ST. LOUIS, Missouri — On a sticky-warm Tuesday in St. Louis, with seven days to go before the primaries, Rep. Cori Bush got on a Zoom call with press and constituents to defend herself from “lies and misinformation.” The Middle East conflict was expanding; Israel had struck into Beirut, killing a Hezbollah commander, and would soon kill Hamas’ leader in Iran. Bush had faced severe blowback for her criticisms of Israel — including in the form of millions in pro-Israel PAC money to her top primary challenger, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell.
But the call wasn’t about the Middle East. It was about why she’d voted against the infrastructure bill.
All over Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, voters in the city of St. Louis and some surrounding suburbs had been inundated with mailers and ads calling Bush “INEFFECTIVE,” highlighting missed House votes and “no” votes on major Biden agenda items. These attacks had grown so damaging that the candidate was spending most of an hour, in the home stretch to the Aug. 6 primary, on one single vote she’d cast three years before. She said she’d voted “no” to preserve leverage for President Joe Biden’s broader “Build Back Better” proposal and ticked off the ways it would have helped St. Louis — expanding the child tax credit, paid family leave, increased affordable housing stock. “I held the line for the whole agenda,” she said. And that agenda, she went on, was ultimately tanked by Republicans and “corporate Democrats.”
For a bitter primary campaign that began partly in response to Bush’s stance on Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel — when Bush condemned the attack but also called Israel an “apartheid state” in the same statement — the leading candidates have rarely brought up the conflict unprompted in the race’s waning days. But it looms over the contest even when it’s unmentioned. It’s in the mailers and ads from the United Democracy Project, the AIPAC campaign arm that’s backing Bell to the tune of $8 million so far. It’s in Bush’s repeated references to “MAGA Money” (though the American Israel Public Affairs Committee also backs leading Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has endorsed Bush) and in her insistence that “St. Louis is not for sale.”
The race is this primary season’s second major attempt to knock off a Squad member, a little over a month after George Latimer felled Rep. Jamaal Bowman by double digits in New York’s 16th District. There, too, the United Democracy Project (the independent expenditure arm of AIPAC) put millions behind the challenger, which helped make that contest the most expensive House primary ever. But as Bush noted in a text to POLITICO Magazine, “St. Louis is a very different district than NY-16. For starters, St. Louis has a plurality of Black voters in this district, and is incredibly diverse and progressive.” It is also younger and less affluent, with a much smaller Jewish population. “Because of the outside spending from right-wing superPACs attacking me and misleading voters,” Bush wrote, “this will be a competitive election that will come down to every vote.”
United Democracy Project has adjusted its messaging accordingly. “Clearly the kind of kitchen-table economic issues are a bigger deal in St. Louis,” said Patrick Dorton, a United Democracy Project spokesperson. “New York is just different. [In] New York it was less about economics and more about social issues.” And though the group’s core message wasn’t about Israel in either case, Dorton said, “obviously it was more of a focus in Westchester.”
The racial dynamics of the contest are also different. New York’s 16th voted to replace a progressive Black candidate with a moderate white one; Missouri’s 1st pits a progressive Black man against a progressive Black woman. Bowman accused Latimer of racism; Bush suggests Bell is a sellout. While the flood of advertising has forced Bush to address attack lines, Bush has made the funding itself a line of attack against him. And because their policy positions are similar other than on Israel, the major differences concern style and tactics: whether St. Louis wants an activist fighter or a lower-key bridge-builder.
“It’s like a bad family feud,” said John Bowman, who is president of the St. Louis County NAACP and supports Bush. Bush and Bell both rose to prominence after the police shooting of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri — she as an activist and he as a municipal judge. She went to Congress, and he unseated a long-tenured, police-friendly prosecutor in St. Louis County, becoming the first Black person to hold that position.
Bowman has supported both of them in the past. But he called the funding issue “very problematic in our communities. … When I talk to older Black women, the first thing they say to me is, why is he running against her? … And the Black women vote, it’s going to matter.”
Bell’s answer to the “why” question is right there in the mailers: He thinks Bush is ineffective and divisive and that the district deserves better representation. He announced his race a few weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, but he says the origins came before, out of conversations with community members and elected leaders that drew him to the conclusion “she’s not doing her job.” The available polls currently have Bell a few points ahead, though they have been commissioned by Bell-affiliated PACs. (The Bush campaign has not made its polling public; Steve Rogers, a pollster at St. Louis University, advised that it’s difficult to poll primary electorates and PAC-funded polls should be taken “with a grain of salt.”)
But it was clear from conversations around the district in recent days that Bell was chipping into Bush’s support in the Black community — not least due to his preexisting brand and relationships. “To me, I feel like Cori has alienated herself from a lot of people, white people particularly,” said Charlie Dooley, who was St. Louis’s first Black county executive. He voted for Bush the last time she faced a primary, which she won by double digits in 2022, but didn’t campaign for her that year (“I wasn’t asked. I’ll leave it at that.”).
“This race will say more about the Black community than it says about Cori Bush or Wesley Bell,” said Mike Jones, a former alderman with a long career in and around St. Louis politics — including as a Dooley adviser. He supports Bush.
“The real story about this,” he said, “will be what comes after.”
It was only two cycles ago that Bush was the primary challenger wielding outside spending for an advertising advantage. She’d run for U.S. Senate in 2016 and U.S. House in 2018, both times unsuccessfully — in the latter race she lost by 20 points to incumbent St. Louis Rep. William Lacy Clay. But when she took her second shot at unseating him, she prevailed by three points, “in a show of progressive might,” as The New York Times wrote. She thereby toppled a dynasty. Clay had by then served 10 terms, and his father, Bill, who had previously held the seat for 32 years, blamed “outside money from sources associated with Bernie Sanders” for the loss.
The dollar amounts at issue seem almost quaint by the standards of the 2024 primary. Justice Democrats, which funded numerous primary challenges against establishment Democrats and helped elevate the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, spent $150,000 on ads in that campaign’s last week, according to OpenSecrets. That same year, another insurgent toppled another establishment (and incidentally pro-Israel) Democrat with six-figure help from Justice Democrats — Jamaal Bowman.
Bush acknowledges that “we have faced outside money in this district before” but says that “the money we are seeing being poured into this race is an unprecedented dumping of money from large corporations and GOP megadonors in a deep blue district.” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, drew a qualitative point from the quantitative difference, texting that “a single Super PAC spending $10, $15 million in a single Democratic primary is … an all-out assault on our democracy that allows the richest megadonors and corporate interests to try and buy a seat in Congress.” Asked about the funding issue, Anjan Mukherjee, a spokesperson for the Bell campaign, redirected back to Bush’s voting record: “Rep. Bush let St. Louis down when she voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill and the Child Tax Credit that would have helped 300,000 Missouri kids. Since she can’t defend her own record, she continues to resort to false attacks on Wesley. St. Louis deserves better.”
In any case, PAC money giveth and PAC money taketh away. And while spending can spread a message, it can’t by itself make such a message resonate. AIPAC spending is not the reason Jewish voters I spoke to feel they don’t have an ally in Congress, and it’s not why St. Louis Jewish organizations across the ideological spectrum called it “sickening” that she characterized Israel’s war in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing.” In the large parts of the district where the Israel-Gaza war is not the top issue — for instance in the neighborhood where I grew up — folks like my mom might not be asking questions about Bush’s infrastructure vote if it weren’t for the deluge of mailers. But it is a vote Bush cast and one voters are entitled to ask about. (The mailer leaves out that the bill passed and St. Louis got millions regardless.) Same goes for the 187 votes Bush has missed during this Congress. A hundred of those, she explained on the Zoom call, took place over three days when she had Covid. (The House has a chronic truancy problem in general.) But absent that reality, Bell wouldn’t have grounds for the attack line that Bush “doesn’t show up to work.”
I heard him make this point in a barbershop in North St. Louis County, where he’d stopped in to chat and press the flesh. One guy named Ezra peppered him with questions about reproductive rights while a barber ran clippers over his scalp. Another wanted to know about investments in North County, prompting Bell to wax rueful about population decline and the need to attract jobs and industry back to the region. The race was getting uglier and more personal — someone in the Bush camp had leaked audio of Bell assuring her he would not run against her, which Bell defended by saying the circumstances had changed. I asked Bell about whether the race was dividing people in the Black community. He said he’d mainly seen the divisions on social media, that people were respectful and constructive in personal conversations. “You’ve got to understand,” he said, “I come from Ferguson. I was there during daily protests, and sometimes they would even get violent. And we came out of that.”
About 17 miles south, in my parents’ suburb of Webster Groves, Bush was meeting with voters at the public library. She was defending her vote on the infrastructure bill. She didn’t bring up Israel, and most of the questions she took had been screened ahead of time. No one asked about it.
Lawmaker who called Israel ‘apartheid state’ faces tough Tuesday primary
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