Days before she was set to face an AIPAC-backed challenger in an expensive and contentious Democratic primary, Representative Cori Bush of Missouri doubled down on the stance that has put her job in peril.
Standing outside an early voting location at a public library in Ferguson, on the same streets where she led protests for racial justice in 2014, Ms. Bush declined to call Hamas a terrorist group.
“We were called terrorists during Ferguson,” she said of herself and other Black activists who took to the streets after the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a white police officer. “Have they hurt people? Absolutely. Has the Israeli military hurt people? Absolutely.”
Most voters in this racially segregated blue city in a deep-red state are not talking about Israel’s war against Hamas. Abortion is illegal here, crime is high and downtown is made up of mostly boarded-up storefronts. There are more pressing concerns. “It’s not a priority for my district, necessarily,” she conceded of her pro-Palestinian views.
But it is her vocal espousing of those views that has allowed Ms. Bush’s more mainstream challenger Wesley Bell to make this contest competitive. It drew a super PAC affiliated with AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups into the race, where they have poured more than $8 million into attack ads against Ms. Bush and positive spots about Mr. Bell, transforming it one of the most expensive House primaries in history.
And the stance has made Ms. Bush, 48, a former nurse who was elected in 2020 during a national outcry over racial inequity, the latest member of the ultraliberal “squad” in Congress to face a mortal political challenge.
“This is the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for the grass-roots organization Justice Democrats. He said it was also a testament to the power of the progressive movement that “right-wing interests” have to “drag our democracy through the mud to even have a shot at challenging Cori Bush.”
On Tuesday, Ms. Bush will face Mr. Bell, a Black county prosecutor who is pitching himself as progressive but pragmatic, and whose campaign is financed almost entirely by the pro-Israel lobby. The case he is mounting against Ms. Bush has little to do with Israel; he argues that she is ineffective, prioritizes her “squad” fame in Congress over local results, and showed poor judgment as a legislator, in voting against President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure law.
“It was a no-brainer; it’s a good piece of legislation,” Mr. Bell said in an interview, noting that the bill had brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the district for jobs, roads and bridges and clean water. “She had her own protest vote as opposed to what’s in the best interest of her district.”
Still, Ms. Bush’s stance on the Israel-Gaza war has shaped the race, and she has been unapologetic about it, even as Republicans in Congress have sought to divide the Democratic Party with messaging votes aimed at portraying critics of Israel’s tactics as extreme.
Ms. Bush was one of two Democrats who voted in January against a resolution to bar members of Hamas and anyone who participated in the attacks against Israel on Oct. 7 from the United States.
Sitting at a breakfast spot in Ferguson, where she was greeted like a celebrity, Ms. Bush said the vote was an act of defiance in the face of efforts to intimidate her and other lawmakers who have expressed pro-Palestinian views.
“You can’t buy members of Congress, and you can’t scare them,” she said. “That’s why we take those votes.”
“We only operate under attack; if it’s me today, it’s Rashida Tlaib tomorrow,” she added, referring to the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan who is the only Palestinian American lawmaker in Congress. “We knew that coming in the door.”
Ms. Bush said that she was reluctant to classify Hamas as a terrorist group given how little she knows about it.
“Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes. But do I know that? Absolutely not,” Ms. Bush said. “I have no communication with them. All I know is that we were considered terrorists, we were considered Black identity extremists and all we were doing was trying to get peace. I’m not trying to compare us, but that taught me to be careful about labeling if I don’t know.”
Later, a spokeswoman for Ms. Bush sought to walk back her comments. “The congresswoman knows Hamas is a terrorist organization,” the spokeswoman, Marina Chafa, said. The issue, she added, was that the term had been “weaponized by the far right consistently to justify violence and in this instance, the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
Marshall Wittmann, a spokesman for AIPAC, called Ms. Bush a lawmaker “aligned with the anti-Israel extremist fringe,” noting she was one of just 10 members of Congress to vote against a resolution expressing solidarity with and pledging U.S. support for Israel and condemning Hamas’s actions days after the group attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing roughly 1,200 and taking hundreds more hostage.
“Democratic voters are sending the message that it is entirely consistent with progressive values to support Israel as it battles Iranian terrorist proxies,” Mr. Wittman added.
Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and the president of Democratic Majority for Israel, said Ms. Bush had been a target for years because of her stance on the country, but votes against popular Democratic initiatives made her more vulnerable this cycle.
“We’re taking advantage of that,” he said. And even if the Israel-Hamas war is not a central concern in St. Louis, Mr. Mellman said progressives like Ms. Bush “have chosen to make this issue central to them.”
“That’s a choice that they made,” he said. “It’s core to who they are.”
So is breaking with their party when they believe progressive priorities are at stake. In 2021, Ms. Bush was one of six Democrats who voted “no” on the infrastructure bill, one of Mr. Biden’s signature initiatives, because many elements liberals wanted, such as universal family leave and free community college, were severed from the legislative package to attract the backing of Republicans whose votes were needed for it to clear Congress.
Ms. Bush said her opposition was an effort “to hold the leverage” to achieve the president’s full economic agenda. But she paid a high price for it. Labor leaders across Missouri criticized her for the vote, and now, while some labor unions have stuck with her, more than half a dozen of them have endorsed Mr. Bell.
It wasn’t supposed to be this hard for a rising progressive star.
Ms. Bush arrived in Washington four years ago after toppling a career politician, Representative Lacy Clay, who had served 10 terms in Congress. She was part of wave of progressive victories over establishment figures that elevated brash Black voices, including Representative Jamaal Bowman for New York, during a summer of protests against police brutality.
Ms. Bush, who at times in her life has been homeless and lived out of her car, became a unique voice in Congress. She spoke from her lived experience when she made the compelling case that “poverty is so expensive.”
In 2021, she grabbed a sleeping bag and a lawn chair and started a round-the-clock sit-in on the steps of the Capitol to protest the expiration of a federal eviction moratorium. Her pressure campaign worked; the White House reversed its stance and announced a new 60-day pause. Ms. Bush was embraced by national progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
In fighting for reproductive rights, Ms. Bush has shared her own harrowing story of getting an abortion after she was raped at 17. She got a book deal. She participated in glossy magazine profiles and developed a national profile.
But since then, the political terrain has shifted, in a large part because of the prominence of the Israel-Hamas war. Now the “squad,” the liberal clique of lawmakers of color that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made famous, is better known for its outspoken pro-Palestinian views and more alienated from more mainstream Democrats. In June, Mr. Bowman, another outspoken progressive, was defeated by a mainstream candidate who also benefited from record-setting backing from pro-Israel groups including AIPAC.
On Thursday evening, at a wine-and-oysters fund-raiser for Mr. Bell at a bar in the Soulard neighborhood, his wealthy backers argued the race was more about ousting a congresswoman who has not represented the district effectively.
“You stand with terrorism, but you can’t stand with your own president?” said Steven Engelhardt, a former top adviser to Mr. Clay who is backing Mr. Bell. “That’s her record; that’s not my opinion. That’s incompetence.”
John Rogers, an attorney who introduced Mr. Bell at the event, told the crowd: “We just have someone barking, complaining, no legislation gets passed, she’s isolated herself from our own party. It’s time for that to change.”
Mr. Bell said that Ms. Bush “doesn’t work with the Democratic caucus, she doesn’t work with the Black caucus, she doesn’t reach across the aisle and our district suffers as a result.”
Ms. Bush has refused to debate him.
“I’m not going to platform a Republican,” she said. “If he was not taking all of this Republican money for a Democratic district, then there would be a conversation.”
On Friday morning, Ms. Bush received a measure of support from House leadership when Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 Democrat, joined her at a round table on abortion rights at her district office in St. Louis.
“She is a leading voice on many issues, but especially on this one,” Ms. Clark said. “She is a champion.” Organizers from the Sunrise Movement were knocking on doors for her.
“I am going off of a lack of sleep and a lot of talking, but I am excited,” Ms. Bush said on Friday morning. She said she was confident her outcome would be different from that of Mr. Bowman, who had won his previous race by a narrower margin than she had.
“They’ve seen me put my body on the line for not just the Black community but for families being separated at the border, the Muslim ban, for abortion rights,” she said of her constituents.
Ms. Bush said Democrats should be wary about allowing AIPAC to wield so much sway over who from their party can survive in Congress.
“It’s not just progressives being at risk,” she said. “Other Democrats need to pay attention to what they’re really trying to do. Don’t think that they wouldn’t go then to the moderates and get those they can pull more to the right.”
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