Last November, Daniel Biss, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Illinois, was bracing for the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group to insert itself into his race. A grandson of Holocaust survivors who later settled in Israel, he describes himself as both a supporter of the Jewish state and a “fierce critic” of its current government.
So Mr. Biss and his team wanted to know just how popular — or unpopular — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was in a district with a long tradition of Jewish representation.
The results were stark.
Three times more Democratic voters there viewed AIPAC unfavorably than favorably, 51 percent to 17 percent, according to an internal campaign survey shared with The New York Times. It was what Mr. Biss needed to make a key decision that helped him clinch a primary win on Tuesday in Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District: He would make AIPAC — and the millions of dollars it wound up pouring into the race through secretive super PACs — a central character, if not a villain, in the campaign.
“We worked hard to tell the voters what was going on,” Mr. Biss, the mayor of Evanston, Ill., said in an interview on Tuesday shortly after his race was called.
AIPAC spent more than $20 million through a network of affiliates in four congressional primaries in Illinois on Tuesday, but the results were mixed: Two AIPAC-backed candidates won, and two lost.
The organization has steadfastly fought to retain its influence but has struggled to do so as public opinion shifts on Israel and the group faces an emboldened left. Last month, in a special election primary in New Jersey, the group’s spending inadvertently helped advance a pro-Palestinian progressive.
In Illinois, its strategy zigged and zagged. It initially opposed Mr. Biss in favor of a more moderate state senator, and then pivoted when a more strident anti-Israel candidate appeared to be surging.
Now, the fight is expected to expand to primaries across the country, including House contests in California and New York and a Senate race in Michigan. Both sides — AIPAC and the campaigns it targets — are likely to take their cues from what happened in the Ninth District, which attracted the most cash, the most attention and the most controversy.
“The candidate they spent the most money attacking is me, and I won,” Mr. Biss said. “The district they spent the most money in is this, and they lost. And they lost because the voters knew who was spending the money and why. I think there’s a really important message in that, that the whole country should hear.”
AIPAC’s super PAC entered the 2026 midterms with a war chest of nearly $100 million and grand plans to spend it sending allies to Congress and defeating its foes.
In the last three elections, the group has deployed a super PAC that, in 2024 alone, spent $23 million to oust two Democratic lawmakers seen as anti-Israel: Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Millions more have been spent for allies.
For decades, AIPAC relied on steadfast bipartisan support in Washington. But Democrats became more vocally critical in the last decade as Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, forged a deep alliance with Republicans.
Patrick Dorton, a spokesman for AIPAC’s official super PAC, the United Democracy Project, said that AIPAC had scored key victories in Illinois, helping to nominate allies in Melissa Bean, a former House member, and Donna Miller, a Cook County commissioner, while the fiercest critics of Israel were defeated.
“The anti-Israel candidates who made the U.S.-Israel alliance the centerpiece of their campaigns all failed miserably,” he said.
AIPAC entered 2026 at a crossroads politically.
Democratic voters have increasingly soured on supporting Israel since the war in Gaza began. Progressives have been running in open opposition to some of Israel’s policies and have scored significant victories at the polls, including Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York City, home to the country’s largest Jewish population. Several potential Democratic presidential contenders have said they will not accept money from AIPAC, including Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
On Capitol Hill, the number of Democratic lawmakers pushing for new restrictions on military aid for Israel has also grown. Despite opposition from AIPAC, a majority of Senate Democrats voted last year to block certain weapons sales to Israel.
“I am deeply concerned about the velocity and the direction that the party is moving in,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey and a prominent ally of Israel. He said he was troubled by recent comments from some party leaders, including Mr. Newsom, who recently compared Israel to an “apartheid state.” “It’s one thing if it is a few bad actors and another if it spreads like a cancer.”
AIPAC’s ability to raise and willingness to spend huge sums of money remains a daunting political threat. But some on the left, including Mr. Biss, see at least some opportunity in opposition from AIPAC — the chance to drive liberals to the polls by turning the group into a boogeyman.
“They just blew 20 percent of their $100 million in one city and came up with two candidates, barely,” said Representative Greg Casar of Texas, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which backed Mr. Biss but saw its candidates lose to AIPAC-backed rivals in two other races.
Making voters aware of who pays for the ads blanketing their screens is a distinct political challenge. Notably, in Illinois, AIPAC was unable to advance its preferred candidate in the two congressional districts where a majority of adults hold college degrees.
Nowhere were AIPAC’s political contortions more complex than in the Ninth District, a strip in the northern Chicago suburbs that has been represented by a Jewish Democrat for decades.
A super PAC with no disclosed links to AIPAC, Elect Chicago Women, started spending $4.4 million in early February to promote Laura Fine, a Democratic state senator who supported military aid to Israel without restrictions. (Mr. Biss has said there should be conditions put on aid.)
Records show the group had been formed just days earlier. Its website features a single page. Its funding came so late in the cycle that it has not disclosed any donors. Its link to AIPAC became clear only when it began using vendors that overlapped with other AIPAC-affiliated groups.
In late February, the committee began to attack Mr. Biss, federal records show, unleashing $1.4 million over just two weeks starting on Feb. 21.
“They’re putting in all this money because they want to buy the seat for someone who’s going to offer a blank check of military aid for Israel,” Mr. Biss said in an interview on Tuesday. “And they’re hiding it because they know that you won’t like that if you hear it.”
Less than a week later, a group with another anodyne name, Chicago Progressive Partnership, began attacking Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive social media influencer also running in the district. Ms. Abughazaleh was fiercely critical of Israel, calling its war in Gaza a genocide. Again, the PAC shared vendors with other AIPAC affiliates.
One more twist came in the final week, when the second group spent more than $100,000 hailing the left-wing credentials of a long-shot candidate, Bushra Amiwala, an apparent effort to siphon votes from Ms. Abughazaleh.
Throughout, AIPAC declined to either confirm or deny it was behind the deluge.
That changed when the voting was over. On Tuesday night, after the results were in, AIPAC’s social media account said it had been “proud” to help defeat Ms. Abughazaleh and praised voters for rejecting both her and Ms. Amiwala, even though the group had just funded $100,000 in ads technically supporting Ms. Amiwala.
But Mr. Casar, the congressman from Texas, said there was no greater evidence of AIPAC’s diminished standing than its decision not only to shroud its involvement in Illinois but to adopt the language of progressives to attack candidates from the left.
“We’re just one cycle away from AIPAC running ads in favor of their candidates by saying that person rejects AIPAC,” Mr. Casar said. “It shows just how toxic AIPAC has become to Democratic voters.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street, which bills itself as a progressive and pro-Israel counterweight to AIPAC, said Mr. Biss’s win represented a remarkable shift in the Democratic Party.
“It’s nearly impossible to run in today’s Democratic Party as an old-school AIPAC supporter and assume it won’t be an issue,” he said. “The politics have shifted that fast. If Democrats win the next majority, it’s going to be the most skeptical Congress AIPAC has ever faced.”
Mr. Dorton disagreed. AIPAC has stood by its adage that “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics.” As for the fact that its affiliates ran ads on issues other than Israel, he said that smart campaigns focused “on issues that voters most care about” in order to win.
But Mr. Dorton did acknowledge that AIPAC had shifted its strategy after a special election in New Jersey in February, when a pro-Palestinian progressive won the Democratic nomination over a more moderate Democrat that AIPAC had opposed.
Now, he said, the organization is now focused chiefly on defeating what he called future potential “squad” members — hard-line opponents of Israel — and that it succeeded on that count in Illinois.
Progressives have sought to use that moment to turn even centrists in the party against AIPAC.
“I hope Dems begin to see that moderate or progressive, AIPAC is not our friend,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wrote on X last month.
As for the shifting targets in Illinois, Mr. Dorton said that was simply realpolitik.
“We have our differences with Daniel Biss,” he said. “But at the end of the day, he is a Zionist.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
The post What One Key Loss in Illinois Signals for Pro-Israel Lobby in Midterms appeared first on New York Times.
