How Bowman lost the Jewish vote
And with it, his congressional seat.
Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost his primary in New York last night, becoming the first member of “The Squad” ousted from Congress since the left-wing group emerged six years ago. The contest wasn’t particularly close: with 88% of precincts reporting, Westchester County Executive George Latimer currently claims a nearly 17-point advantage over Bowman, 58.4% to 41.6%.
There are two main lenses from which to look through Bowman’s loss: the Israel lens and the not-Israel lens.
The not-Israel portion of the race, it became clear months ago that Bowman would lose on. For proof, you need only look at the result of his primary victory in 2022, when he was renominated with only 54% of the vote, a fairly alarming outcome for an incumbent. Discontent existed in his district entirely separately from Israel, long before the war in Gaza.
Bowman’s list of Israel-unrelated vulnerabilities was long, including his breaks with President Biden (who is deeply popular in the district, where he won 75% of the vote in 2020), such as by voting against the bipartisan infrastructure package in 2021; his years-old 9/11 conspiracy poems and other bizarre blog posts; and, of course, the strange incident from October of last year when he falsely pulled a fire alarm, seemingly committing a misdemeanor in order to delay a House vote.
Was the Israel portion of the race always destined to be a loss for Bowman? I don’t think so, no.
Most of the Israel-related attention in the race has been focused on AIPAC, the pro-Israel group which poured millions of dollars into defeating Bowman. But, as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait points out, it’s not as if AIPAC supported Bowman in 2020, when he was the one challenging an incumbent in a primary.
The change that augured Bowman’s downfall, Chait argues, wasn’t from AIPAC, but from another Jewish group. In 2020, he writes:
Bowman had J Street’s endorsement. J Street is a liberal pro-Israel group that has a fraction of AIPAC’s budget and also lacks its decades of institutional ties to the Jewish community. But J Street, which believes in the two-state solution and assigns Israel’s government a large share of the blame for its failure to materialize, represents a significant and growing share of Jewish opinion. This year, J Street withdrew its endorsement of Bowman.
Bowman’s district had a significant Jewish population — but, as Chait writes, many American Jews are not exactly aligned with AIPAC in their opinions on the Israeli government. From that understanding, it follows that it would be possible to win a fairly progressive, Jewish district without AIPAC’s segment of the Jewish vote. “But running against AIPAC and J Street is a formula for giving up on the Jewish vote,” Chait adds.
In other words: it’s easy to imagine a Democrat winning a district like New York’s 16th with J Street-style criticisms of Israel and its leaders. But a path to victory is hard to chart once you start making comments like this, which Bowman said at a rally:
“There was propaganda used in the beginning of the siege. There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women. But they still keep using that lie [for] propaganda.”
(A UN investigation concluded “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.”)
Or this, which Bowman said on a podcast:
“The money to Israel is part of supporting another settler colonial project, which Israel is.”
(Many American Jews may have criticisms of Israel’s government and handling of the war in Gaza, but few would likely describe the country as a “settler colonial project.”)
Or this, which Bowman told Politico:
“In New York City we all live together. [But] Westchester is segregated. There’s certain places where the Jews live and concentrate. Scarsdale, parts of White Plains, parts of New Rochelle, Riverdale. I’m sure they made a decision to do that for their own reasons … but this is why, in terms of fighting antisemitism, I always push — we’ve been separated and segregated and miseducated for so long. We need to live together, play together, go to school together, learn together, work together.”
(The idea that Jews are clannish and only associate with their own community is a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theory.)
Comments like those are how you lose the Jewish vote: the AIPAC segment and the J Street segment. Which, in most U.S. congressional districts, would not be a threat to your political survival, since most congressional districts do not contain a significant Jewish population. But Bowman’s does, which meant he had to be careful in his criticisms of Israel and to ensure he did not employ antisemitic stereotypes in the course of that criticism. Bowman was not careful.
“I suspect Bowman didn’t know that the idea of Jews as clannish is an antisemitic trope,” the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg opined about the Poltitico quote, “but when you have lots of Jewish constituents, understanding their sensitivities is part of the job.”1
And that lack of understanding, more than merely criticizing Israel, is how you end up with a graph like this, which plots Bowman’s rival’s vote share in Westchester County precincts against the Jewish population in each one:
And graphs like that are how Bowman ended up winning just 37% of the vote in Westchester County. Bowman’s district does not only include Westchester, of course: it also contains parts of the Bronx, which Bowman won with 84% of the vote. But of the 76,000 voters who participated in Bowman’s race last night, nearly 68,000 were from the part of his district in Westchester County. Only 8,000 hailed from the part in the Bronx. Hence, Bowman’s double-digit loss.
Other “Squad” members have managed to calibrate their criticisms of Israel to avoid competitive primary challenges in their districts. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for example, has sought to balance her opposition to Israel’s continued war in Gaza with support for Israel’s right to defend itself. Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) worked to reduce the salience of Israel in her primary and focused on other issues. Ocasio-Cortez won her primary with 82% of the vote last night; Lee won with 61%.
Bowman did not similarly try to reduce the salience of Middle East policy in his primary race. Especially in the contest’s closing stage, he ran against Israel head-on.“We’re going to show fucking AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx,” Bowman declared at a rally this past weekend.
One moment that I keep returning to to understand Bowman’s loss is a video that he and Ocasio-Cortez recorded in the days before the primary. In the video, Ocasio-Cortez speaks first, offering a general message announcing that the polls have opened for early voting and encouraging viewers to turn out for Bowman. Then, Bowman interrupts: “Ceasefire now, ya’ll! That’s what we’re doing! Ceasefire now, let’s get it poppin’!” Bowman does not mention any other policies — inflation, housing, health care, etc. — over the course of the Instagram video, merely repeating “Stop the bombs!” before it ends.
Again, it’s possible to win a progressive Jewish district while criticizing Israel. It is harder to do so while making criticism of Israel the signature issue of your race.
On the other hand, making criticism of Israel the signature issue of your race is a very easy route to Twitter fame and national celebrity.
And here is where the Israel and the not-Israel portions of the race connect. All politics are local, as Tip O’Neill famously reminded us. Bowman may have been able to win with a more stringent Israel message if he was already operating off of a deep base of goodwill and connections within his district. He wasn’t, as his 2022 primary result showed. Some members of Congress would have seen that result and moderated their rhetoric, or at least made sure their local connections were intact.
Many local officials have told reporters that Bowman did not, especially compared to his challenger Latimer, whose local ties ran so strong that Politico called him “the Cher of suburban New York.” Paul Feiner, the longtime town supervisor of Greenburgh, told the New York Times: “I could see Latimer maybe five times a week. I’ve only seen Bowman maybe three or four times since he’s been a congressmember.”
When you consider comments like that, suddenly, Bowman’s loss becomes more understandable as almost an inverse of his race against Eliot Engel, the incumbent whom he defeated in 2020. Both races serve as a reminder that a strong local presence will often outweigh a national profile in congressional contests — and, importantly, this is true whether the national profile is earned in the traditional way (Engel was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) or through newer channels (Bowman’s 360,000-strong following on Twitter, almost 50 times Latimer’s).
“I didn’t win it on the national debate,” Latimer said on CNN last night. “I won it because I went door to door…talked to people about the issues they wanted to talk about, which included what’s happening in the Middle East.”
This is reinforced by AIPAC’s ads against Bowman, which largely focused on issues like the infrastructure package, not Israel. (Although the impact of AIPAC’s $14.5 million ad blitz cannot be ignored, it does not suffice as an explanation of Bowman’s loss, seeing as a poll showed Bowman down by 17 points — the exact final margin — in April, before any advertising began.) The spending followed the vulnerability, not the other way around. Importantly, it was also in service of a local-focused message, whereas Bowman’s message increasingly focused on Israel as the race went on. (This is best exemplified by his aforementioned comment — “We’re going to show fucking AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx” — with both showed a national-minded focus on AIPAC and a misunderstanding of his own district lines, which did not include the South Bronx.)
This is the Squad’s first defeat, so it will be interesting to watch how its other members respond to Bowman’s loss down the line. Will they calibrate their rhetoric more carefully and seek to re-establish local ties? Or will they seek to rely on national clout, hoping that’s enough?
The next test of these questions will come on August 7th, when another Squad member, Democratic Rep. Cori Bush, faces a primary challenger in Missouri. Bush, like Bowman, has rocky ties with her local Jewish community that far precede the war in Gaza; is entrenched in a scandal entirely unrelated to Israel (in her case a Justice Department investigation into alleged mishandling of security funds); and voted against President Biden on issues like the infrastructure bill.
Bowman’s loss shows that tensions over Israel are likely not enough to sink a Democratic lawmaker. But, when combined with previous scandals, other frustrations, and a lack of local goodwill, suddenly the picture for an incumbent starts to shift.
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That’s all from me today. Thanks for waking up to politics! See you tomorrow on Debate Day. 👀
Bowman continued to show a lack of understanding of these sensitivities until the end. "We should be outraged when a super PAC of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn’t true,” he said in his concession speech, a message that also seemed to reinforce antisemitic stereotypes.
Really enjoyed reading this.
Astute analysis. Thanks for writing this!