Blinded by AIPAC

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 21, 2026

 

The Washington Post eventually came to its senses, but not before all the wrong people saw how it characterized the race to replace former Representative Eric Swalwell in California: “AIPAC has a new target to exert influence over Democrats.”

 

A far more neutral headline subsequently took its place, but the original is instructive. The actual candidates in the race were, to the reporters and editors who crafted it, immaterial. They weren’t even rendered one-dimensional caricatures, players in the political press’s solipsistic morality play. They were erased. So, too, were the voters of California’s 14th district. In their place was a contest of power between one lobby — and a mob boss of a lobby, at that — and the Democratic Party, a unified entity beset by malign outside forces.

 

You could be forgiven for concluding that the victor in this race, Aisha Wahab, ran against a Republican in the contest to finish out Swalwell’s term. She did not. Her “moderate opponent,” Melissa Hernandez, a onetime transit official in San Francisco, seems to have earned the label only because she presented herself as tougher on crime than her opponent. But the Post’s coverage of this race (like many other outlets) reads like coverage of a far-off conflict in which the proxy forces doing the actual fighting are treated as mere pawns in a greater geostrategic game.

 

“Support from AIPAC has been used as a cudgel against Democratic candidates,” the Post wrote, once again, of a Democrat-on-Democrat race. Indeed, some outlets even seemed to regard the very concept of outside spending in this election as untoward.

 

The Wahab campaign “was on track for a double-digit win,” the San Francisco Chronicle observed. “Then came the AIPAC money.” As if the Americans who engaged in constitutionally protected political speech played a spoiler role by depriving Wahab of the ability to run up the score.

 

But the Chronicle’s piece does contain a useful admission from an unlikely source, the national political director for the far-left PAC Our Revolution, Robert Dempsey. “This is the establishment just trying to assert their control over this district and have another vote in Congress to vote against Medicare for All and to continue to pad their pockets,” he said of AIPAC’s spending on Hernandez’s behalf.

 

Which is to say that AIPAC is not and, really, never was a pro-GOP organization. “Since the 1990 election cycle — the earliest one recorded by the Center for Responsive Politics — contributions by pro-Israel interests have favored Democrats,” Open Secrets reported a decade ago. It was only after 2023 (did something happen?) that AIPAC’s PAC, which it only registered in December 2021, threw its weight behind more Republicans than Democrats. As late as the 2022 cycle, AIPAC backed both Democrats and Republicans evenly. Indeed, its primary project in that midterm year was to drive the Republicans who objected to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory out of office. For the Americans who contribute to AIPAC, things have changed a lot in the last few years.

 

If AIPAC’s spending in this race occupies a prohibitive amount of real estate in reporters’ heads, the outside spending that benefited Wahab does not. No one seems to care about the contributions to her campaign from controversial outfits like the Teamsters Union, the Service Employees International Union, or the Medicare for All PAC. To observe any consistency here would detract from the mania that media and Democrats are cultivating over AIPAC’s very existence.

 

Indeed, it doesn’t even really seem to be about AIPAC per se. As Dave Weigel helpfully flagged this week, one New Hampshire Democrat is attacking her opponent not for her affiliations with AIPAC but “AIPAC donors,” which is to say . . . well, you know what she’s trying to say. We all do.