisconsin state representative and formidable DSA candidate for governor. “That transcends political party, transcends ages, and it transcends geography. This is not just a coastal elites thing.”

Despite the narrative that the socialist model only works among electorates dominated by young, white, coastal elites, the DSA, the largest socialist organization in the U.S., is decentralized and operates chapters in a majority of states. Its members currently hold office in states like Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee. Many of those candidates have been elected to local offices even as far-right campaigns to take over bodies like school boards have dominated in recent years. Since 2018, 305 DSA-backed lawmakers have won their races. Democratic socialists won state legislative primaries this season in Georgia and Kentucky, and they’re on the ballot in upcoming primary races in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where Hong has polled first or second in recent months in a tight gubernatorial primary.

In order to win, they’ve built what some might call a machine, joining forces with more mainstream progressive organizations to marshal resources against a well-financed political establishment that buried candidates on the left in 2024.

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Their success has sent the Democratic establishment into a frenzy. Dismissing the wins in his backyard, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the socialist victories in New York were concentrated in “higher-income districts” with an “outsized focus on issues connected to the Middle East.” 

But while Valdez and Avila Chevalier won a majority of voters in areas dominated by the young, wealthy, and college-educated, Avila Chevalier beat longtime incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat among Black voters, while Valdez dominated over Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso among majority-Hispanic precincts — suggesting the socialism-curious share of the electorate is more complex than its critics might make it seem. 

“People are going to keep trying to move the goalposts to pretend like this isn’t a movement sweeping the nation,” said democratic socialist New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport, pointing to another DSA member who won a primary upstate in Buffalo. “It’s an attack line that will keep coming again and again, a very reductionist identity politics from pundits and critics who don’t have anything meaningful to offer working-class voters.” 

According to Cooper, Democratic leaders hold responsibility for the surging popularity of the socialist brand. 

“The socialist label is more popular than the Democratic label because people are recognizing that they’ve been fed a bill of lies through capitalism,” she said. 

Democratic socialists looking to take over the governor’s mansion in Wisconsin say their message isn’t contingent on geography, race, or class.

“You’ve had throughout history political leaders use socialist policies without actually calling it socialism,” said Wisconsin state Rep. Darrin Madison, the first Black socialist elected in the state. He pointed to policies like the New Deal, the eight-hour workday, and Social Security. “Building systems of mutual aid, that’s a form of socialism,” Madison said.

Wisconsin’s long history of socialist politics has enjoyed a revival in recent years. Milwaukee sent the first socialist to the House in 1910 and elected three socialist mayors over the next half century, but the state’s socialist caucus died out in the early 1930s — after passing close to 300 bills in the preceding decade. Frank Zeidler, elected Milwaukee mayor in 1948, was the last socialist elected in the city until 2020, when voters elected Ryan Clancy to the County Board of Supervisors. Two years later, Madison and Clancy won election to the state Assembly; the first thing the pair did after taking their oaths of office was to found the Socialist Caucus, which had died out in the 1930s. The caucus doubled in size last year to four members, adding Hong and state Rep. Christian Phelps.

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Socialists resuscitated their Wisconsin roots at a time when Democrats had earned a reputation for shirking their responsibilities at every level of Wisconsin’s government. After Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the state’s 2016 Democratic primary, its general election voters swung toward Donald Trump — clinching his first presidency. Until current Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers was elected in 2018, the state was under full Republican control.

“The last time that Wisconsin had a [Democratic] trifecta was 16 years ago now,” Clancy told The Intercept. After Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle did not seek reelection, the Democratic candidate lost the 2011 governor’s race to Republican Scott Walker, and the GOP flipped both state legislative chambers. “The Democrats at the time squandered that opportunity, and they really failed to deliver for the state.” 

Those failures, Clancy said, included not codifying abortion rights ahead of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and not raising the minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour, when they had the votes to do so. “They didn’t even bring it up for a vote because they feared what that would mean for their large-dollar donors,” Clancy said.

Cooper said Hong’s campaign is hearing from voters who are increasingly blaming the capitalist system for the problems they see around them. In response, the campaign is talking about what it says is the true definition of socialism, Cooper said: “Taking care of our neighbors, taking care of people’s economic needs.”

“They’re waking up to the fact that it is capitalism at the heart of these issues. It is people profiting off of our neighbors being sick, or not being able to afford groceries or not being able to afford their credit card bills, when we see that people are becoming billionaires while we’re suffering and literally just trying to feed our families,” she said. 

Hong’s performance in recent polling shows that socialist policies are resonating with voters, Madison said. 

“When folks say this is a reflection of the elites and folks from academia and young folks in college, that does a disservice to community members and their abilities to understand the circumstances that they are in and the ways in which parties have exploited their pain,” he said. 

“It doesn’t speak to the reality that folks are facing.”

Nearly 2,000 miles southwest of Wisconsin’s capitol, the city of Los Angeles has all the markers of a coastal haven for democratic socialist politics to thrive: a large working class, high racial diversity, a significant immigrant population with a rich history of progressive organizing, all existing alongside pockets of wealthier, whiter, college educated residents who lean left. The city has its own storied history of socialism and nearly elected a socialist mayor in the early 1900s, riding a wave of labor and working-class support and drawing on the socialist model of Milwaukee. 

Since 2020, the LA DSA chapter has gained a foothold in City Council with challenges to the Democratic establishment. When Nithya Raman unseated an incumbent that year with the backing of DSA LA, the victory sent shockwaves throughout an LA establishment — then the DSA repeated the feat three times in subsequent cycles.

Now, Raman has a chance to unseat incumbent Democratic mayor Karen Bass in November, tempting comparisons that suggest the city is on the cusp of its own wave of governmental transformation akin to New York under democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Yet DSA LA has struggled to break out of its main stronghold of the city’s east and northeast sides, into some of the city’s power centers, such as South LA, which has majority Black, Latino, and working-class precincts.

“If we’re serious about building power in the areas where we want to build power, then the process has to begin much earlier than a candidate coming to DSA” for an endorsement, said DSA LA co-chair Leslie Chang. She acknowledged the need to break out of LA’s own “commie corridor,” where many DSA members live.

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Like in New York, DSA LA has had to battle accusations that its candidates only draw support from white, college-educated voters, despite winning in multiple districts with majority-Latino residents. This reality played out in two city council races on LA’s west and south sides, where one DSA candidate lost outright and the other made it to the runoff — but trailing the establishment pick by 13 percentage points.

Chang, who spent a week in New York knocking on doors and phone-banking for that socialist slate, said the LA chapter needs to follow New York’s lead to train and identify “homegrown” candidates within the organization. 

“We need multi-year power building plans for a lot of the things that we want to achieve,” Chang said. “We have to commit to working on projects, like non-electoral campaigns in districts, to become better embedded in that community that we want to represent.”

While DSA found success in its first citywide race when its endorsed city attorney candidate, Marissa Roy, locked out the incumbent from the top two and made it to a November runoff, its members were split over whether to back Raman for mayor or long-shot candidate Rae Huang. Its city council members endorsed Bass. Now, DSA LA’s larger membership has to weigh whether to endorse Raman in November’s runoff as she faces lingering mistrust among the organization and LA’s left after she diverged from her DSA colleagues on key housing issues and on Palestine and Israel. If she does want to unlock the group’s army of canvassing volunteers, Raman would need to collect at least 50 signatures from DSA members, sit for an interview with its electoral politics committee, and fill out a questionnaire that would likely include policy commitments important to the group.

Still, recent socialist victories have had a reverberating effect on the nation’s second largest city. The LA chapter saw bumps in membership after Mamdani’s election last year and another after New York’s congressional primaries, adding 70 new members to its total of 5,000. Chang said the wins in New York have also energized the chapter to begin building toward electing members to the California State Legislature, where only one current DSA member from the Silicon Valley is serving. Elsewhere in California, Mai Vang, endorsed by the Sacramento DSA chapter, is headed to a runoff after leading longtime Democratic incumbent Rep. Doris Matsui; the previous person who held the seat was Matsui’s husband Bob.

“When New York wins, LA wins,” said Sean Wakasa, a DSA LA co-chair with Chang, also mentioning the wins in Philadelphia and Denver. “We’re building politics that working-class people can see themselves in, and it’s built around addressing universal issues around affordability around the ability for people to work.”

DSA might bristle at the suggestion that it’s becoming a political machine. The group prides itself on getting buy-in from its members before taking a position on policy issues and having a painstakingly democratic structure — not the top-down politics they say has led to the downfall of the Democratic Party. 

But DSA is playing the game. It’s one group in a coalition of lefty organizations whose chapters have beefed up their coordination this cycle to power socialist and progressive candidates. 

In all four of its congressional primary wins so far this cycle, DSA chapters have teamed up with Justice Democrats, the left insurgent group that rose to prominence in 2018 when it helped get the first two DSA members of Congress elected — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. — but suffered last cycle when two of its newer incumbents, Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, were ousted by AIPAC-backed challengers. Now, joining forces with DSA chapters and Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate group that has expanded its ambit to oppose war and authoritarianism, Justice Democrats is receiving mea culpas for previous death knells — as JD spokesperson Usamah Andrabi told The Intercept when Kiros won: “We’re just having an amazing fucking cycle.”

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Groups on the left have also massively increased their spending in this year’s primaries after losing candidates last cycle who faced tens of millions of dollars in attacks from deep-pocketed super PACs and dark-money groups. Several pro-Palestine PACs are working or spending on primaries for the first time this cycle. The super PAC American Priorities, funded by Mamdani donors, has spent more than $4 million so far. Those investments have helped shift the dynamics in congressional races even in the face of similar outside spending against the left.

“Justice Democrats has the expertise to run federal challenger primaries — embedding in campaigns as staff and advisers, managing budgets, recruiting and training candidates, coordinating donors and leading independent expenditure programs,” Andrabi told The Intercept. “Combining that expertise with local DSA’s immense field and organizing power, which is unmatched in cities like NYC, delivers these monumental victories.

The national groups that helped power Kiros, Valdez, Avila Chevalier, and Rabb’s congressional campaigns don’t work on state-level races. But the DSA’s local Wisconsin chapters and another three campus chapters of the Young Democratic Socialists of America have endorsed Hong and are helping to boost her campaign by canvassing, fundraising, holding events, and calling voters. A new DSA chapter for Central Wisconsin formed last week and is also expected to endorse her. 

Still, Hong’s campaign expects to face a surge in outside spending against her. “We know that super PAC money is going to come in, especially with Fran’s stance on data centers. We know AI money is going to come in,” said Cooper, Hong’s campaign manager. She also said she expects to face money from the pro-Israel lobby, though its flagship national group does not spend on state races. 

“That doesn’t change our message or our work. We know that we are never going to raise the most money. We know that we’re not going to have a ton of independent expenditures coming in to rescue us. We have 6,000 volunteers on the ground,” she said. The weekend after the New York primaries, the campaign knocked 10,000 doors in a day and a half. “That is how we will offset paid media and the spending and all those kinds of things, is getting people out to have real conversations.” 

In addition to outside spending, Cooper said the current pearl-clutching around the rise of democratic socialist candidates was to be expected. 

“Any time within the larger pendulum swings, there’s smaller ones as well.”

The post There’s a New Democratic Machine. It’s Unabashedly Socialist. appeared first on The Intercept.

When Maine Democratic Senate hopeful Graham Platner sealed the deal on his resounding primary victory in June, the oysterman turned political lightning rod sounded a note of defiance — one that resonated with another would-be candidate on the other side of the country. 

In Washington state, Alex Scheel, who is also a veteran of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saw Platner’s win and decided to take the plunge. He officially launched his congressional bid to unseat incumbent Rep. Marilyn Strickland on June 13. 

“Platner is an inspiration for this, he’s got a similar background to me with the veteran thing,” Scheel said in an interview with The Intercept. “I think Americans are so tired and disengaged. … There’s hope for more left-wing candidates to challenge Trump and the corporate Democrats.”

At 38, Scheel is a few years younger than Platner, but he’s a more seasoned organizer; a longtime member of Democratic Socialists of America, Scheel has been his local branch’s housing justice chair, secretary-treasurer, membership coordinator, and campaign coordinator.

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Scheel’s hopeful that his experience with the DSA — which is currently riding high after primary electoral upsets against entrenched incumbent Democrats in Colorado and New York — as well as the political moment that Platner and other insurgent candidates have tapped into will propel him through the state’s August 4 primary. Like California, Washington has jungle primaries, where the top two finishers (of any party) advance, meaning that if his long-shot candidacy pays off, he wouldn’t have to beat Strickland outright until November.

“People are hungry for normal, regular, working-class people to step up and say, ‘If we get together, we can build power, and we can make America, we can make the world a better, safer, peaceful place,’” Scheel said. “It’s obvious that we’re ready for that. Whether it’s Mainers or whether it’s Washingtonians, we don’t want the same old neoliberal politics.”

While more left-leaning than many of their peers, Platner and Scheel are part of a large cohort of former military service members running for office this cycle. According to data from the advocacy group With Honor, which tracks veterans in politics, 2026 has seen a 47 percent increase in candidates with military backgrounds from 2024, with 752 running so far, up from 513.

Born in San Diego in 1987 and raised in northern Michigan, Scheel joined the military in 2007. He served as an interrogator in Iraq until 2011 and in 2012 worked in intelligence in Afghanistan. That experience “radicalized” him, Scheel said. Speaking to men his age who were potential “enemies,” he instead found common ground with their frustration and could relate to their rage.

“As an interrogator, I sat and talked to Iraqis and Afghans every day and got to know them and got to understand where they were coming from,” he said. Scheel said his interaction with one man, Muthanna, sticks with him in particular. He told Scheel “how the Americans came in, invaded, bombed the electricity plants, and bombed water treatment plants. They had four hours of electricity a day and no clean drinking water, [the U.S.] killed his dad in the invasion, and they threw his uncles into prison.”

Scheel continued, “He was painting this horrible picture. I had enough empathy to put myself in his spot and go, ‘Holy shit, I would do the exact same thing. I would join any sort of group that tried to defend my country and my family and friends.’”

In 2014, Scheel left the military and relocated to Washington, where he attended Evergreen State College. Four years later, he got involved in community activism after joining the Tiki tenants fight in Tacoma, where a developer attempted to displace poor, disabled, and elderly tenants of an apartment building. (While the organizers won some concessions, the project ultimately went forward.)

“Because of my service, I realized that our government is often just straight-up lying to you,” Scheel said. “We can go bomb and kill and do all this horrible shit in the name of democracy or whatever, and your average person doesn’t know it.”

While Democrats can point to politicians like New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill as proof of concept that veterans get elected, it’s not, necessarily, an indicator of long-term success.

For decades, centrist Democrats, perhaps most notably Rahm Emanuel during his time as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have looked to recruit veterans to topple popular Republican incumbents, often to little lasting electoral gain. In the last 10 years, liberals have poured money into losing campaigns like Kentucky’s Amy McGrath, MJ Hegar in Texas, and Marcus Flowers in Georgia, with the hope that moderates and disillusioned Republicans would cross the aisle.

Scheel is disrupting that model by running on Medicare for All and housing justice, among other progressive policies he believes will resonate in his 10th Congressional District, which includes the left-wing cities of Tacoma and Olympia. He faces an uphill climb: The establishment Democratic incumbent has around $800,000 campaign cash on hand and the backing of the local party. But he’s betting that his time organizing in the area will help to narrow that disadvantage. He’s raised around $5,000 so far, he said.

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In a sign of how the party’s primary contests are splitting down new lines, Scheel is setting himself apart from Strickland by running an anti-war campaign that highlights his opposition to military aid to Israel. Adam Arafat, a fellow veteran who is also running in Washington’s 10th District, led off a candidate questionnaire question about the issues in the race by saying he would refuse “corporate PAC money and AIPAC money.”

The incumbent offers a rich target for this line of attack: Strickland went on a trip to Israel in March 2024 sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an arm of AIPAC, and is a leadership member of the moderate New Democratic Coalition. 

Nationally, there is a real hunger for change — and Scheel believes he can offer a new way forward. The party establishment is failing a base that’s expecting them to fight and stand up for what’s right and has been repeatedly disappointed. Scheel told The Intercept he believes Democrats, including his opponent Strickland, have fallen down on the job, which has created an opening for the left wing of the party.

“This last presidential campaign failed because they didn’t deliver on their promises to fight Trump and to make the country a better place,” he said. “Standard of living is horrible, affordability is horrible, and it shows in their polling. Their polling is almost as bad if not worse as Trump. So there’s an opportunity.”

The post Graham Platner Inspired Another Left-Wing Veteran to Take On an Establishment Dem appeared first on The Intercept.

The MAHA enthusiast announced last month that HHS was demanding federal action on allegations that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also known as CAIR, and its California and Washington affiliates had misused federal grant funds. “If there is evidence of fraud, abuse, or ties to designated terrorist organizations, we will act,” he wrote on X. 

The post came as a shock at CAIR’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., because the organization had never received nor solicited federal funding from Health and Human Services.

“Not even a penny,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of CAIR. “[Kennedy] would know that if he had spent any amount of time doing research before he decided to publicly attack us in this way.”

Kennedy’s mystifying crusade appears to be an attempt to satisfy the demands of a group of Republican members of Congress led by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, as an emboldened right wing chomping at the bit to target Muslim Americans dictates the decisions of the executive branch. After Roy and his colleagues argued without evidence that CAIR and its affiliates were connected to international terrorist organizations and had misused federal funds intended to help settle Afghan refugees, Kennedy’s fumbling attempt to address their concerns set off a bizarre chapter in the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent that left the intended targets wondering whether they were under a real investigation or had become pawns in a challenging midterm cycle.

“During election cycles we see the ramping-up of this type of anti-Muslim rhetoric,” said Saher Selod, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “Saying we need to investigate CAIR national is following a playbook of trying to motivate a base to come out and vote, and Muslims have become the bait in this moment.”

CAIR, which advocates for the civil rights of Muslims in the United States, has been a thorn in President Donald Trump’s side since his first administration, when the group sued to block his infamous “Muslim ban.” In Trump’s second term, CAIR national and its local chapters have continued to push back against the administration’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agenda through the courts and in public statements.

While CAIR national has never received HHS funding, CAIR California and CAIR Washington, which operate separately from the national branch and are overseen by their own boards of directors, have received federal health dollars to provide legal services to Afghan refugees fleeing after the Taliban took power in 2021.

Both chapters vehemently denied any wrongdoing and emphasized the extensive vetting process required by both their respective states and the federal government to use the funds under contention. 

“They won’t get anything out” of an investigation, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR California. “It is merely an attempt to create smear and destruction, to silence … the most important American Muslim voices in the country when it comes to issues dealing with Israeli abuses and the U.S. funding of those abuses.”

The allegations levied against CAIR and its local affiliates come amid a larger wave of anti-Muslim attacks as Republicans fight to hold onto power in a midterm cycle where they’re likely to lose seats. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in December in designating CAIR as a “foreign terrorist organization.” In Tennessee, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”

Democrats have hardly been immune from spreading Islamophobic rhetoric. During last year’s New York City mayoral election, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand had to apologize for comments characterizing now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, as supportive of a “global jihad.” Before winning New Jersey’s June primary, Dr. Adam Hamawy faced attacks from some of his Democratic opponents over a brief 1995 trial testimony he gave for a religious leader convicted of plotting terror attacks, in what Hamawy’s campaign described as well-worn Islamophobic tropes.

Roy, who has been leading the charge against CAIR in Congress, was running his own campaign for Texas attorney general when he sent a letter to Kennedy urging HHS to investigate and suspend CAIR and CAIR California, accusing the organization of having long-standing ties to Hamas and documented “misuse of federal grant funds.” 

In response, CAIR California sent a letter to Kennedy refuting Roy’s claims as “lies, smears and defamatory statements.” The group noted that it was selected and vetted by the state of California to provide these services, and argued that its “use of public funds are fully accounted for, transparent and compliant with its legal obligations.” 

Over a month later, CAIR California received what Ayloush, its executive director, described as an “amicable” and “reassuring” response from HHS. In the letter, obtained by The Intercept, the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, Paula M. Stannard, said she was directed by Kennedy to respond to CAIR California on his behalf.

“OCR plays a critical part in the effort to ensure that people are able to lead healthy lives free of discriminatory barriers,” Stannard wrote. “OCR’s policy and enforcement efforts continue to protect all Americans from unlawful discrimination; ensure equal access to health and human services and respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” 

The letter did not commit to anything, but Ayloush said that he did not get the sense that the secretary would be joining in on what he described as the “bashing of Muslim organizations.” 

So it came as a surprise when only a few days later, the secretary posted about an investigation not only into CAIR California, but also CAIR national and CAIR Washington. 

“There’s an interesting divergence between what he said privately to CAIR California in writing, and then what he said on social media,” Mitchell, the national deputy director, said. 

So far, all three organizations told The Intercept that they have not received any correspondence from HHS. “To this point, we have not received any communication from him indicating that he’s looking into anything,” said Mitchell. “No subpoenas, no nothing at all, just this shot across the bow in the court of public opinion.” 

Roy, who founded the Islamophobic “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” thanked Kennedy in June for “investigating CAIR’s alleged ties to the groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.” 

Imraan Siddiqi, executive director of CAIR Washington, said that accusing Muslim Americans of fraud had become a convenient line of attack politically. He pointed to attacks in Washington state on predominantly Somali Muslim childcare workers after conspiracy theories that Somalis were committing child care grant fraud spread in Minnesota.

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“They’ve found a line of attack that some people are responding to or resonates with them,” he said, particularly in an era where social media can easily amplify misinformation for an audience eager to confirm their own biases. 

Hatem Baizan, an Ethnic Studies lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, said the administration does not need to prove these claims to smear CAIR and its affiliates.

“Facts are immaterial for this current administration,” he said. “The aim is to throw as much dirt as possible, use as many investigative tools as possible with the hope that you have enough delegitimization, enough doubt, to actually get people to distance themselves from CAIR.” 

The post RFK Jr. Claims He’s Investigating Terrorism Now, Too appeared first on The Intercept.

Voters chose democratic socialist Melat Kiros, an attorney who lost her job for condemning her industry’s silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ahead of longtime Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat representing Denver who touted progressive positions on domestic issues but drew criticism that she had grown complacent over three decades in Congress and generally followed the party line on support for Israel.

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DeGette’s defeat in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District brought more bad news for Democratic incumbents reeling after losses in New York last week. Party leaders are facing a surge in public frustration with their brand and a cascade of voters who say they don’t wield power effectively. Though some Democratic leaders have discounted those races and claimed that the ascendant candidates’ vision is out of step with the party’s base, leftists and progressives are continuing to notch wins under their noses as they take the battle over the future of the Democratic Party to the polls.

“In the last week, we have taken out 40 years of incumbency,” said Usamah Andrabi, spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed Kiros and two of the candidates who won in New York. 

Members of the Democratic establishment “hate that they can no longer simply spend unlimited sums of money to buy a seat in Congress, and we are truly proving that organized people power and mass movements can beat the money,” he said. “We’re just having an amazing fucking cycle.”

Kiros, who will face Republican Christy Peterson in November, is heavily favored to win in the solid Democratic district.

Anti-incumbent sentiment also came through in the tight Democratic race for governor, where the state attorney general framed himself as the choice against the establishment despite holding statewide office. Two-term Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser defeated sitting Sen. Michael Bennet after casting himself as outsider who went after President Donald Trump in court dozens of times and won — a fairly standard tactic for Democratic state attorneys general.

That’s not to say every race in Colorado was a warning sign for the establishment. In the statewide race for Senate, the incumbent safely kept his seat as progressive challenger Julie Gonzales fell short of ousting centrist Sen. John Hickenlooper. (Hickenlooper had refused to debate Gonzales and tried to thwart her run early in the race.)

Mixed Results in Key Districts

In the district encompassing Colorado Springs, Jessica Killin, an Army veteran and previous chief of staff to former second husband Doug Emhoff, easily beat Joe Reagan, a populist second-time candidate and fellow veteran. Killin had far outraised him with the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

Days before the 5th Congressional District primary, Killin pledged to sign onto a new pact from conservative House Democrats to promote capitalism, equating socialism with the right-wing MAGA movement and promising to fight both. Killin will face first-term incumbent GOP Rep. Jeff Crank, whose district the Cook Political Report changed from “solid” to “likely” Republican.

State Rep. Manny Rutinel, who has been described as a progressive but recently reneged on some of his policy pledges, meanwhile, beat a former state lawmaker backed by conservative Democrats’ Blue Dog PAC in the 8th District, rated a “toss up” and one of the DCCC’s “races in play” that could help determine control of the House. He’ll face freshman GOP Rep. Gabe Evans, who was ranked last summer as the most vulnerable incumbent in the country.

Rutinel campaigned in the heavily Latino district on fighting the “cruelty” of Trump’s immigration policy and attacked the record of his opponent, Shannon Bird, on the issue. He positioned himself as the candidate who would do more to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Backed by the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rutinel backed off of some of his more left-leaning stances during his campaign, such as Medicare for All and opposing fracking. While he had reportedly been privately critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he said he wouldn’t “boil it down to one word descriptors” and would support military aid to Israel. He ran without the support of the Working Families Party, which had previously endorsed him.

While Blue Dog-backed Bird had the institutional support of the centrist and party-aligned New Democrat Coalition Action Fund and EMILY’s List as well as the pro-Israel Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, Rutinel had the advantage in fundraising and dominated ad space. House Majority PAC — which is aligned with House Democratic leadership — has already reserved $6.1 million in ad reservations for the general election.

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“Voters can see through the hollow words and platitudes of the corporate-backed candidates who have tried to hijack our working families-centered messaging during this campaign,” said Carlos Valverde, Southwest regional director for the Working Families Party. “People are tired of status-quo, do-nothing politics that protect the comfortable while working families struggle with housing, healthcare, wages, and basic dignity.”

In Denver, according to Andrabi, on-the-ground energy from the campaign’s supporters made the crucial difference. While DeGette received a last-minute infusion of super PAC money, the Kiros campaign “knocked 115,000 doors in this race, which is just insane.”

The post Socialist Momentum Grows as Melat Kiros Wins in Denver appeared first on The Intercept.

The Colorado Democrat is facing her first competitive primary in her 30-year House career on Tuesday. After a series of confrontations with voters — including a public meltdown in a coffee shop — an unfavorable poll kept out of public view, and speculation that she called on powerful allies to pressure venues to cancel planned participation in a rally for her opponent, a slew of new super PACs swooped in to keep DeGette’s campaign afloat in the final weeks of the race — including one funded by the pro-Israel lobby. 

While DeGette has spent the campaign’s home stretch defending her record as a progressive, her leading opponent, democratic socialist Melat Kiros, has never been more optimistic. 

After leftist candidates rode to victory in New York last week on a growing wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, Kiros said her campaign saw a major uptick in donors and volunteers. A coalition of leftist organizations backing her has run an aggressive field campaign and say they’ve out-organized DeGette, who didn’t take the challenge seriously at first and was almost kicked off the ballot in March. In a district full of the kinds of young voters who helped socialists win last week in New York, Kiros’s backers say a similar coalition could power another socialist challenger to topple the Colorado incumbent on Tuesday.

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“While the Democratic establishment reveals its contempt for its own voters by lashing out against the candidates their base elected, our candidates keep winning by taking on the corporate interests raising our prices to deliver a positive vision to make life more affordable for working class voters — from Medicare for All to ending taxpayer-funded genocide,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Kiros.

DeGette’s challenge is emblematic of a wake-up call for many Democratic incumbents this midterms cycle, Andrabi said: Even being relatively “progressive” is no longer enough to fend off a challenger from the left, let alone to keep your seat. 

“Voters are done watching Democrats take corporate PAC money and then wonder why nobody trusts them to fight,” Kiros said in a statement to The Intercept. “They are done with representatives who show up six weeks before a primary because a challenger finally scared them into it. The energy that showed up in New York is the same energy that’s showing up in Denver and we are ready for Tuesday night.”

Another progressive strategist who works with congressmembers and candidates and requested anonymity in order to speak freely said DeGette’s backers were worried. “Across multiple districts we’re seeing Dem primary voters unwilling to accept the usual platitudes from incumbents about their work ‘standing up to Trump’ as sufficient to earn their support,” they said.

“Voters across the spectrum are deeply frustrated with the Democratic Party’s ineffectiveness, and feel like many of these incumbents have been all talk and no action in this term,” they said. “There is broad anti-establishment sentiment that creates real opportunity for a next-generation challenger like in CO-01.”

The influx of super PAC spending for DeGette in the final days of the race came even as she had painted herself as further to the left. The incumbent has name-dropped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for example, in campaign ads, a candidate forum, and an interview.

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And while DeGette has said repeatedly she isn’t backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, pro-DeGette super PAC money came from one of several groups used this cycle by United Democracy Project, the super PAC for AIPAC, to back its preferred candidates without publicly getting involved in races. United Democracy Project provided more than a third of the money raised this year by the group behind the ads.

“AIPAC’s desperation to stop the pro-Palestinian movement’s momentum and our candidates bringing this fight forward proves just how much they are losing the Democratic Party,” Andrabi said. 

DeGette has banked her reelection on reminding voters that she’s a progressive. Pointing to her three decades in Congress and a late endorsement from her Congressional Progressive Caucus colleague, former chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., DeGette has warned that electing Kiros — who was born the year after DeGette was first elected and who the incumbent says has no political experience or capital — comes with risks. 

Kiros’s backers are using DeGette’s long record against her. They argue she has little to show for her 15 terms in Congress and say the wave of young voters turning out to oust incumbents and back leftist candidates across the country will work against her.

Throughout her time in Congress, DeGette has expressed her support for all the right marquee progressive priorities. She’s reminded voters that she helped write the Medicare for All bill and is the top Democrat on the committee that could make it a reality, and led fights to protect healthcare, the right to abortion, and the environment. 

But her critics, including Kiros, say she’s rested on those laurels and done little to leverage her seniority in the Democratic caucus to pass meaningful legislation on those issues — and that part of her inaction is tied to her donors. 

“The DeGette team clearly was not in the community talking to voters, because that is the only way they could have missed the energy behind our campaign and the hunger for leadership that is unbought and unafraid,” Kiros said. 

Kiros and others have pointed to DeGette’s longtime support from the pharmaceutical industry, one of Medicare for All’s greatest foes, as a major reason she’s allowed the legislation to languish. DeGette has promised voters that if they reelect her and Democrats win the House this year, she’ll finally take over the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health, where she has served as ranking member since January 2025 and been a member since 2017, and bring the bill up for a vote. 

There’s also the issue of Israel and Palestine. Despite naming her progressive bonafides, DeGette has described herself as pro-Israel and has a mixed record on related legislation. She’s not endorsed by AIPAC, but its super PAC is funding one of the groups spending against Kiros, an outspoken critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza who was fired for writing a post criticizing big law firms, including her employer, for blacklisting pro-Palestine protesters.

The group running the ads, Pro-Choice Majority Action, formed in May as an affiliate of EDW Action, which received $1 million from United Democracy Project between April and May. That’s about a third of the $2.7 million EDW Action reported since January. Another pro-Israel group, DMFI PAC, gave EDW Action $37,750 in April.

“Our endorsements are based on a candidate’s record of fighting for women and families, not on foreign policy,” a spokesperson for Pro-Choice Majority Action told The Intercept. “In fact, our endorsed candidates have held a wide range of views on Israel and the broader foreign policy debate within the Democratic Party. When other organizations support one of our candidates, we sometimes work together to amplify our message about that candidate’s record of fighting for women.”

United Democracy Project and DMFI PAC did not respond to requests for comment.

“Their support for a 30-year congresswoman who they don’t even publicly endorse is far less about Diana DeGette and far more about the extremes they have to go to blunt the momentum of first-time candidates like Melat who represent the will of the Democratic majority,” Andrabi said. 

“We are seeing a new generation of leaders elected by a new generation of young people who are approaching politics with moral clarity,” said Denae Ávila-Dickson, a spokesperson for the youth-led Sunrise Movement, which is backing Kiros. “These elections make one thing clear: Candidates who are unapologetic about opposing the genocide in Gaza, willing to take on billionaires and corporate power, and committed to fighting for working people are the ones inspiring young voters.”

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The winner of the Democratic primary in heavily blue Denver is almost certain to be elected in November. And if Democrats win the House — the party in power tends to lose midterm seats, but Republicans are pushing forward aggressive plans to gerrymander and pass new voting restrictions — DeGette says Democrats will finally have the leverage they need to really stand up to President Donald Trump.

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

DeGette’s detractors say a lack of urgency beyond just Medicare for All characterizes her record — and that she’s only been beating the M4A drum because she’s facing a credible challenger. Only seven bills she’s sponsored over her 29 years in Congress have become law or been enacted through other bigger bills, according to GovTrack. Most representatives pass zero or one bill each term, and Congress is in an era where historic levels of partisan gridlock mean it’s passing fewer bills than it ever has.

While legislation passed is only one of several measures of a member’s activity in Congress, DeGette’s Colorado colleague, Rep. Joe Neguse, a member of House Democratic leadership first elected in 2018, had 22 bills enacted in his first two terms — the most of any member last session. In 2024, the four Republican representatives with more than 10 years in office who had the most legislation enacted into law passed six bills each.

“No seat is safe when an establishment Democrat is taking millions from corporate PACs and calling it representation,” Kiros said. “The voters are ahead of the party establishment, and they have been for a while. The question is whether the party is finally ready to listen or whether they’re going to keep learning this lesson the hard way.”

Update: July 1, 2026
This story has been updated with a comment from Pro-Choice Majority Action.

The post Socialists Are Surging. In Colorado, a 29-Year Incumbent Is Sweating. appeared first on The Intercept.

Jewish Voice for Peace Action is building off of the momentum from a string of victories for the insurgent left in Democratic primaries, where voters have repeatedly chosen outspoken pro-Palestine candidates to represent their party in the November midterms. The nominations signal a sea change in the Democratic Party and its electorate — adding a new class of members to Congress willing to question the United States’ unconditional support for Israel and putting heat on an entrenched political establishment.

“Abdul has been a stalwart and unapologetic defender of Palestinian rights and freedom, and his campaign has demonstrated a moral consistency that centers justice and equality for all people,” said Beth Miller, JVP Action’s political director. “This campaign is a historic opportunity to bring a leader into office who will fight for our communities here at home, and to reimagine a US foreign policy that supports freedom and justice, not genocide and apartheid.” 

Ahead of the August 4 primary, El-Sayed is locked in a contentious three-way race with Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., a centrist lawmaker with the backing of the Democratic establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, including its flagship warhawk lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a self-styled progressive who has drawn endorsements from figures like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the liberal pro-Israel group J Street.

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El-Sayed, who has the endorsements of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., as well as progressive Squad members in Congress like Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, has positioned himself to the left of both his opponents and has been a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza since long before he launched his campaign. While many voters cite affordability and economic pressure as their top electoral concerns — especially amid rising prices spurred by the U.S. and Israel’s unpopular war on Iran — Israel’s genocide and apartheid conditions for Palestinian people have continued to animate political organizing across several congressional races this cycle. 

That’s at least in part thanks to Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been instrumental in drawing public attention to the genocide in Gaza by organizing a wave of anti-genocide demonstrations across the U.S. – from college campuses to Wall Street and the Capitol. Its political advocacy and lobbying arm is a main backer of the Block the Bombs bill in the House, which has become a litmus test for progressive candidates in congressional races. 

“There is a marked shift in the way that movements, organizations and voters are showing up to send a very clear message: that Palestine cannot be removed from a broader progressive agenda,” Miller said.

It’s considered harder to elevate a more radical candidate to the Senate, where a politician has to win statewide election, than it might be in a deep-blue congressional district with a progressive electorate. But Miller said El-Sayed was a standout — in the seven years since its 2019 establishment, Jewish Voice for Peace Action had never seen a Senate candidate that seemed worth its endorsement. JVP Action also backed candidates in the recent House races where the left won in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, though its preferred candidate lost in San Francisco. In Colorado’s primary election on Tuesday, JVP Action is also supporting Melat Kiros, an anti-war House candidate who was fired from her job as an attorney for refusing to take down her post on the genocide in Palestine.

The bulk of El-Sayed’s platform focuses on affordability, championing Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires, and labor protections against the AI industry replacing jobs. Yet his position on Israel has drawn perhaps the most scrutiny from his opponents. 

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Moderate Democrats condemned El-Sayed’s decision to invite influential streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker to a pair of campaign rallies at Michigan universities in the spring, claiming that appearing with the vocal anti-Zionist streamer was insensitive to the Jewish community in the wake of a horrific March shooting at a Michigan synagogue. McMorrow, whose husband and daughter are Jewish, compared Piker to the far-right, neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes in an interview with Jewish Insider, and she repeated that it was insensitive for El-Sayed to stump with Piker after the synagogue attack on CNN last week. 

“I believe in freedom of speech,” she told CNN, “but we have a very diverse population here in Michigan — we have the largest Arab American population in the country, alongside a very significant Jewish population. We need to keep everyone together, not just to win, but to govern and represent this state appropriately.”

El-Sayed has repeatedly condemned the synagogue attack and decried the use of actual antisemitic violence as a cudgel to deflect criticism of Israel’s violence against Palestinians. “He knows our community intimately and cares for it,” said Miller of JVP Action, pointing out that El-Sayed grew up in close proximity to the Jewish community in Michigan, attending bar and bat mitzvahs and Seders and spending time at shul.

“Many candidates, many in the establishment of both parties, treat Palestinian safety, treat Jewish safety like political footballs that they can use to divide our communities in order to score political points,” Miller said. “What I have seen from Dr. El-Sayed, he is not going to play into bad faith smears and attacks.”

El-Sayed had not only weathered the political storm but may have benefited from the added attention. In polls over the past several months, he has consistently led Stevens and McMorrow, though margins remain slim in the tight three-way race. One recent poll by Zenith Research showed El-Sayed outperforming his Democratic opponents in a November general against the likely Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, largely due to El-Sayed’s popularity among progressive and younger voters.

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The June poll also found that a plurality of Michigan voters — 46 percent — showed support for ending all U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, in accordance with El-Sayed’s campaign position. McMorrow says she supports blocking offensive weapons shipments, leaving room for so-called “defensive” systems like the Iron Dome, and Stevens supports continuing the unconditional flow of arms to Israel.

“At a time when too many have tried to pit communities against one another,” El-Sayed said in a statement, “JVP Action has shown that standing against antisemitism and standing up for the lives and dignity of Palestinians are rooted in the same commitment to our shared humanity. I’m deeply humbled and energized by their support and the movement they’ve built.”

The post Abdul El-Sayed Becomes First Senate Candidate Backed by Pro-Palestine Jewish Group appeared first on The Intercept.

Ocasio-Cortez is backing Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson in the 9th Congressional District, which will be a tough win for Democrats after Republicans scrambled to gerrymander it earlier this year thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The district covering parts of Memphis and its suburbs is one of more than a dozen that Republicans have redrawn at President Donald Trump’s demand to ward off what many in the GOP see as the increasingly likely prospect that they lose both congressional chambers to Democrats in November. 

An endorsement from democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez is a coveted stamp of approval for progressive insurgents looking to challenge incumbents or capture open congressional seats. She has endorsed several Democratic primary candidates running for open seats in other states this cycle including Chris Rabb, who won his primary in Pennsylvania; Analilia Mejia, who won in New Jersey; and Junaid Ahmed, who lost his primary in Illinois. But critics raised eyebrows at her decision to stay out of key congressional primaries in New York; she opted instead to endorse a slate of democratic socialist candidates in the state Assembly.

The endorsement is a major boost to Pearson, who is also backed by Justice Democrats, the progressive group that first backed Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 against longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Pearson originally launched his campaign with the intention of ousting two-decade incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen, the last remaining Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation. Cohen dropped out of the race in May after state lawmakers split up his district into three neighboring districts, saying it was “drawn to beat” him. 

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Observers theorized that Ocasio-Cortez’s absence from New York’s congressional primaries reflected a desire not to butt heads with Democratic Party leaders who endorsed against leftist challengers, potentially signaling her plans to run for higher office in a future cycle. Others argued that she stayed out to split her efforts with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to maximize the left’s political currency in a cycle with historic outside spending against their candidates. Mamdani emerged as a kingmaker in Tuesday’s elections, backing three congressional candidates who won their primaries on Tuesday: socialists Clare Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and progressive Brad Lander, and several — but not all — of the New York City DSA’s endorsed candidates.

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said the left’s wins in New York’s House primaries were part of both “a moment” and “a movement” of voters demanding more from the Democratic Party after major losses in 2024. 

Endorsing in the races would have pitted Ocasio-Cortez against her congressional colleagues whose support she might need in a run for higher office, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber in November. She’s made most of her other endorsements this cycle in open seats with no incumbent, including Rabb, Mejia, Ahmed, Adelita Grijalva in Arizona, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, and Sam Forstag in Montana. She endorsed Democratic candidate Randy Villegas against the incumbent Republican, Rep. David Valadao, in California. Her former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, said her decision not to endorse him likely contributed to his loss in an open California primary to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., by fueling attacks from his opponents.  

In New York City, Avila Chevalier and Lander ousted incumbents backed by Jeffries and Democratic leaders: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat and Rep. Dan Goldman. Valdez won her primary in an open seat where retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez had endorsed her preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Velázquez bemoaned Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez against her pick in the months leading up to the race. And even after their candidates lost on Tuesday, Jeffries and other party leaders aired their disappointment in Mamdani’s decision to go against them. 

But in Tennessee, Pearson emerged as the frontrunner when the incumbent dropped out. He’s hoping to tap into voters’ frustrations with both parties by campaigning on economic change for the working class — a message that boosted both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. 

The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wades Into Tennessee Primary, Endorsing Justin J. Pearson appeared first on The Intercept.

When Hakeem Jeffries, who’s positioning himself to be House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber come November, was shown on the screen at an election party full of socialists in Brooklyn Tuesday night, the crowd chanted, “You’re next! You’re next!” Before polls closed on the night that would see the Jeffries-endorsed candidates fall and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s candidates win, the New York congressman told reporters that he and the mayor have “agreed to strongly disagree” and that “a handful of primaries that go in one direction or the other in a given state or two aren’t going to reshape who we are as House Democrats.”

He may be right in the short term; it will take many nights like Tuesday to remake the face of the party. But what’s underway is nothing less than an existential threat to the version of the party that has made Jeffries its standard-bearer. If middle-of-the-road Democrats fail to reckon with this escalating reality and shift to the left, they risk making themselves irrelevant forever — and ceding even more ground to the Republicans as they cut off their nose to spite their face.

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After all three congressional candidates that earned Mamdani’s endorsement — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez — won handily, as did nearly all of the Democratic Socialists of America’s down-ballot slate in New York, Jeffries and his ilk were quick to discount Mamdani’s political project as one that could never take root beyond the New York City meeting halls of Williamsburg and Bushwick. But as other primary races this cycle have shown us, that’s simply not true.

In Maine, Graham Platner delivered a crushing defeat in the Democratic Senate primary to Gov. Janet Mills, whom Chuck Schumer reportedly “aggressively recruited” to enter the race at all (and as we’ve covered, her campaign never really got off the ground or found anything approximating grassroots support). Platner’s victory — amid a spate of scandals over his online posts and alleged mistreatment of women — is now exposing the lie of one of his party’s favorite refrains for disciplining the left: that for all our differences, we must “vote blue no matter who.” 

In the Senate race in Michigan, polling is strong for Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official pushing Medicare for All and centering Israel’s genocide of Palestinians while competing with a both-sides-ing progressive and an outright AIPAC Democrat. Philadelphia nominated Chris Rabb, an outspoken anti-genocide democratic socialist, over the party’s political machine-mined candidate in Philadelphia, and Dr. Adam Hamawy, a 9/11 first responder who saved Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s life as an Army medic but was also tarred with Islamophobic attacks that tried to frame him as a supporter of terrorism, won a crowded 12-way primary in New Jersey earlier this month. (The latter three have all appeared on the trail with Hasan Piker, the popular streamer who’s become a potent political force for left-wing Democrats, much to the dismay of centrists who condemn him as “controversial” and worse.)

If you care to pay attention, there’s an obvious through line with all these candidates: They all stand for actual policy, not just mealy-mouthed “messaging,” and they have been unequivocal in their criticism of Israel. Mainstream Democrats have long lacked that moral clarity as America’s ally in the Middle East committed a genocide in Gaza and dragged the U.S. into an instantly unpopular war with Iran, and they’re being handed the losses they so richly deserve by candidates running to the left. For now, they’ve responded by making overtures of progressive change without meaningful or widespread policy shifts.

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The idea that the party should respond to the will of its voters has become so foreign to the Democrats that Jeffries’s political operation has sneeringly referred to even the notion of a party challenge from the left as coming from “Team Gentrification.” On no issue is the division between voters and the national party as stark as it is when it comes to Israel.

A party that wants to defeat the rise of the far right in this country should look to bring the left in, especially as it continues to win at the ballot box. But instead, establishment Democrats have continued to bash and attempt to marginalize the growing left consensus. “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” former Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison wrote on social media on Tuesday.

But you can only condescend and disregard your party’s supporters for so long until they look for another vision of the future — one that doesn’t include you.

The post The Left Just Keeps Winning. It’s Time for Democrats to Bend the Knee. appeared first on The Intercept.

After primary election night in New York marked a high-water point for the left, a GOP prankster left a bouquet of flowers at the door of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who was widely seen as one of the night’s biggest losers.

“Three losses in one night is tough,” said Mike Marinella, the spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement. “We wanted so-called ‘Leader’ Jeffries to know our thoughts are with him, his candidates, and whatever remains of his influence in the Democrat Party.”

He was referring to three House candidates with the backing of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — two of them card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America — who notched victories against more established opponents.

In New York’s 7th Congressional District, state Assembly Member Claire Valdez handily beat Antonio Reynoso, a progressive backed by outgoing Rep. Nydia Velázquez; in NY-10, former City Comptroller Brad Lander swept away Rep. Dan Goldman; and in the closest and perhaps most surprising result of the night, former Columbia University pro-Palestine student organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier narrowly edged out Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a powerful figure in Manhattan Democratic circles and chair of the Democratic Party’s Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

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In the wake of the stunning sweep, Republicans spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning gloating at the electoral headache they foresee the insurgent strain of left-wing populism causing for the Democratic Party. Or rubbing salt in the wounds of their enemies: President Donald Trump seemed giddy on Wednesday over the loss by Goldman, a centrist pro-Israel Democrat and an old foe from Trump’s first term who worked as lead counsel in his first impeachment inquiry.

“Weak and pathetic Congressman Dan Goldman just lost, BIG!” Trump wrote on social media. “I guess people didn’t like him illegally targeting President TRUMP. In any event, this jerk is finally GONE!”

Not everyone on the right was laughing, however. Christopher Rufo, the messaging wiz who helped build a comprehensive conservative rebuttal to 2020-era “wokeness,” took to X to mutter darkly about therising threat of socialism, a phenomenon he described as the left moving “from ‘woke’ to Third-Worldism.”

“Third-Worldism is a more serious threat to life, liberty, and property,” Rufo wrote.

Trump, too, took a moment to be serious and call the candidates “communists,” making an impassioned pledge: “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” he wrote Wednesday.

The victories of all three left-wing congressional candidates appeared to confirm a staying power for Mamdani’s popularity and power six months into his term in office, with numerous commentators declaring him a kingmaker. But Republicans predicted his profile is just as high at a national level — and not in a way that some Democrats would like.

“Republicans need a national boogeyman,” said one GOP operative in the House. “I think it’s going to be very difficult for your mainstream Democrat in a toss-up district to separate themselves from Mamdani and those kinds of socialist insurgents who are running in these primaries. And our view is that they are just unelectable in a swing district where you’re trying to win voters in the middle.”

Corbin Trent, a former aide to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said he thought that GOP strategy was destined to backfire. 

“These ideas that [democratic socialists are] lifting up again are very divisive, but I think we’re misinterpreting who they’re divisive with,” Trent told The Intercept Wednesday. “They’re divisive with people that are going to D.C. dinners, they’re divisive to people at fundraisers, they’re divisive to people in Beltway, and they’re certainly divisive among the big donor class. But I think what [Republicans are] going to be surprised by is how they’re not divisive among the electorate, among the 80 percent of Americans that have been struggling to understand how it is they live in the richest nation in history — and yet they can barely scrape by.” 

In the attacks, Trent saw a potential for the class-based politics of affordability championed by the Democratic Socialists of America slate in New York, along with other insurgent primary winners like Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner, who was so successful in winning over supporters that his establishment-backed opponent stopped campaigning weeks before the primary.

That sense of hope did not appear to be shared by centrist Democrats, who in the wake of the political upset in New York appeared every bit as gloomy as the GOP was gloating. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., took to Fox News Tuesday night to denounce the pro-Palestine bent of the DSA winners in New York, while Jeffries told Spectrum News NY1 that he was more focused on swing states than on his own backyard.

“We’re not in the business of winning Democratic primaries and state seats that are going to be blue regardless of who wins a primary,” he said. “In order for us to be able to take back control of the House of Representatives, we got to flip seats in tough areas.”

On Wednesday, when The Intercept sought comment from Jeffries, a reporter found him busy, standing shoulder to shoulder in the U.S. Capitol with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., unveiling a giant congressional time capsule for the country’s 250th birthday.

The post The Left Is Unstoppable, According to Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.