One week ago, a slate of democratic socialists swept three competitive Democratic House primaries in New York. In districts this blue, the primary is the election.
Among the winners are candidates who rose through the movement that treats hostility to Israel as a credential, including one who helped organize the Columbia University encampments. They are now bound for Congress.
Now, it may be Colorado’s turn.
In Denver, a 29-year-old barista and self-described democratic socialist is polling ahead of a 15-term congressional incumbent. The challenger has said that the Oct. 7 attacks were justified. She launched her campaign after losing a law-firm job over a letter defending critics of Israel’s war in a district that has not gone Republican since 1970. Today’s primary will decide the seat.
The numbers behind the alarm are unforgiving. A Pew survey in March found that 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up from 53% a year earlier and 40% in 2022. The erosion reaches the core: Evangelical Christian favorability fell from 72% to 65% in a single year, and American Jewish favorability from 73% to 64%. The base is not merely outnumbered; it is thinning from within.
Elected officials read these numbers before anyone else. In April, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block a weapons sale to Israel; two years earlier, only 15 would have. A position once confined to the fringe is now a near-consensus in one of the two governing parties.
Confronted with this, the instinct of Israel’s friends is the instinct of every well-funded cause: raise money, run ads, flood the zone. It feels decisive, but seldom is. This spring, pro-Israel groups spent more than $5 million on a single House race in a heavily Jewish Chicago district, and their candidate finished a distant third.
Money can amplify a strategy. It cannot replace one.
Here is what all that spending refuses to learn: The most underrated force in American politics is not money but organizing, and organizing is cheap.
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in the primary election for New York’s 14th Congressional District—the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a presumptive future Speaker who outspent her many times over—by 4,018 votes. She won by out-organizing him, not by outspending him. These contests turn on a few thousand ballots, not the national mood.
Ironically enough, the pro-Israel side is sitting on precisely the asset those ballots require and barely touching it. Its voters cluster in suburbs and congregations, where a primary can turn on a handful of precincts. They do not need persuading; they need to be found, registered and walked to the polls. Faith communities are unusually well-suited to it: A turnout operation needs accurate lists and committed volunteers, and is helped by the routine gathering of the same people. Most congregations already have all three.
None of this is partisan. The left’s turnout machines were built over decades by unions and community organizers, one conversation at a time, while the other side kept mistaking spending for strategy. Helping a neighbor cast a ballot is not an ideology; it is a discipline, and only one side has bothered to master it.
Listen to how the winning side explains itself. In response to the outcome of June 23, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) credited the victories to ordinary people who “knocked on doors, made phone calls, organized in their communities.” That, he wrote, is how to “defeat establishment politicians and enormous amounts of money.” He has been saying versions of this for 40 years, and this year his side is proving it again, district after district.
Donors tired of watching money vanish into the next ad cycle, and the members of Congress who count votes for a living could learn from the people who keep beating them with it. A supporter found in the spring is a known vote in the fall. Organizing compounds where advertising does not.
The favorability numbers will keep sliding, no matter what any commercial says, and what came for New York last Tuesday may already prove true in Denver. There, the pro-Israel community was privately urged for months to organize against it. It remains to be seen whether they did.
Sanders’s people grasped long ago what their opponents still resist—that conviction without organization is only sentiment, and sentiment does not turn out to vote. The question facing Israel’s friends is no longer whether they believe, but whether they will finally do the patient, unglamorous work that belief alone has never once done for them.
