The US representative Summer Lee greeted a cheering crowd of a couple of hundred supporters at the Pittsburgh teachers’ union headquarters on Sunday, with two days left until her Democratic primary.
Lee, who made history in 2022 when she became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania, predicted that voters would send a resounding message on Tuesday about the resilience of the progressive movement. To underscore that point, Lee was joined at the rally by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another member of the progressive “Squad” in the House.
“Everybody in the country is waiting to see whether or not we can have a reflective democracy,” Lee said. “So we are going to fight in western Pennsylvania, and on Tuesday, we’re going send a message to every dark-money billionaire, whoever they are: that your influence is no longer welcome in our democracy.”
The boisterous rally marked an impressive show of support for a politician who eked out the narrowest of primary victories two years ago, after facing an onslaught of negative advertising from pro-Israel groups. This time around, many progressives expected the same groups to target Lee again, given her consistent and vocal support for a ceasefire in Gaza.
But those groups have chosen to stay out of Lee’s primary this year, a decision that the congresswoman’s allies credit to her popularity with constituents and the government funding she has brought to her western Pennsylvania district.
Despite the pro-Israel lobby’s absence, at least one Super Pac, financially backed by the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, has gotten involved in Lee’s primary to support her opponent, the local council member Bhavini Patel. If Lee is successful on Tuesday, her victory could provide a roadmap for other progressive candidates who are bracing for a wave of pro-Israel money in their own primaries this cycle due to their criticism of the Israeli government and their outrage over the rising death toll in Gaza.
“Pittsburgh is the first one up. Tuesday is the first of the rest of these races. So, Pittsburgh, what you’re doing on Tuesday is sending a message to the country,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Addressing mega-donors like Yass, she added: “Your money isn’t good here any more.”
A notable absence
When Lee first ran for Congress in 2022, her record as a two-term state legislator did little to assuage the concerns of establishment Democrats. A number of local groups, including the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, lined up behind Lee’s opponent, the Pittsburgh attorney Steve Irwin.
Most consequentially, United Democracy Project, a Super Pac affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), entered the race to boost Irwin’s campaign. According to OpenSecrets, UDP spent a total of $3.3m against Lee and another $660,000 in support of Irwin, flooding the airwaves with ads accusing Lee of threatening Joe Biden’s policy agenda.
Lee won her race by less than 1,000 votes, or 0.9 points, and her victory provided a shot in the arm for progressives’ fight against Aipac and its affiliates, which spent nearly $50m across the entire 2022 cycle to boost pro-Israel candidates.
This year, Aipac and its affiliates reportedly plan to spend twice as much money, $100m, across the election cycle. Progressive leaders expected that Lee’s primary would serve as an early test of messaging strategies for “Squad” members facing primary challenges and targeted by Aipac.
Surprisingly, UDP and the group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), both of which spent heavily in Lee’s 2022 primary, appear to have opted out. According to reporting by the Intercept, Aipac contacted two prominent Pittsburgh Democrats to inquire if they would consider running against Lee. Both of them declined. (UDP did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.) Mark Mellman, the founder of DMFI, recently told Semafor that the group had determined Lee simply wasn’t as vulnerable as other “Squad” members this year and thus wasn’t worth the investment.
Lee’s allies credit her electoral strength to the work she has done in Congress. As Lee’s campaign frequently touts in ads, she has helped bring more than $1.2bn to her district in the form of infrastructure projects, clean water initiatives and housing grants.
“Summer is a very popular politician. She represents this district incredibly well,” said Jodi Hirsh, a 48-year-old Lee campaign volunteer and longtime Pittsburgh resident. “People who may be not up to speed on all the other socially progressive, social justice-oriented things that many of us care about do know that she’s helped them fundamentally from a constituent services perspective.”
That work appears to have paid dividends with fellow Democratic leaders as well. In February, the Allegheny County Democratic Committee endorsed Lee for the first time, and she has received the backing of prominent liberal groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood Action Fund as well as an array of local labor unions.
“That balance of being able to build a progressive vision while delivering every day for your constituents is the progressive movement through and through,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a progressive Pac.
Lee’s supporters argue that her work for constituents and her progressive views on issues like abortion access, the climate crisis and economic inequality have played a larger role in the primary race than the war in Gaza. But when voters do bring up the war, they often voice agreement with Lee’s calls for a ceasefire, allies say.
Polling does indeed suggest widespread support for the ceasefire campaign. According to an Economist/YouGov survey conducted this month, 65% of US adults – including 80% of Democrats – support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
“This is a race where the president, the party have just continued to move towards [Lee] over time,” said Nicholas Gavio, mid-Atlantic communications director for the Working Families party. “All the polling shows that Summer’s position and the position of a lot of the [‘Squad’ members] is the position of Democratic party voters.”
Despite polls consistently reflecting mounting criticism of Israel’s airstrike campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, Patel has continued to attack Lee over her views on the war. In a statement to the Guardian, Patel said Lee’s criticism of the Israeli government “hits at a deeper level” considering Pittsburgh’s dark history of antisemitic violence. In 2018, a gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, killing 11 people in the deadliest anti-Jewish attack in US history.
“As fringe extremist Summer Lee has locked arms with people trying to weaken President Biden over the last few weeks, we have seen an outpouring of support from voters energized by the possibility of a pro-Biden Democrat representing them in Congress,” Patel said.
Eva Borgwardt, a spokesperson for IfNotNow, traveled to Pittsburgh from New York to knock on doors for Lee’s campaign on Saturday. She firmly rejected Patel’s framing. (IfNotNow, a group of Jewish activists advocating for Palestinian rights, has also endorsed Lee.)
“Summer’s vision of Jewish safety, I think, is the thing that we as a Jewish community need – especially right now,” Borgwardt said. “She’s resisting this false narrative of Palestinian and Jewish safety being pitted against each other.”
That argument may be resonating with many Americans, but Patel has found at least one ardent proponent of her viewpoint: Jeffrey Yass.
‘Kick some Yass’
The ad opens with the ominous warning that “our rights are under attack”. The video then switches from images of the deadly January 6 insurrection to clips of Lee withholding applause during Biden’s State of the Union address last month.
“We need a representative who will work with President Biden, and that’s Bhavini Patel,” the ad concludes. The narrator then notes that the group Moderate Pac is responsible for the ad.
Moderate Pac’s stated aim is to “support Democratic policymakers who champion sensible fiscal and economic policies”, but recent FEC filings show its largest donor is Yass, who has given tens of millions to Republicans in recent years. According to OpenSecrets, Yass has already given more than $46m to conservative causes and candidates for 2024, making him the largest individual donor of this election cycle so far. (Previous reporting also suggested Yass was one of the major donors to a rightwing Israeli group that supported the proposal of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for judicial overhaul, but more recent accounts have cast doubt upon that connection.)
Yass has been named as a potential treasury secretary if Trump wins re-election, and the company that he co-founded was recently in the headlines for its involvement in a lucrative merger with the former president’s media company.
“You couldn’t write it up in a movie to be more absurd than to have the man who bailed out Donald Trump’s social media company spending money to write ads about a Democratic member of Congress not being Democrat enough,” Andrabi said.
Moderate Pac has now spent more than $600,000 on independent expenditures to promote Patel’s campaign, filings show.
A constellation of progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Working Families party, have come to Lee’s assistance, pouring more than $700,000 into the race. And Lee herself has proven a much more successful fundraiser than Patel, as the incumbent has raised four times as much money as her challenger. According to FEC filings, Lee has raised $2.3m to Patel’s $602,000.
Lee has even leaned into Yass’s involvement in the primary to motivate her donors. The subject line of one recent fundraising email read, “Are YOU ready to kick some YASS?” Hirsh said that Yass’s financial assistance had become a liability for Patel with Democratic primary voters.
“Here’s someone parading around as a ‘good Democrat’, ‘a centrist Democrat’, ‘a moderate Democrat’, who is almost entirely funded by a Maga [“Make America great again”] Republican who supported an insurrection, who’s destroying our public schools, who does not believe in the right to abortion,” Hirsh said. “All of the things that we want our Democratic representatives to support, this person is opposed to. That does not belong in our Democratic primary.”
For that reason, Andrabi believes that other progressive candidates can still learn many lessons from Lee’s campaign.
“Aipac and DMFI aren’t in Summer’s race. But you know, choose your Super Pac funded by Republican billionaires. It’s the same model across the country,” he said. “What we’re seeing is Republican billionaires using Super Pacs as vehicles to spend in Democratic primaries against mostly Black and brown progressives.”
If Lee wins on Tuesday, her ability to mobilize progressive voters in Pennsylvania could prove crucial in November, as Biden tries to win the battleground state against Trump.
Andrabi said: “There’s no one who is a greater threat to Donald Trump and far-right extremism than a Black woman who not only stands up for progressive values but also expands the electorate and ensures that all marginalized people have a voice in a state like Pennsylvania.”
