AIPAC Wanted to Shape the Debate. Now It Is the Debate.

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/11/08/israel-aipac-midterm-elections-foushee-01154924

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee was both the primary adversary and in some sense a model for the new group. In late 2021, AIPAC had formed its own super PAC, United Democracy Project, which spent $64 million in the following two cycles. American Priorities set a goal of raising $10 million for the midterms, and came up short of that in its spending of around $8 million. Campaign-finance disclosures show UDP alone spending over $50 million this cycle through mid-October, not accounting for other AIPAC-affiliated groups. “We never thought we could outspend them,” said Mohammed Waqas Javed, a former director of engineering at the tech company AppLovin, whose $1 million in donations made him one of American Priorities’ early backers. “We wanted to be smart about where we spent, and surgically deploying $10 million was enough to run a serious operation across the country.”

But the financial mismatch was less important than the environment in which American Priorities arrived. A longstanding, bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that AIPAC had helped establish — and, more recently, enforce — was already fracturing over the war in Gaza, and AIPAC’s own role in Democratic primary politics had become controversial. American Priorities formed in part to capitalize on the shift, but its emergence was far more an effect than a cause of the public’s changing views on Israel. Indeed, candidates attacked AIPAC in races where neither its own super PAC nor American Priorities even spent.

The group will face a very different Capitol Hill in January. Thirteen members of the Democratic majority will arrive with American Priorities having backed their elections. And Rep. Valerie Foushee, one candidate American Priorities opposed for AIPAC’s role helping bring her to Congress in the first place, turned on her former backers before the primary even started — the anti-AIPAC group now considers her an ally.