Democratic divisions over Israel lead to a left-left battle for a seat in the House of Representatives
Challenging Rep. Cori Bush for her seat in the Missouri House of Representatives, the St. Louis County prosecutor started his day Thursday with an interview by a prominent black radio personality in St. Louis.
The prosecutor, Wesley Bell, then gave a sociology class at St. Louis Community College, where he once taught criminal justice, and had lunch at a soul food restaurant in Ferguson, where it is now peaceful nearly a decade after protests there virtually destroyed the Black Lives Matter movement.
He met with workers' unions that afternoon, was interrupted by a Vietnamese community celebration of the Lunar New Year, and ended late into the night at the North County Democrats Club, in the suburb of Hazelwood.
“If you call me, I'll answer,” Bell, 49, assured members of the Laborers' International Union of North America, whose leaders once supported Mrs. Bush and now support her challenger, Mr. Bell. “And if you want me to come, I will come.”
Driven by the passions surrounding the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis and the subsequent war in Gaza, pro-Israel groups are financing a slew of primary challenges in heavily Democratic districts aimed at dethroning outspoken critics of Israel on the political left.
The deadly war has divided centrist Democrats from progressives like Mrs. Bush, who has condemned Israel for its response, seeking to hold back aid while pushing for a ceasefire as the death toll in Gaza has risen. Late last month, Mrs. Bush and the only Palestinian American in the House, Rashida Tlaib, were the only opponents of a resolution to ban Hamas members and those who participated in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel from the United States.
But unlike many of the primary conflicts fueled by different groups – such as the American Israel Political Affairs Committee; its political affiliate, the United Democracy Project; and the independent Democratic Majority for Israel – the battle between Bush and Bell in Missouri's First District pits progressives against progressives, each with a significant record that has little to do with Israel.
And though driven by money from pro-Israel groups and fervent Israeli critics, the battle for Missouri's deep-blue First District is likely to make scant mention of the Middle East. Instead, it will be a battle over representation, and what that should look like for troubled St. Louis.
“I am being targeted by AIPAC because I not only believe that Palestinians deserve to live free and peacefully like Israelis, but because I want to protect our democracy from Republican extremism,” Mrs. Bush said Monday. “I want to codify abortion rights, I want to pass meaningful gun violence prevention legislation, and I want to raise taxes on billionaires — all things that AIPAC, their GOP donors, and the insurgents they support oppose.”
Mrs. Bush is an icon of the left, an activist from the streets of the Ferguson protests who brought her voice to the halls of Congress. But Mr. Bell was also on the streets, mediating between protesters and police and then being elected to the Ferguson City Council.
He is a key figure in the progressive prosecutors' movement, which has spent nearly a decade trying to steer low-level offenders from incarceration to mental health and drug treatment programs, to free wrongfully convicted people from St. Louis prisons, and to to increase supervision of official bodies. misconduct in law enforcement and public prosecutions.
The primaries are expected to draw national attention because of the broader discussion about Israel and the extent to which the Democratic Party is willing to accept the Jewish state's fiercest critics, such as Mrs. Bush. But in the city of St. Louis and the surrounding county that bears the same name, the race may revolve around the limits of activism and personhood in a region desperately in need of tangible help.
Mrs. Bush enters the race as a lightning rod. Her pro-Palestinian activism has made her a particular focus of pro-Israel groups. She has acknowledged that there is a federal criminal investigation into the use of campaign funds to pay her husband for security work. And her outsize personality has rubbed some in the Democratic leadership the wrong way.
But for Mr. Bell and his supporters, her transgressions are more local. First and foremost, she voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill, a blow to the unions that supported her. Worse, she never met with them to explain her vote, said Clinton McBride, director of government affairs for the Laborers' International Local 110.
“The communication is pleasant,” he says. “It says a lot even though it's not there.”
Mrs. Bush denied keeping the unions in the dark and claimed her team had been in contact before, during and after the vote.
There are plenty of voters in St. Louis who love Mrs. Bush's in-your-face style of activism and who regret having to choose between two progressives. Ken Hughes, a retired member of Labor Local 42, recalled Mrs. Bush camping out on the Capitol steps in an orange sleeping bag and lawn chair in 2021, a vigil that forced the extension of a pandemic-era moratorium. about deportations.
“She's a fighter for the people, and I like that,” said Hughes, 60, who has not yet decided how he will vote in the Aug. 6 primary.
His friend, Greg Lomax, 54, was indecisive at the start of Thursday's labor meeting. But then, he said, “I just learned today that she voted against the infrastructure bill.”
Mr. Lomax spoke approvingly of her beliefs, adding in a tone of frustration, “but she's so, you know, resistant.”
Megan Green, chair of the St. Louis City Board of Aldermen, said Mrs. Bush has been well attuned to the city's needs. Mrs. Bush, she said, has secured nearly $2 billion for St. Louis' community health care facilities, public schools and nonprofits.
“For those of us who live here, when Cori says your congressman loves you, our community feels it,” Ms. Green said.
Pro-Israel groups have yet to formally intervene in the primaries, but an AIPAC official said Monday that the group has endorsed Mr. Bell. Other organizations are expected to support Mr Bell soon. At the same time, these groups' fundraising has been staggering since Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel and the resulting war in Gaza.
The United Democracy Project announced receipts of more than $44 million at the end of 2023, while there is still almost $41 million in the war chest. Contributors included well-known pro-Trump Republicans such as Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, who gave the political action committee $1 million.
The Democratic Majority for Israel will have $1.7 million more to spend at the end of the year.
These groups are targeting a number of incumbent Democrats this cycle, including Reps. Summer Lee in Pittsburgh, Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis, Jamaal Bowman in New York and Ms. Tlaib in Detroit.
“Defeating a sitting congressman is the hardest thing in politics; that is just a statistical fact, and she is not an unpopular politician,” said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic operative and founder of the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC.
But, he added: “She can be defeated.”
Marcy and Richard Cornfeld, the co-chairs of the St. Louis AIPAC Council have already given Mr. Bell the maximum, as has the financier Tony Davis. Timothy Drury, a scion of a Republican hotelier family, has done just that maximizes its contributions to Mr. Bell. So also Reid Hoffmanthe founder of LinkedIn and Democratic megadonor.
It is telling that Bell considered running for Senate against Missouri's senior senator, Republican Josh Hawley, and then reconsidered, said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the left-wing political action committee that fueled Mrs. Bush's rise supported. and will support her again this year.
“Wesley Bell went from running against Josh Hawley, a true right-wing insurgent, to taking thousands of dollars from the donors of Josh Hawley, Donald Trump and almost the entire Missouri Republican delegation to take on Missouri's first black congressman, ” he said.
For Mrs. Bush and liberal activists locally and nationally, such contributors disqualify a candidate who insists he is the progressive champion of local issues.
“I don't see Wesley Bell as progressive,” said Hannah Rosenthal, co-founder of Progressive Jews of St. Louis and a Bush ally. “His loyalty to AIPAC supporters is a good example.”
Ohun Ashe, an activist who met Mrs. Bush during the 2014 street protests in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown, said the impending intervention by national pro-Israel groups was part of a pattern of posturing for Mr. Bell.
Mr. Bell helped mediate between protesters and Ferguson police during the unrest, and in 2018 he defeated longtime incumbent prosecutor Robert McCulloch, promising to reopen the case against the police officer who killed Mr. Brown, Darren Wilson. shot.
He kept that promise and said in 2020 that he could not build a sufficient case against the officer, reaching the same conclusion that his predecessor and the Justice Department reached.
Even supporters of Mr. Bell say the sting lingers.
“Some of the people who appointed him as prosecutors may not support him against Cori Bush,” said Ferguson's current and first black mayor, Ella Jones, who does support him. “They are still angry.”
Mr. Bell said in an interview that it was quite rich for Mrs. Bush and her supporters to question a primary challenge backed by outside money, since Mrs. Bush did just that in 2020, by a sitting president, William Lacy Clay Jr., for ten terms. ., whose family name was virtually synonymous with the First District of Missouri.
Mr. Bell likes to advance positions that appeal to pro-Israel donors, saying Israel has a right to self-defense, and castigates Mrs. Bush for some of her votes, especially her opposition to U.S. investment in Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system, which he calls critical to stopping a broader war in the Middle East.
But his campaign focuses on his record: 2,200 low-level nonviolent defendants diverted to health care, job training and mentoring programs, with a 5.9 percent recidivism rate; the creation of a unit to investigate credible allegations of wrongful imprisonment and official misconduct; and an end to capital punishment prosecutions in the District – all pursued amid a national backlash against such efforts.
“That's a big problem in Missouri,” he said Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, which pushes for a less punitive approach to prosecution. “It's hard to commit to that movement in the long term because they come for you.”