In June, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) lost to George Latimer in the most expensive primary in the history of the House of Representatives. Latimer was backed extensively by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). While many factors—like a recent redistricting—affected the race, the contest was viewed widely as an indication of the power of AIPAC to help oust progressives. (Bowman had, notably, called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide.)
But to say Bowman lost because of his views on Israel misses the way money works. AIPAC and other ads targeted Bowman on a myriad of issues. A key talking point, repeated consistently, was that Bowman did not vote for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. “Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda,” explained one $2.8 million spot, “and refuses to compromise with President Biden.”
In this election cycle, the attack has become a common theme. AIPAC and its subsidiary the United Democracy Project (UDP) have targeted progressive members of Congress who have vocally opposed Israel’s 10-month war in Gaza. But their line of attack has often not been about foreign policy but, instead, that the leftists did not toe the Democratic line.
Tomorrow, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) will go up against St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell, who entered the race almost immediately after Bush called for a ceasefire in Gaza—and, in doing so, has accessed massive ad funding from those same PACs that funded Latimer.
The same dynamic is at play in the race: Bell’s ads have repeatedly said Bush did not vote for the infrastructure bill.
That’s true—but also misses key context.
President Joe Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized $1.2 trillion in federal spending to modernize America’s roads and bridges, among other things. It was a landmark achievement. But it came as a compromise—excluding provisions around human infrastructure needs, like child care. Bush had fought for the wider agenda as part of Biden’s original goal to Build Back Better.
When Build Back Better was first introduced, it was budgeted at about $3.5 trillion. The House passed a version of the bill, only to be thwarted by Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), who at the time had de facto veto power. Eventually, through a lot of negotiations (and exhausting back and forth), Biden and Congress passed two bills: the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
During that process, to push for as many components of Build Back Better as possible, members of the progressive caucus withheld their votes from the infrastructure bill.
Bush and Bowman, alongside three other progressives, kept pushing to pass a fuller version that would give families a $3,600 annual Child Tax Credit, establish a guaranteed free pre-K program, increase housing investments, supply tax-funded elder care, incentivize green energy development, and expand Medicare and Medicaid. At the time, Bush said this more robust plan would have benefited low-income residents of her district, and people like herself—a Black single mother who spent time living in her car.
“St. Louis deserves the president’s entire agenda,” Bush said at the time. “So that means both the bipartisan infrastructure package and the Build Back Better Act.” The Build Back Better Act included $1.75 trillion in child care and climate readiness investment; the infrastructure package did not. (Some elements of Build Back Better did make it into the Inflation Reduction Act.)
Bush’s position that both bills needed to pass was not particularly radical. Joe Biden himself initially said that: “If this is the only one that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.”
Everyone seemed to understand the dynamics at play in the aftermath. Bush handily won reelection in 2022 with about 70 percent of the vote in her district. Her “no” vote on the infrastructure bill was not brought up as loudly at any point during that election. Now, though, it’s near-impossible to turn on the television in Bush’s district without seeing a portrayal of Bush as anti-union, anti-infrastructure, anti–St. Louis.
“What I find really disheartening about that is, before she took that vote, she did a district Zoom meeting,” Megan Green, president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and a staunch Bush supporter, remembers. “There were labor leaders on the call, there were a lot of elected officials on the call, and she said, I just want to talk through what we’re doing and why I’m taking this vote this way.”
“To kind of turn around and use that against her is really disappointing,” Green continued.
Latimer’s campaign—well-subsidized by PACs like AIPAC and Fairshake, a cryptocurrency lobby group—deployed that same playbook earlier this summer.
Like Bell in his race against Bush, Latimer’s campaign dug up Bowman’s “no” vote on the infrastructure bill and presented him as an incorrigible obstructionist. But that’s not an accurate account of what happened back in 2021, as Bowman explained at the time.
“While one is the hard infrastructure bill—roads, bridges, tunnels and construction jobs; great, we need that. We also need child care. We also need universal pre-K. We need to lower drug prices. We need paid family leave,” Bowman said. “The plan was to pass both together, and when we decided not to do that, I decided to vote no on that bill.”
Latimer defeated Bowman by 17 percentage points.
Don Samuels, who will be up against Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in an August 13 primary, is using a note-for-note identical strategy in his first advertisement of the campaign.
It has been three years since the infrastructure bill vote, and the Build Back Better Act still hasn’t been passed.
Bowman lost, and Bush, tomorrow, runs the risk of being ousted too.