In the Democratic Party, AIPAC’s “aura of invincibility” has dissipated. But it still remains a formidable force.

For half a century, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) operated on a simple premise: that no member of Congress, in either party, could afford to cross it. That premise is now being tested in real time, and it is failing more often than Washington’s conventional wisdom expected.

AIPAC’s influence was never really about ideology. It was about fear, the near-mechanical assumption among candidates and incumbents alike that AIPAC’s money and its ability to mobilize a well-organized donor and volunteer base could end a career. That fear was rational as long as AIPAC kept winning. For decades it did, expanding from a modest lobbying shop into a machine capable of funneling millions of dollars into primaries through vehicles like the United Democracy Project (UDP).

But the machine’s design depended on something specific: bipartisan consensus that support for Israel, on Israeli terms, was simply not a subject of legitimate domestic political debate. 

That consensus has been fraying since well before October 2023. Still, Israel’s war in Gaza accelerated the fracture, particularly inside the Democratic Party, where AIPAC’s leverage was always more contested and more expensive to maintain than inside a Republican Party with few internal skeptics left to police.

What’s notable about the 2026 midterm cycle is not that AIPAC and its allied groups stopped spending; they didn’t. Reporting this year shows AIPAC-aligned outside groups pouring tens of millions of dollars into Democratic primaries, often through opaque “pop-up” super PACs designed to obscure the money’s origin until after voters had already cast ballots. What changed is that the spending increasingly failed to convert into wins. 

In Illinois’s March primaries, AIPAC-backed candidates lost multiple high-profile races despite outspending their opponents many times over. This matters because AIPAC’s entire theory of power was never really about persuading voters. It was about deterring challengers and punishing dissenters severely enough that the next generation of candidates wouldn’t test the boundary.

When that deterrent stops working—when candidates start winning anyway, and increasingly campaign against AIPAC’s involvement as a badge of independence—the model breaks down. A super PAC’s money is a threat only if the threat is credible.

There’s a deeper irony here. AIPAC’s shift toward disguised, delayed-disclosure spending through shell PACs was a tactical response to its own declining popularity, an attempt to influence races without the AIPAC brand itself appearing on attack ads. But that tactic has increasingly backfired once reporters traced the money back to its source, turning “dark money” from a shield into a story. 

Opposition researchers and progressive operatives have gotten faster and more effective at making that connection before Election Day, and voters, especially younger Democratic-aligned voters, have responded by punishing candidates once the AIPAC tie becomes public.

Polling from earlier this year is instructive: in Michigan, the majority of Democratic primary voters, and a striking share of Jewish Democrats under 35 nationwide specifically, say an AIPAC endorsement makes them less likely to support a candidate, not more. An organization whose leverage depends on its endorsement being an asset has a serious problem when, for a large and growing slice of its own party’s base, that endorsement has become a liability to be denied or explained away.

AIPAC also now faces something it rarely had to contend with seriously: an organized financial counterweight. New groups formed explicitly to neutralize AIPAC’s primary spending, running candidates who campaign openly on rejecting the lobby’s money and its foreign-policy premises, have begun notching their own wins, funded in the low tens of millions rather than AIPAC’s tens of millions, but enough to make races competitive rather than foreordained. 

The lobbying equivalent of mutually assured destruction doesn’t eliminate AIPAC’s power, but it does something almost as consequential: it makes that power contestable, which is a status AIPAC spent decades trying to avoid.

For most of the last two cycles, the formula seemed reliable: AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, floods a district with independent-expenditure spending, and the candidate it opposes goes down. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO) learned that the hard way in 2024. But the 2026 midterm primaries told a messier story: AIPAC still won plenty of races, and still outspent everyone in the room, but in several high-profile contests, the money didn’t close the deal. 

Michigan’s Senate primary was the cycle’s marquee race. UDP spent roughly $30.6 million trying to sink progressive public-health advocate Abdul El-Sayed and elect Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, the largest sum AIPAC’s network has ever put into a single race. Total spending in the primary for Stevens topped $60 million when other groups are included.

El-Sayed won anyway, edging Stevens by roughly one percentage point in a race that took more than 12 hours after polls closed to call. Coverage at the time described it as one of the biggest setbacks AIPAC’s operation has taken this cycle. This nine-figure spending campaign came within a hair of working but ultimately didn’t move enough votes.

In the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 11th District special election to fill Mikie Sherrill’s old seat, AIPAC spent $2.3 million attacking former Congressman Tom Malinowski, himself a self-described “pro-Israel” moderate who had previously enjoyed AIPAC’s own support in past races.

The spending actively pushed the race toward Analilia Mejia (D-NJ), a Bernie Sanders-aligned progressive who has been sharply critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Mejia won by a very narrow margin; about 1,100 votes separated her from Malinowski.

In Connecticut’s 1st District, Rep. John Larson (D-CT), who had received about $120,000 in AIPAC-linked donations over the cycle, lost his primary to Luke Bronin, the former mayor of Hartford, by a wide margin, 53 percent to 34 percent. This wasn’t a race decided by millions in outside spending; it reads more like a case where the AIPAC association simply wasn’t enough to offset broader dissatisfaction with the candidate.

In Michigan’s 13th District, Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI), who had reversed course from once co-sponsoring a resolution calling Israel an “apartheid state” to becoming one of AIPAC’s more visible allies in Congress, complete with an AIPAC-funded trip to Israel, lost his seat to state legislator Donavan McKinney. 

This one was a bit different from the others: AIPAC hadn’t poured major independent-expenditure money into defending Thanedar this cycle, so analysts have been careful to call it “not a clean AIPAC loss” rather than a straightforward repeat of the Bowman/Bush playbook. Still, Thanedar heavily outspent McKinney from his own wallet; he had $5 million cash on hand versus McKinney’s $142,853, and lost anyway, 48.1 percent to 51.9 percent.

What does seem consistent across these races is that AIPAC’s association is becoming more contested territory in Democratic primaries than it was a cycle or two ago; several Democratic strategists and even some formerly AIPAC-aligned candidates have started describing the group’s spending as a liability rather than an asset in certain districts.

It would be a mistake to write AIPAC’s obituary prematurely. It remains, by a wide margin, the best-funded and best-organized pro-Israel political operation in the country. 

Its Republican relationships are largely undisturbed, since the GOP has little of the internal dissent roiling Democrats. And general elections, where AIPAC-backed Democratic nominees often cruise to victory regardless of primary controversies, remain a different environment than the primaries where its brand has become toxic. A bad cycle in Illinois is not the same as structural collapse.

What’s actually eroding isn’t AIPAC’s bank account. It’s the assumption, held for a generation by candidates, consultants, and reporters alike, that crossing AIPAC was simply not survivable. That assumption is now demonstrably false often enough that ambitious politicians are recalibrating their risk models in real time. 

An interest group whose power rested on an aura of invincibility doesn’t need to lose every fight to lose the thing that made it powerful. It just needs enough visible losses, and enough candidates willing to run against it and win, for the aura itself to dissolve.

That process is underway. Whether it culminates in genuine decline or in a chastened, less dominant AIPAC that finds a new equilibrium is the open question of the next several election cycles, not this one.

About the Author: Leon Hadar

Dr. Leon Hadar, a contributing editor with The National Interest, is a former senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and a former research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has taught international relations, Middle East politics, and communication at American University in Washington, DC, and the University of Maryland, College Park. A columnist and blogger with Haaretz (Israel) and Washington correspondent for The Business Times of Singapore, he is a former United Nations bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post.

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