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'Special Interests Lost and Our Movement Won': Omar Trounces Primary Challengers
"Whether it's universal school meals, student debt cancellation, climate action, or a just foreign policy that reflects our values—the 5th District showed tonight that we want to drive the nation toward a better future."
Aug 14, 2024
U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar handily won her primary race in Minnesota's 5th District on Tuesday, effectively securing her reelection to Congress in the face of an onslaught of pro-Israel cash aimed at unseating progressive supporters of a Gaza cease-fire and other popular policy positions.
Omar defeated her main challenger, former Minneapolis city councilmember Don Samuels, by more than 16,000 votes after narrowly fending him off in 2022. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has spent aggressively to defeat other members of the progressive "Squad," did not get heavily involved in the Minnesota race after its attempt to recruit a different challenger failed.
Samuels' campaign did receive a late boost from pro-Israel donors—including a flurry of contributions following Rep. Cori Bush's (D-Mo.) primary loss to an AIPAC-backed Democrat last week—but Omar enjoyed a significant fundraising and spending advantage.
"I am honored that my community voted to send me back to Congress," Omar, the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said after The Associated Press called the race in her favor. "Tonight's victory shows that the 5th District believes in the collective values we are fighting for in Washington."
"Whether it's universal school meals, student debt cancellation, climate action, or a just foreign policy that reflects our values—the 5th District showed tonight that we want to drive the nation toward a better future," she continued. "And our work is far from over. From protecting reproductive healthcare to reforming the Supreme Court to ending the genocide in Gaza to combatting the climate crisis—we will continue to fight for a more just world."
Tonight, special interests lost and our movement won. Thank you to everyone who was a part of it. Every single person who contributed made this moment possible.
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) August 14, 2024
Omar's decisive victory in a primary that was open to voters of all party affiliations came after candidates bankrolled by AIPAC's super PAC succeeded in defeating Bush and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) in two of the most expensive congressional primaries in U.S. history. Along with Omar, Bush and Bowman are among Congress' most vocal supporters of a Gaza cease-fire.
A Politicoanalysis found that AIPAC has been "the biggest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democratic primaries this year." The lobbying organization has spent nearly $25 million on elections in 2024.
Justice Democrats, a progressive advocacy group that has been working to counter AIPAC's influence in Democratic primaries, acknowledged in the wake of Omar's win Tuesday that "our movement has suffered immeasurable losses this cycle."
"But the backlash from monied corporate and right-wing interests proves not only are we succeeding, but our mandate to elect more Justice Democrats and take big money out of politics is abundantly clear," the group added. "The greatest obstacle to Democrats delivering the agenda they have promised the American people is the influence of corporate super PACs and lobbies buying our party's inaction. We must show our voters that a brighter future is possible, if we fight for it."
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution—a group that backed Omar's campaign—said Tuesday that the Minnesota progressive's victory was "a powerful rebuke to the influence of corporate money in our democracy."
"Her commitment to bold, progressive policies—whether it's climate action, Medicare for All, or standing up for a permanent cease-fire and end to unconditional aid to Israel—resonates deeply with her constituents," said Geevarghese. "The Democratic Party must take note: To secure victories in 2024 and beyond, they must embrace the policies that truly address the struggles of working families, and reject the influence of dark money that seeks to undermine our democracy."
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Cori Bush Loses Reelection Bid to Democrat Backed by AIPAC
"Tonight's results should be a warning sign to anyone who cares about our democracy," said one advocacy group.
Aug 07, 2024
Rep. Cori Bush lost her reelection bid in Missouri's 1st Congressional District on Tuesday to a Democratic primary candidate backed by a massive influx of spending from AIPAC, which targeted the progressive incumbent over her early calls for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.
Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, enjoyed a huge cash advantage over Bush, with nearly two-thirds of his campaign money coming from fundraising efforts by AIPAC's super PAC, the United Democracy Project (UDP).
UDP, which has been bankrolled by ultra-wealthy Republicans, spent around $8.5 million to oust Bush, the second Squad member to lose to an AIPAC-backed primary opponent this election cycle. AIPAC pledged earlier this year to spend $100 million attacking progressive candidates, and the organization has thus far been the largest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democratic primaries this year.
The Intercept's Akela Lacy reported that in Tuesday's race, AIPAC's money was spent "on voter engagement efforts and phone banking in addition to digital and mail ads."
"One of the mailers, first reported by The Intercept, included images that distorted Bush's features," Lacy added.
Bell, who also raised money directly from Republican billionaires and previously served as campaign manager for a GOP candidate, narrowly defeated Bush, winning 51.2% of the vote compared to the incumbent's 45.6%—a margin of fewer than 7,000 votes.
In a fiery speech to supporters following her defeat, Bush said that by "pulling me away from my position as congresswoman, all you did was take some of the strings off."
Bush, who was elected to the House in 2020, went on to directly address AIPAC's role in what became one of the most expensive congressional primaries in U.S. history.
"AIPAC, I'm coming to tear your kingdom down," said Bush. "And let me put all of these corporations on notice: I'm coming after you too. But I'm not coming by myself. I'm coming with all the people that's in here, that's doing the work."
Cori Bush defiant in defeat: "All they did was radicalize me, so now they need to be afraid."
"They about to see this other Cori, this other side," she said. "AIPAC, I'm coming to tear your kingdom down." pic.twitter.com/690T0aEhmZ
— Mark Maxwell (@MarkMaxwellTV) August 7, 2024
Justice Democrats, a progressive organization that helped propel Bush to victory in 2020 and backed her reelection bid, said following Tuesday's contest that "no matter what a singular super PAC can spend to try and buy an election, nothing can take away from the transformational effect Cori Bush has directly had on the people of St. Louis."
"That power—of everyday people to transform what we can expect from our political system—is such a threat to right-wing power, corporate interests, and AIPAC's influence, that a coalition of GOP-funded Super PACs had to spend over $12 million to even have a chance at defeating it," the group said in a statement posted to social media. "As AIPAC's influence in Congress wanes and the right-wing network propping it up is exposed, AIPAC has to spend historic amounts to continue advancing their interests at the expense of the Democratic mainstream that overwhelmingly supports a ceasefire and an end to genocide in Gaza."
Bush was one of the original sponsors of a congressional resolution calling for an end to Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip, which has dragged on for 10 months and left nearly 40,000 Palestinians dead, according to official tallies that are likely a vast undercount given the number of people missing under ruins and in mass graves.
"We can't bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom," Bush said as she introduced the resolution alongside her progressive House colleagues on October 16. "With thousands of lives lost and millions more at stake, we need a cease-fire now."
"Cori Bush had the moral courage to speak out against her constituents' taxpayer dollars funding war crimes in Gaza."
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said Tuesday that "without the deluge of misleading advertisements" attacking Bush, she "would be headed to Congress for another term next year."
"Tonight's results should be a warning sign to anyone who cares about our democracy," said Shiney-Ajay. "If Democratic Party leaders don't stand against AIPAC and right-wing billionaires, they undermine our democracy and risk disillusioning the young voters and voters of color we need to defeat the far-right."
Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese echoed that message, saying in a statement that "tonight's outcome puts the blatantly undemocratic nature of Democratic Party primaries on full display."
"Cori Bush had the moral courage to speak out against her constituents' taxpayer dollars funding war crimes in Gaza. As a result, AIPAC and its MAGA Republican-funded super PAC spent more than $8.4 million to buy her congressional seat," said Geevarghese.
"Democratic Party elites have spent years decrying Trump as an existential threat to democracy," he added, "yet they are resoundingly silent when wealthy conservative donors unseat a true working-class champion who was among the first federal lawmakers to endorse Kamala Harris in her historic candidacy for president."
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'Time to Go for the Jugular': Climate Movement Has New Plan to Destroy Big Oil
"We have an opportunity for 18 months to organize, to take out the oil and gas industry," said one environmental leader during a Sanders Institute event in Vermont.
Jun 03, 2024
"Now is the time to go for the jugular. Now is the time to kill the fossil fuel industry, because we don't have another chance at survival after this."
That's what Jamie Minden, senior director of global organizing for the youth-led group Zero Hour, told the audience Saturday during The Sanders Institute Gathering, in Burlington, Vermont. The three-day event featured panel discussions on various topics and a few screenings, including the trailer for The Welcome Table, Josh Fox's forthcoming documentary about climate refugees.
"In order to win, we need to go on the offensive," said Minden, "because defense has not been working."
Playing offense against the incredibly powerful and well-funded fossil fuel industry requires growing the movement and seizing political opportunities to implement lifesaving policies, according to experts and organizers who participated in a series of panels focused on the climate crisis.
One of those opportunities that campaigners are already gearing up for is the January 2025 expiration of tax cuts signed into law in December 2017 by then-President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the November election.
Speaking alongside Minden on the livestreamed panel, Friends of the Earth (FOE) president Erich Pica described the looming fight as a "Tax Super Bowl" that will take place shortly before the next president is sworn in. The climate movement is organizing aggressively to show just how much U.S. consumers and taxpayers are being ripped off by the greed of the fossil fuel giants that enjoy massive federal subsidies and enormous tax breaks despite the "eye-popping" profits they post year after year.
. @Erichpica: The Tax Super Bowl [will be] in January 2025. All the Trump Tax Cuts that were passed in 2017, particularly the ones that impact individuals, are up for reauthorization...We have an opportunity for 18 months to organize to take out the oil and gas industry. pic.twitter.com/VbaeHzuTIi
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
"We know that there will be a tax bill that, if it is not passed, will end up increasing taxes on all individual Americans. And so we have an opportunity for 18 months to organize, to take out the oil and gas industry," Pica said.
Trump in April made a reported quid pro quo offer to fossil fuel executives: Pour just $1 billion into his current campaign, and he will repeal climate policies implemented under Democratic President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection.
Pica pointed out that Big Oil—which has benefited from federal tax breaks since the Revenue Act of 1913—could profit handsomely by taking Trump up on his offer, if the Republican returns to the White House. In an analysis published last month, FOE Action found that the industry fueling the climate emergency could see an estimated $110 billion in tax breaks alone if Republicans get their way.
Throughout the weekend, multiple panelists highlighted the End Polluter Welfare Act recently reintroduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—whose wife Jane O'Meara Sanders and son Dave Driscoll co-founded the Sanders Institute. The legislation aims to close tax loopholes and end corporate handouts to the fossil fuel industry, and the sponsors estimate it would save American taxpayers up to $170 billion over a decade.
. @JosephGeev: Our democracy is on the line. But so too is the fate of our planet…Donald Trump is pitching a deal to big oil executives to give me a billion dollars in campaign contributions and I'm gonna make sure the US government keeps the fossil fuel industry in operation. pic.twitter.com/5N6NJ2Asud
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
The bill's reintroduction last month was "an important step," said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, an organization that grew out of the senator's 2016 presidential campaign. "The thing is, we need a movement and a strategic opportunity to be able to get that policy over the finish line."
Some panelists argued that the moment is now, but the movement must expand beyond what Rev. Lennox Yearwood, president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, said is, "at this time, a siloed, segregated, progressive climate movement."
Americans are not only "dying because of the climate crisis" but also paying fossil fuel companies "to kill us," Yearwood told the audience. "Their business plan literally means a death sentence for our communities."
"The issue on taxation," he explained, "allows us to once again broaden our movement, allows us to go to Republicans, go to Democrats, to go to Independents, and go across this country... and say simply: 'Your tax dollars are going to go to those who are rich and are killing our communities. Do you want that?'"
. @RevYearwood: The fossil fuel industry is evil. I mean evil. We have never as humans dealt with anything as global, as destructive, and as suicidal as this industry. pic.twitter.com/45LDPm6psg
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
Another way to grow the movement is to include communities—especially those historically represented in politics by Big Oil beneficiaries—in the global green transition.
On the Gathering's opening night, which was also livestreamed, Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous, also a Sanders Institute fellow, spoke about recently visiting a plant where workers make solar panels in the district of far-right Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a major Trump ally.
While touring the Hanwha Qcells solar facility in Dalton, Jealous asked about a wall of drawings and paintings. He learned that they were created for Earth Day last year by children of the employees, who were asked to portray "how they see their parents working at this factory."
"In maybe the most, arguably the most conservative congressional district in America," workers' children "portrayed their parents as heroes saving the planet," he said. "The kids in that district get that we need solar panels, get that we got to work together to save this planet. There's reason to be hopeful."
. @BenJealous: The seeds to overcoming the division in America lies in the factories we are building for renewables, for batteries, for semiconductors. pic.twitter.com/yxNQv4GlJo
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
The plant's South Korean company has been able to grow because of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that congressional Democrats passed and Biden signed in 2022. While members of the climate movement have long framed the law as a flawed but still historic package in terms of tackling the planetary emergency, with the general election mere months away, speakers at the Gathering stressed the need to showcase such progress to voters nationwide.
"We really do have to take those moments when something happens and claim it. And partly that means in this election being willing to say how important that IRA was," said panelist and Sanders Institute fellow Bill McKibben, who founded Third Act, which organizes elders for climate advocacy.
"Was it perfect? Not even close… but it was in some other sense, remarkable," he continued. "We've got to actually talk about that enough that people understand it. And truthfully, we don't… Certainly, the Democratic Party does not a good job of talking about those things in those ways."
Also pointing to the Georgia solar plant, McKibben added that "one of the things that's really brilliant about the IRA is that the bulk of the money is going to red state America to do this work, which is not something that we're used to anymore in our country... people being willing to do anything other than support their own supporters. And it's a remarkable possibility for a kind of political healing going forward."
McKibben: At the exact same moment that the planet is physically starting to disintegrate in precisely the way scientists 30 years ago told us it would, as if kind of scripted by Hollywood, we're also seeing the sudden spike in the only antidote we have at scale to deal with this pic.twitter.com/FaUQv6BdTk
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
No matter the outcomes of the upcoming U.S. congressional and presidential elections, climate campaigners are committed to the fight against fossil fuels. As Pica put it, "I think we have to wage the fight regardless."
"The oil and gas industry has been operating with impunity for over a hundred years," the FOE leader said. "They're crushing our politics, they're polluting the climate, and they're getting away with it."
"We discovered during the Inflation Reduction Act fight, when there was a real effort to repeal the oil and gas subsidies, that they expended a lot of political capital to keep those subsidies in place," he noted. "The fact that we can wage a campaign that forces the oil and gas industry to expend political capital to maintain their largesse from the federal government, regardless of if we win or we lose, is a winning strategy for us."
"'Cause that means they're not trying to repeal the stuff in the Inflation Reduction Act. That means that they're not trying to work on reducing… their corporate taxes," he explained. Like Minden, Pica wants the climate movement to make the fossil fuel industry finally play defense.
The End Polluter Welfare Act "is the organizing vehicle," Pica said. "We've gotta get support behind it. We've gotta get members of Congress on it. We've gotta get community activists out there in the streets."
Jamie Minden: I am 21 years old and I've never lived a year of my life without experiencing extreme climate disaster first hand…We have an entire generation of young people growing up this way. This is not only our future. This is our present. @ThisIsZeroHour pic.twitter.com/ULZYFRya0Z
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
The organizers battling Big Oil underscored the urgency, emphasizing that not only are the Trump tax cuts set to expire soon, but also communities across the country and around the world are already enduring the effects of a hotter planet—including rising sea levels, more destructive storms, extreme temperatures, devastating floods, and raging wildfires.
"A hundred years from now really matters. But also what's going on today and in the next five years really matters," said Minden. "I think within the next five years… our world's gonna be pretty unrecognizable in many ways."
The 21-year-old climate campaigner told the Gathering's audience—full of academics, advocates, policymakers, and more—that "whether you're here working in healthcare or income inequality or labor, the reality is that this issue is about to become a part of your work, if it's not already."
"I know we all have our own fights. I know everyone here is working on things that are really, really important. But if we don't all go out on this fight, if we don't all go out on climate, we're gonna get taken out," she warned. "It's a matter of survival."
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