Cori Bush Becomes Second Squad Member to Lose 2024 Primary

Much like Jamaal Bowman, Bush was taken down by the combination of a credible challenger and lots of AIPAC-directed money.

Cori Bush of Missouri, perhaps the most combative member of the U.S. House’s “Squad” of outspokenly progressive Democrats, narrowly lost her seat in an August 6 primary to St. Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell, who benefited from very heavy spending by a PAC associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Both Bell and the United Democracy Project, which spent over $8 million on his behalf, took issue with Bush’s uninhibited criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and her ambivalence about condemning Hamas (though she eventually came around to agreeing it’s a terrorist group). But the campaign was actually fought out over other issues, with Bell and UDC criticizing Bush’s refusal in November 2021 to vote with most other Democrats in favor of Joe Biden’s infrastructure package (she and five other Squad members voted against it to protest compromises made with Republicans, which helped secure 13 GOP votes). This was the same line of attack that succeeded in defeating Bush’s New York colleague Jamaal Bowman in June, where the incumbent’s defiance of party solidarity was similarly an issue and attracted both a strong opponent (George Latimer) and tons of AIPAC-aligned money.

In Bush’s case, the primary challenge from a more orthodox (albeit quite progressive) Democrat may have represented a bit of payback for her successful upset win over a deeply entrenched incumbent in 2020, as my colleague Zak Cheney-Rice noted when she achieved global fame in 2021 for a protest against the expiration of a pandemic-related eviction moratorium:

Cori Bush, the U.S. representative from Missouri’s First Congressional District, came to politics through protest, having worked as a triage nurse and organizer during the Ferguson uprising in 2014. She primaried 20-year incumbent [William] Lacy Clay in 2020 with a message that took aim at his complacency: His longevity and cushy position in the Democratic pecking order left him ill equipped to meet the urgent needs of the moment, she suggested.

Now Cori Bush is soon to be an ex-congresswoman. She did receive $2 million in backing from the progressive group Justice Democrats and tried to make an issue of Bell’s failure to prosecute the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014 (Bell was a city councilman in Ferguson before being elected chief prosecutor in St. Louis County in 2018). The two candidates had a lot in common, including recent legal controversies, as the Washington Post noted:

Bell and Bush are liberal Black Democrats who were born and raised here and who entered public service after protests against police shooting unarmed Black men. Both are beating back allegations of improper behavior: Bush faces a federal investigation over allegations that she misused campaign funds to hire her husband to provide security, and Bell faces a civil trial that has been delayed until January over allegations that he fired people based on their gender, age and race. Both candidates have denied wrongdoing.

Interestingly enough, fellow Squad member Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is also facing a competitive primary on August 13 against a challenger who nearly defeated her in 2022. But her primary has not attracted national money the way Bowman’s and Bush’s did, and she’s expected to win handily (new national celebrity Tim Walz is one of her allies). It seems Bush became more of a target than Omar due to her aggressive criticism of Israel, as the Post noted:

Bush was the first member of Congress to call for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, nine days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. She has described Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza — which, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians — as a genocide. (Israel has denied the allegation in ongoing hearings at the United Nations’ top court.)

Bell, on the other hand, called Hamas “openly genocidal” in an interview with The Washington Post last month and said the group was a threat to Western countries, including the United States. Israel is “just the front door,” he said, adding that it was “important for our national security that we stand with our fellow democracies, and that we stand against terror states, and Hamas is a terror state.”

The notion that Bell let himself become the vehicle for a show of power by AIPAC was encouraged by the circumstances of his late-developing challenge to Bush, as The Guardian explained:

Bell has denied being recruited by pro-Israel groups to run against Bush, but suspicion lingered after he abandoned a challenge for the US Senate and entered the congressional race not long after Jewish organisations in St Louis began to seek a candidate to take on Bush after accusing her of “intentionally fuelling antisemitism”.

So in the end, the Squad is down two members, and AIPAC has doubled down on demonstrating that conspicuous hostility to Israel has consequences in Democratic primaries.