The political arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee funneled over $5 million to other groups as part of its work to defeat Illinois Democrats critical of Israel in House primaries held Tuesday, filings made public late Friday show. The secretive giving is the latest example of how outside groups are obscuring their spending in competitive campaigns.
The contributions, which didn’t have to be disclosed until after Election Day under federal campaign finance regulations, funded part of a record-breaking total of outside spending: $225 million has been spent to influence midterm elections so far, according to a Post analysis of federal election data. Special interest groups, including AIPAC, have sometimes tried to veil their spending by using affiliated organizations that appear unrelated to the parent organization’s stated policy goals.
AIPAC, a pro-Israel group that has grown increasingly unpopular with Democratic primary voters, cloaked its spending in a trio of innocuously named organizations — Chicago Progressive Partnership, Affordable Chicago Now and Elect Chicago Women — and ran ads that attacked candidates, including Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, for a variety of reasons other than his position on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
“It’s awful for politics,” said Jim Kessler, an executive at Third Way, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization. The use of shell super PACs, he added, shows these groups know “what you’re peddling is not popular with voters.”
The groups behind the spending argue they are using legal tools to further their goals and hinted they will do so in future primaries. Critics argue that the masking is underhanded, noting that the practice suggests the groups know their policy objectives are unpopular, or they would otherwise be willing to reveal the spending before the races are decided.
“They know that if you knew the truth about what was happening, you would hate it, so they’re hiding it on purpose,” said Biss, a Jewish liberal who supports recognizing a Palestinian state. Biss, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, won a crowded primary on Tuesday to replace U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky in Chicago’s northern suburbs, defeating AIPAC’s preferred candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine, and Palestinian American Kat Abughazaleh, a critic of Israel and the war in Gaza.
Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, defended the group’s strategy on Friday, calling the results in Illinois “a victory” for their movement. He said that the group would continue to “use a number of different tactics to make sure that pro-Israel Democrats make their voices heard” and confirmed that the group supported Chicago Progressive Partnership, Affordable Chicago Now and Elect Chicago Women.
In addition to gifts from United Democracy Project, Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago reported a combined $8.7 million in gifts from individual donors, almost all of whom had also given to AIPAC or UDP in the past year. Top contributors included investor Anthony Davis, who gave $2 million across the groups; hedge fund manager Michael Sacks, who gave $1.2 million; and Blair Frank, an investment banker, who gave $1 million. (Chicago Progressive Partnership is not required to disclose its donors for another month.)
“We are going to use all the pro-democracy arrows in the toolbox to make sure that we get the largest bipartisan pro-Israel majority in Congress,” Dorton said. “And by any measure, we have a more pro-Israel delegation in Chicago … than we did before the primary. That is success.”
A February Gallup poll found 65 percent of Democrats surveyed sympathize with Palestinians in the ongoing conflict. Seventeen percent sympathize with Israel.
Outside groups have already spent over $225 million trying to influence the 2026 congressional elections — the most ever at this point in the cycle, and over $75 million more than a record spending total reached in 2024.
Super PACs poured more than $57 million into Illinois races, including two that ranked among the top 10 House primaries targeted with the most outside spending ever.
Elect Chicago Women, the AIPAC-funded group, hit Biss in television ads on everything from his leadership as mayor to his connections to a super PAC, but not his positions on Israel. Biss made AIPAC a central part of his campaign, attempting to educate voters on what the group was doing to obscure their spending against him.
“The cloak-and-dagger aspect of it, the hiding the ball, and the dishonesty were important because it really showed people that even the people who were putting out these messages understood they had something to hide,” Biss recalled.
Three major outside interests spent money on the Illinois races: pro-Israel, pro-cryptocurrency and pro-artifical intelligence factions. AIPAC’s primary goal is to elect candidates who steadfastly support Israel, while the crypto and AI factions largely back candidates who support friendly regulatory policy for the industries. All three spent to back Democratic former congresswoman Melissa Bean in her primary, which she won by about 3,500 votes, or about five percentage points.
“People still remembered me,” Bean, who represented the district from 2005 to 2011, told The Washington Post after her victory. “What I heard from so many people was, we are so glad you’re back, we need a grown-up in the room to take on this president, and we want you to hit the ground running.”
Bean declined to speculate on the role that outside spending played in her favor. “I was just really proud to get a lot of broad base support from just every wing of Democrat,” she said. But Bean said she still hopes to back stronger campaign finance reforms in the House, despite the $6.6 million in spending from outside groups representing the vast majority of the money spent on her behalf.
“It absolutely should be a priority, particularly the issue of transparency,” Bean said of outside spending. When pressed about how some of the groups supporting her obscured the source of their money, Bean said, “Transparency, I think, should be our priority when we take on campaign finance reform.”
In other races, crypto-backed candidates took on AIPAC-backed candidates, with mixed results.
The groups’ backers were first revealed about an hour and a half after polls closed earlier this week, when AIPAC began posting on X about Illinois races for the first time this year. AIPAC tweeted its congratulations to Donna Miller, who won the 2nd district Democratic primary, and then shared a post calling Affordable Chicago Now an “AIPAC affiliated group.” AIPAC followed that by quoting a tweet about Miller losing an endorsement for her perceived AIPAC support. “And then what happened?” the group wrote on X.
Justice Democrats, which backed Bean’s opponent, Junaid Ahmed, accused AIPAC of “buying seats in Congress … by deceiving voters and hiding behind shell PACs.”
“AIPAC knows that it is becoming one of the most toxic forces in American politics,” said Usamah Andrabi, a top operative at the group. “Even if they win a few races, they are losing the long-term battle for the future of this party.”
Even super PACs that did not obscure the sources of their funding avoided running ads on the special interests they represented.
Fairshake is a pro-crypto PAC whose website urges politicians to give “blockchain innovators the ability to develop their networks under a clearer regulatory and legal framework.” None of the ads it ran in Illinois mentioned cryptocurrency, however. Instead, it attacked candidates as corrupt and beholden to special interests. For instance, Fairshake spent $400,000 to air an ad attacking candidate Robert Peters, who finished third in the race for the 2nd district, as the beneficiary of a “dark money super PAC, flooding money into the race,” as dollar signs flashed around Peters’s face. The group spent almost $4 million on an ad criticizing Senate candidate Juliana Stratton for her financial supporters: donors to her “massive super PAC,” and not “refusing money from MAGA donors.”
Fairshake wasn’t alone: Super PACs spent at least $5.7 million on ads attacking candidates for their connections with other super PACs or wealthy donors. Chicago Progressive Partnership, the AIPAC-backed group, took a similar line of attack on Abughazaleh. “Kat’s campaign is being funded with tens of thousands of dollars from right-wing donors to Republicans and Donald Trump,” said an ad the group spent about $800,000 on.
“Democratic voters — by wide, consistent margins — oppose the positions AIPAC spends millions to enforce,” said Greg Krieg, spokesperson for American Priorities, a Democratic anti-AIPAC group. “That’s why their ads never mention their core issues and why candidates who take their money increasingly go out of their way to hide it.”
The post Super PAC spending passes $200M, with some groups hiding their cause appeared first on Washington Post.
