Of the roughly $20 million super PACs affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have spent ahead of a quartet of Democratic congressional primaries in Illinois on Tuesday, the largest chunk has gone toward the state’s 9th District, one of the most heavily Jewish districts in the entire country.

It’s also the district where AIPAC’s preferred candidate is seen as having the least chance of winning. Two progressives whom AIPAC has spent millions of dollars opposing — Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and journalist Kat Abughazaleh — are seen as the most likely victors, while the path to victory for State Sen. Laura Fine, whom AIPAC has backed, now relies on multiple left-wing candidates splitting their vote.

Progressives are hopeful AIPAC’s struggles in the 9th District, which includes Chicago’s North Side and suburbs to the north and west of the city, can provide a blueprint for other left-wing candidates hoping to battle AIPAC as the lobby seeks to stamp out any dissent within the Democratic Party on providing unconditional military aid to Israel. The strategy they hope to replicate is simple: Make sure voters in the district know who AIPAC is and why the group is pouring millions into elections.

“When voters know about the dark money forces that are paying for the ads that they’re seeing, then progressives win,” said Rep. Greg Cesar (D-Texas), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is backing Biss. “When voters don’t know, then we lose.”

But AIPAC’s comparative success in three other Illinois districts holding primary elections the same day — its preferred candidates are favored to win in the 8th District, which includes suburbs to the south and west of the city, and are among the front-runners in the plurality-Black 2nd and 7th Districts in Chicago — may end up pointing to why an ultimate victory for the left in the long electoral battles over U.S. government support for Israel may be hard to secure.

While Israel has rapidly lost support within the Democratic Party ― an NBC poll released Monday found just 13% of Democrats have a positive view of the country, down from 34% in 2023 ― AIPAC’s strategy of using super PACs with generic names and airing attack ads on unrelated issues has worked in districts from St. Louis to Michigan to the New York City suburbs.

But there are reasons it seems to have flopped here. The 9th District is highly educated — a full quarter of its residents hold graduate degrees, and another 37% hold bachelor’s degrees. It’s also relatively wealthy, with a median income of around $90,000 a year, allowing it to support a more robust local news scene. And it’s 10% Jewish, according to demographic estimates, making it one of the most Jewish districts in the country outside of Florida and the New York metro area.

So voters here have the time, inclination and ability to figure out who’s behind the ads bombarding their television screens under innocuous sounding banners like Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership and Affordable Chicago Now!

“They are aware of what AIPAC is and what they stand for,” said Biss, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a liberal Zionist himself. “They don’t agree with their agenda of unconditional military aid for the current Israeli government no matter what they do in Gaza. They don’t agree with the position they’ve taken on this unbelievably dangerous, reckless and illegal war in Iran.”

Biss’ internal polling, in fact, indicates that AIPAC has a -30 favorability rating among likely primary voters. Democratic operatives in other races around the country say unconditional support for Israel is an unpopular stance basically everywhere, but awareness of AIPAC and its specific role is much lower. And creating it can be a challenge.

This is the problem facing State Sen. Robert Peters, a progressive running in the 2nd District. He’s facing attacks from a super PAC funded by crypto interests, while the artificial intelligence industry and AIPAC are funding super PACs backing two of his opponents. All of them are using innocuous-sounding PACs to do so while never mentioning the issues they actually care about.

“I find it disgusting and insulting to do that to voters,” Peters said of the way AIPAC and the other interest groups are obscuring their funding sources. “This is a working-class Black district. These are people who might be working two jobs, living paycheck to paycheck. They only have a limited amount of time for themselves, right? They have to try to figure out how they’re gonna get food on the table, they’re gonna take care of their kids, and they only have a limited amount of time they can tune in [to] a limited amount of media.”

“What we have here is a bunch of super PACs who are aligned with some of the worst people in this country trying to lie to working-class Black people,” he concluded.

Peters is hopeful the voters in his district can nonetheless see through the barrage of outside spending. “People bring it up to me – there’s a PAC they don’t like that’s backing Donna Miller,” he said, referring to the Cook County commissioner AIPAC is supporting. “It might not be explicit, they might not know about [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu], but they know it’s hiding its relationship to the Republican Party.” (Much of the money funding AIPAC’s electoral efforts comes from pro-Israel donors who also financially support President Donald Trump.)

The problem for the left is that many of the districts in which they hope to compete look more like the 2nd ― working-class and diverse ― than the comparatively high-income, high-education 9th District.

Strategists affiliated with the AIPAC-linked super PACs did not respond to a request for comment, but on Monday told Jewish Insider their goal was to prevent the election of candidates they viewed as potential future members of the Squad, naming Robert Peters, Kina Collins, Junaid Ahmed, Yasmeen Bankole, Kat Abughazaleh and Bushra Amiwala.

The list notably leaves off Biss, a candidate the group spent more than $1 million opposing.

Beyond Miller and Fine, AIPAC’s preferred candidates are Chicago Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin in the state’s 7th District and former Rep. Melissa Bean in the 8th District.

But it’s clear the 9th District was a priority for pro-Israel groups. AIPAC worked to get an Orthodox Jewish candidate off the ballot to help consolidate pro-Israel voters behind Fine and began airing ads supporting him more than a month before the election. Ads attacking Biss soon followed.

At the time, it appeared the group’s priority was stopping Biss, whose background could make him a uniquely powerful voice in speaking out against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “They’re threatened by me,” Biss said.

But as polling increasingly showed Biss holding his own, with Fine stuck in second or even third, the group also began attacking Abughazaleh with television and digital ads resurrecting articles she wrote as a conservative-leaning high school student.

The 26-year-old is to Biss’ left on Israel-Palestine issues, willing to call the war in Gaza a genocide, and has criticized Biss for speaking with AIPAC officials early on in the race. The spending, in part, seems designed to avoid a repeat of the results of a recent special election in New Jersey, where AIPAC attacked a mainstream Democrat who dissented from its hard-line views, helping a more leftist candidate triumph.

“They’re panicking because they did the same thing in New Jersey, and they are underestimating just how little the American people want AIPAC to be dictating our politics,” Abughazaleh said. “AIPAC knows that it’s unpopular because they’re hiding who they are from the American people. It’s kind of ludicrous how much they understand this fact, and yet how insistent they are that the status quo should continue.”

And now in the last days before the election, the group has moved on to yet another strategy. It’s running ads boosting a third progressive candidate, Amiwala, the member of a local board of education, in an apparent attempt to further divide left-leaning voters.

CORRECTION: This article was updated to correct the location of Illinois’ 9th district.

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