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democratic primary
Bowman’s Loss Reveals the Dangers of Unregulated ‘Dark Money’ Funds in Primaries
If left unchecked, America’s democracy, already distorted by big money, will be swamped and destroyed by billionaires who will make elections their game in which to manipulate voters at will.
Jul 02, 2024
Last week, New York Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman was defeated in his bid for a third term in Congress. In describing the outcome, newspaper headlines and media analysts only scratched the surface of why and how this happened and the consequences this contest would have on future elections.
For their part, pro-Israel groups, while acknowledging that they spent a combined $25 million dollars to defeat Bowman, tried to play it two ways. On the one hand, they gloated that their involvement was decisive proof that “being pro-Israel was good policy and good politics.” Like gangsters of old they wanted to send a message of fear to other candidates that “if you cross us, we’ll get you too.” On the other hand, they attempted to downplay their role suggesting that Bowman’s loss was due to his “radicalism,” with voters demonstrating their preference for the more “centrist” candidate, negatively comparing Bowman’s passion with the staider demeanor of his opponent, County Executive George Latimer.
The lessons the media deduced from all of this were that pro-Israel groups indeed won, progressives lost, and that supporting Palestinian rights was an electorally dangerous proposition. This, however, ignored the deeper story that played out in this election.
If the party doesn’t address this issue, they may lose a sufficient number of their base who are resentful of the party establishment’s failure to both stop the genocide in Gaza and to defend progressive champions like Jamaal Bowman.
First and foremost, it was about the huge amounts of money spent, why and how it was used, and the impact it had on the contest. The $25 million pro-Israel groups spent to defeat Bowman was by far the most ever expended in a congressional primary, used mainly for negative advertising and direct mail attacks smearing Bowman’s character and criticizing his style. Virtually no mention of Israel was made in these ads.
During some points in the campaign, voters were nightly subjected to more than a half-dozen of these attack ads. The impression created was that Bowman was a flawed individual and an unworthy candidate. One observer told me that “if Jamaal’s mother had stayed at home watching this negative onslaught, she wouldn’t have voted for her son either.” That’s the role of negative ads: to damage the candidates being attacked so that they are defined as so flawed that their supporters are discouraged from voting on Election Day. This tactic is simply an expensive form of voter suppression.
In reality, Latimer outpaced Bowman in “radicalism” by making outrageous, racially tinged comments that could have been used against him. But Bowman didn’t have $25 million to define and destroy Latimer’s character. And so, the impression was created that Bowman was a loose cannon and Latimer was the responsible candidate. To be sure, racism played a role in all of this as the contest became “the angry, frightening young black man versus the calm, thoughtful older white guy.”
How the money was used is one thing, but why it was raised is something else to consider. Pro-Israel groups are running scared. They are losing the public debate over policy—especially among Democrats. Most Democrats are deeply opposed to Israeli policies in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian lands. Majorities want a cease-fire and an end to settlements. And they want to stop further arms shipments to Israel.
Knowing this, pro-Israel groups never make their campaigns a referendum on Israel. Instead, they focus their attention on the character of their opponents. When they win, they claim that it was a victory for Israel and support for its policies, when it most decidedly isn’t and never was.
There was another factor in this contest that was largely ignored by commentators. Bowman’s congressional district had been redistricted last year (by a statewide committee that included Latimer). The new district removed many of the areas that had been more favorable to Bowman and included new areas that were more favorable to Latimer. This made Bowman vulnerable, providing pro-Israel groups with the opportunity to play in this race and make it look like they won on the merits.
Historically this is how they’ve done their work—only going after vulnerable candidates. It’s why they left alone other equally strong pro-Palestinian, but less vulnerable, members of Congress. It’s a cowardly approach, to be sure, but it gives them bragging rights they can use to cower others into thinking they are invincible.
Examining who the donors to these pro-Israel campaigns were, we find that while they are largely supporters of Israel, many of the very large contributors are billionaire Republicans who take great pleasure in meddling in a Democratic primary helping to defeat progressive candidates. The use of unregulated “dark money” that is increasingly playing a role in primaries ought to set off alarms. Twice I tried and failed to get the Democratic Party to ban such “dark money” funds. My warning then was that if this tactic can be used by pro-Israel groups now, why won’t other powerful lobbies make use of this approach in the future. If left unchecked, America’s democracy, already distorted by big money, will be swamped and destroyed by billionaires who will make elections their game in which to manipulate voters at will.
One final observation for Democrats: While Bowman was defeated, support for Palestinian rights continues to grow. And the resentment of voters who favored Bowman and other targeted members of Congress will also continue to grow. These are Democratic voters that U.S. President Joseph Biden will need to win in November. If the party doesn’t address this issue, they may lose a sufficient number of their base who are resentful of the party establishment’s failure to both stop the genocide in Gaza and to defend progressive champions like Jamaal Bowman. Seen in this light, “Israel’s win” in the Bowman contest may negatively impact Democrats’ chances for victory in November.
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Biden Intervention in Democratic Primaries Is a Show of Weakness
Having his way with the Democratic National Committee is a slam dunk because Biden supplies the ball, hires the referees, owns the nets, and controls the concession stands.
Jan 31, 2023
When the Democratic National Committee convenes its winter meeting on Thursday in Philadelphia, a key agenda item will be rubber-stamping Joe Biden’s manipulation of next year’s presidential primaries. There’ll be speeches galore, including one by Biden as a prelude to his expected announcement that he’ll seek a second term. The gathering will exude confidence, at least in public. But if Biden were truly confident that Democratic voters want him to be the 2024 nominee, he wouldn’t have intervened in the DNC’s scheduling of early primaries.
New polling underscores why Biden is so eager to bump New Hampshire from the first-in-the-nation spot that it has held for more than 100 years. In the state, “two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election,” the UNH Survey Center found. “Biden is statistically tied with several 2020 rivals, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, all of whom are more personally popular than Biden among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.”
Dismal as Biden’s showing was in the new poll, it was a step up from his actual vote total in New Hampshire’s 2020 primary, when he came in fifth with 8 percent of the vote. No wonder Biden doesn’t want the state to go first and potentially set primary dominoes falling against him.
Keen to reduce the chances of a major primary challenge next year, Biden sent a letter to the DNC in early December insisting on a new schedule -- demoting New Hampshire to a second spot, alongside Nevada, while giving the leadoff slot to South Carolina. Democratic Party energy and funds will be squandered in that deep-red state, which is about as likely to give its electoral votes to the 2024 Democratic ticket as Ron DeSantis is likely to donate the money in his campaign coffers to the Movement for Black Lives.
But South Carolina, the state with the lowest rate of unionization in the country, offers the singular virtue of having rescued Biden’s presidential hopes with its 2020 primary. As the Associated Press explained last week, Biden is “seeking to reward South Carolina, where nearly 27 percent of the population is Black, after a decisive win there revived his 2020 presidential campaign following losses it suffered in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.”
The president’s rationalization for putting South Carolina first is diversity. Yet the neighboring purple state of Georgia, which has an activist Democratic base, is more racially diverse -- and it’s a crucial swing state, where the party’s general-election prospects would benefit from being the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
Biden’s intervention has created a long-term political mess for Democrats in New Hampshire, where he’s now less popular than ever due to undermining the state’s first-primary status. Even New Hampshire’s normally compliant Democratic senators and representatives in Congress have been denouncing the move. Biden’s maneuver has boosted the chances that the Democratic ticket will lose the state’s four electoral votes this time around.
But Biden having his way with the Democratic National Committee is a slam dunk because he supplies the ball, hires the referees, owns the nets and controls the concession stands. While cowed DNC members dribble at his behest, substantial concerns will echo outside the range of officials’ whistles.
As a Don’t Run Joe full-page ad in The Hill newspaper pointed out last week (full disclosure: I helped write it), “There are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races.”
But so far, like the Democrats in Congress, members of the DNC have indicated much more concern about avoiding the ire of the Biden White House than avoiding the probable grim outcome of a Biden ’24 campaign. By the time the DNC adjourns on Saturday, news reports will be filled with on-the-record statements from members lauding Biden’s leadership with next year’s elections on the horizon. Conformity prevails.
But warning signs are profuse. Among the latest are results of a YouGov poll released days ago: “Just 34 percent of Americans describe Biden as honest and trustworthy -- a new low for his presidency. That's an 8-point drop from when this question was last asked in December 2022, prior to the public revelation that classified documents had been found in Biden's possession.”
This is the electoral horse that Democrats are supposed to be riding into battle against the extremist Republican Party next year. The national Democratic Party is locked into operating at the whim of a president now believed to be “honest and trustworthy” by only one-third of U.S. adults.
How all this will play out at the DNC meeting is hardly a mystery. Yet many members surely know that Biden is likely to be a weak candidate if he goes ahead with proclaimed plans to run for re-election. The hope is that the GOP will defeat itself as an extremist party in disarray. But it would be irresponsible to gamble on such a scenario by rolling dice loaded with Biden.
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Biden, DNC Urged to Make Diverse Swing State--Not South Carolina--First Primary Contest
"Our first priority must be to select states early in the process that help produce the strongest Democratic nominee consistent with our working-class values and agenda," says a new petition from More Perfect Union.
Dec 08, 2022
Progressive criticism of President Joe Biden's move to make South Carolina the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary was given a boost Wednesday when More Perfect Union launched a petition imploring the Democratic National Committee to pick a diverse swing state instead.
"If we really want to pick a diverse primary electorate, look to South Carolina's neighbor to the north--an actual battleground state."
Biden's proposal to raise South Carolina to the first spot on the party's presidential primary calendar was approved by the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee last Friday but is still months away from receiving a green light from the entire panel. If Biden's plan is rubber-stamped by the full DNC, voters in New Hampshire--currently home to the nation's first primary contest following the Iowa caucuses--would be second in line, casting ballots on the same day as their counterparts in Nevada.
In its petition, More Perfect Union applauded other changes sought by Biden, including his proposed elevation of Nevada, Georgia, and Michigan--three general election battleground states that were among the 10 closest races in his 2020 victory over then-President Donald Trump.
The biggest flaw in the president's plan is that he "chose South Carolina to go first and ahead of all those battleground states," said the progressive media outlet. "Biden's proposal to elevate South Carolina to the front gives it incredible power to shape the race."
Doing so would be problematic, More Perfect Union contended, because:
South Carolina is not a battleground state: Donald Trump carried it by double digits in 2020. It is way more ideologically and culturally conservative than the Democratic Party and the rest of the nation. It's also one of the fiercest anti-union, anti-labor states in the country. In fact, South Carolina is already first in the nation with the terrible distinction of being the lowest-density union state in America.
If Democrats are serious about winning the working-class vote, South Carolina isn't the state to get it done.
While Biden has portrayed his preferred reshuffling of the Democratic Party's presidential primary calendar as an attempt to foreground voters of color, the progressive advocacy group RootsAction recently characterized the president's move as "an inappropriate, self-serving intervention dressed up in noble rhetoric."
Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign manager Jeff Weaver, meanwhile, warned Thursday in The Nation that "the schedule put forward by the White House empirically and dramatically diminishes the influence of Latinos on the Democratic presidential nominating process."
"In doing so, this proposed gerrymander will give Republicans more fodder for convincing Latino voters that the Democratic Party is not a home for them," Weaver argued. "Given the erosion of Democratic Party support among the fastest-growing segment of the American population, that's a problem."
Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign manager and current adviser Faiz Shakir--the founder of More Perfect Union and a DNC delegate--has vowed to reject Biden's effort to promote South Carolina, which he sees as a transparent attempt by the White House to reward Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) for his influential endorsement in the last presidential contest.
While Shakir agrees that Iowa should no longer go first, he argued in a New York Timesopinion piece published Monday that pushing South Carolina, a GOP stronghold, to the front of the line "would be comical if it weren't tragic."
"We all know why South Carolina got the nod," wrote Shakir. "President Biden, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and many of his top supporters were buoyed by their campaign's comeback in February 2020 when the state delivered Mr. Biden his first victory of the season--and a big one at that."
"The media attention from that victory, and the consolidation of the Democratic field that it yielded, helped catapult him to winning a majority of the following Super Tuesday states," Shakir continued. "And when Covid spread through the nation shortly after, the rest of the primary contests were effectively quarantined, and Mr. Biden iced his victory. None of that story is a reason to put South Carolina first, however."
Soon after the piece was published, DNC Chair Jamie Harrison appeared to baselessly accuse Shakir of disrespecting Black voters. In an ensuing interview with Politico, Shakir said that "it's a very insulting approach to suggest that somehow we don't care about Black voters because we think South Carolina shouldn't go first."
In his essay, Shakir wrote that "if we really want to pick a diverse primary electorate, look to South Carolina's neighbor to the north--an actual battleground state."
More Perfect Union's petition also advocates for prioritizing racially diverse swing states: "As one of the strongest voting blocks in the Democratic coalition, it is essential Black voters get their say early and often throughout the nominating process. Yet Georgia has significantly more Black voters than South Carolina. So do Florida and North Carolina, two more battleground states. In fact, 14 states have larger Black populations than South Carolina."
"Our first priority must be to select states early in the process that help produce the strongest Democratic nominee consistent with our working-class values and agenda," says the petition. "South Carolina isn't even trending in any way toward the Democratic Party."
"Just two years ago, Jaime Harrison--now the chair of the Democratic National Committee--spent the eye-popping sum of $130 million to try to defeat [Republican] Sen. Lindsey Graham. After out-raising and outspending Mr. Graham, Mr. Harrison still lost the 2020 Senate race decisively," the petition adds. "Let's not compel all other Democratic campaigns to waste more money that could be better spent building coalitions in states Democrats need to win."
Adolph Reed Jr., professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an organizer with the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute's Medicare for All campaign in South Carolina, told Common Dreams that the notion that the South Carolina primary serves as corporate Democrats' so-called "firewall" has "only worked that way because Democratic elites have interpreted it that way when it's been in their interest to do so and because the news media have colluded with them in that view."
"It's just as important to note that South Carolina is a state no Democrat is going to win in November," said Reed, "and that Black voters in South Carolina are not identical to Black voters in Michigan, Illinois, or New York, that there's no such thing as 'the Black vote,' and that South Carolina Black voters' inclinations are shaped significantly by political dynamics within the state as are those of those voters in other states."
Shakir, for his part, called it a "special honor" to go first. "The state chosen for the task is rewarded in myriad ways. Iowa's economy has benefited greatly over the years from the high level of campaign spending and travel. Aware of the process' economic power, many of our Democratic campaigns employed union-friendly hotels, restaurants, and vendors when we were active in Iowa. Good luck finding that in South Carolina."
\u201cSouth Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the country. Democrats haven\u2019t won it in a presidential election since 1976. Actually shameful how much priority personal favors take over party wellbeing under Biden, who\u2019s willing to let Clyburn run this thing into the ground.\u201d— Alex Sammon (@Alex Sammon) 1670016701
As RootsAction's Don't Run Joe campaign--an effort to dissuade the incumbent from seeking reelection in 2024--noted last week in a statement:
Biden received a mere 8% of the vote in the 2020 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, finishing fifth. Now he wants to dislodge New Hampshire from its long-standing first-in-the-nation primary role. On the other hand, Biden was the big winner of the South Carolina primary in 2020. Now he wants that state to go first.
Biden's decision to intrude into the Democratic National Committee's painstaking process for setting the 2024 presidential primary schedule appears to be a sign of anxiety in the White House about potential obstacles to his winning renomination. The president has indicated repeatedly that he plans to run again, so how ethical would it be for the DNC to allow a contestant to determine key rules of the game before the race begins?
South Carolina is a state that Biden obviously sees as vital to a renomination bid, but--unlike all other states under consideration for early primaries--it is not a battleground state. Everyone knows that the Democratic ticket will not win the deep-red state of South Carolina in 2024. Georgia, on the other hand, is one of the most important battleground states, and is more racially diverse than South Carolina. If Biden's proposal to supplant the New Hampshire primary as first-in-the-nation were truly about diversity and not about improving his own prospects for renomination, he would be promoting a state other than South Carolina to be first.
The group called on Biden to stop trying "to manipulate the Democratic primary schedule for his own narrow political purposes."
That message is echoed in More Perfect Union's petition, which tells Biden and the DNC: "Don't make South Carolina the first state to vote in the 2024 Democratic primary. Make diverse, battleground states that Democrats need to win in the general election, like Georgia, Nevada, and Michigan, first instead."
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