Aipac in the era of Trump: the pro-Israel Super Pac that has become an electoral liability

Four Democratic congressional primaries in and around Chicago on Tuesday have turned into the most expensive test yet of a question the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) would rather not answer: what happens when your money is so toxic you have to pretend it isn’t yours?

Aipac, one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying forces supporting Israel, and affiliated political action committees have spent at least $13.7m across four Illinois races, according to an investigation by WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station, funneling it through a pair of Super Pacs so determined to hide their origins that they don’t mention Israel once in their ads, with anodyne-sounding names: Elect Chicago Women, and Affordable Chicago Now.

But the operation has all the hallmarks of coordination. FEC records, analyzed by the American Prospect, show 237 donors who previously gave to Aipac or its United Democracy Project super PAC contributed to both Cook county commissioner Donna Miller and former congresswoman Melissa Bean; sixty-five of those same donors also gave to state senator Laura Fine. All three women are running for Congress in competitive Democratic primaries. Forty-four gave to all three, several on the same date, for identical amounts. One hundred and ninety-eight donations arrived in Miller’s account on New Year’s Eve alone, according to that analysis.

The Super Pacs backing the three candidates were incorporated in January. Their donors won’t be disclosed until on or around election day.

Aipac was founded in 1954 partly to combat poor press after Israeli commandos massacred 60 Palestinians in the West Bank the year prior, and has since grown to spend decades as one of Washington’s most formidable lobbying forces, its influence based on the premise that support for Israel was simply what rational people in both parties did. In 2022, it launched the United Democracy Project to more directly get involved in the Democratic primaries, and it has declared a $96m war chest for the 2026 midterms, according to the New York Times.

The group states on its website that any disagreements with the Israeli government are “best handled in private” – a policy it has applied so faithfully that in its more than 70-year history, only one big public break with the Israeli government in the 1980s has been recorded, according to a review by the Guardian.

The new problem it’s facing, however, is that Democratic voters have shifted sharply: polls now show the party sympathizes more with Palestinians than Israelis, and the devastating Gaza war has made Aipac’s brand a genuine electoral liability in the kinds of urban, educated districts it is now trying to hold.

Aipac did not respond to a request for comment.

The New Jersey special election in February offered a preview of what that looks like in practice. Aipac spent roughly $2m attacking moderate Tom Malinowski – a candidate who supported Israel but suggested aid shouldn’t be unconditional – and managed to hand the race to a progressive even less friendly to its positions. The same ad buyer is now running the Illinois Super Pac campaigns.

“Their heavy-handed campaign against Malinowski backfired spectacularly,” David Axelrod told Politico. “If people recognize the source as Aipac by another name, the tactics and funder of the ads may overwhelm their message and wreck their intended beneficiary.”

The ninth district in Illinois, a heavily Jewish, highly educated north shore seat that has returned a Jewish Democrat to Congress for 61 consecutive years, is where the strategy looks most likely to collapse on itself.

Aipac-aligned groups have begun attacking Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston, whose mother was born in Israel, who believes in Israel’s right to exist, and who has suggested US military aid should come with strings attached. The risk, which Aipac appears to be courting anyway, is that the attacks drive voters not toward Fine but toward Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian American progressive running to Biss’s left.

“The attack ads are calling [Biss] a phony or fake progressive,” Chicago consultant Frank Calabrese told Politico. “And that message could shift more voters to Kat.”

The House primaries are not the only races drawing quiet Aipac money in the state. The Intercept has reported that at least 27 Aipac donors are backing lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton in her bid for the Senate seat being vacated by Dick Durbin, with a former Aipac president, Lee Rosenberg, sitting on her finance committee. Aipac has formally endorsed her leading opponent, representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, who received more than $250,000 from the pro-Israel lobby during his decade in Congress.

When Donald Trump first started to bomb Iran, Aipac’s situation took a turn for the worse. Aipac immediately praised the strikes, which Israeli leadership has been pushing for decades, but every candidate Aipac backed in Illinois condemned them. Fine flipped from once supporting the June 2025 strikes to now saying Trump should be impeached for attacking Iran, Bean and Miller both called Trump’s decision “dangerous and unconstitutional” and Democratic candidate Melissa Conyears-Ervin called it “a war of choice” and said that Trump “had lost his mind”.

Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser, explained the logic to Jewish Currents: “They are aware that Democratic voters oppose this war pretty overwhelmingly. They have to be careful if they want to keep Aipac support.”

Fine told the New York Times she has asked the groups backing her to identify their donors and is “kind of hitting a wall”. Illinois governor JB Pritzker, once a significant Aipac donor himself, told the Times he walked away from the group around 2015. “I still believe it is significantly Maga-influenced,” he said.

The progressive candidates in the race have been the most direct about what they believe is at stake.

“This is the Aipac playbook on how to control Congress,” Junaid Ahmed, who is running against Bean in the eighth district, said in a statement to the American Prospect. “They’ll spend big money now and then expect my opponent to send billions in aid and weapons to Israel when she’s in Congress.”