How Summer Lee cruised to victory

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Summer Lee cruised to a convincing victory on Tuesday night against a well-financed opponent who had hoped Lee’s outspoken opposition to Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza would bring the freshman congresswoman down. With most of the vote counted, Lee leads Bhavini Patel with a blowout margin. The race was a test of the politics of Israel-Palestine, as Lee is among the Squad members who called for an early ceasefire and whom AIPAC had been hoping to take out.

Yet AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – which spent millions against Lee in her 2022 race, took a pass this time, perhaps concerned that Lee’s strong polling and broad popular support would make the contest a poor investment. But AIPAC also didn’t need to spend money, since Patel was boosted by massive super PAC support from Republican donor Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire. Yass is a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and financed his controversial effort to take over Israel’s judiciary. 

(Many Israeli political observers, including Yuval Harari, blame the attempted judicial coup for distracting the country and allowing the surprise attack of October 7. The decision to move security forces north to support rampaging West Bank settlers also left Israel's southern border with Gaza minimally defended.)

Yass, through the absurdly named “Moderate PAC,” spent at least $800,000 in the Pittsburgh-area race, perhaps more, which we’ll learn when the next round of Federal Election Commission reports are posted.

“Our campaign was built on a record of delivering for our democracy, defending our most fundamental rights, and expanding our vision for what is politically possible for our region’s most marginalized communities,” Lee said in a statement on Tuesday night. “Our victory is a rejection of right-wing interests and Republican billionaires using corporate Super PACs to target Black and brown Democrats in our primaries—be it AIPAC or Moderate PAC or any other MAGA billionaire in Democratic clothing.”

Squad member Cori Bush watched the returns from St. Louis, where she’s facing her own AIPAC-backed challenge. “Tonight, the people of Pittsburgh showed our seats cannot and will not be bought–and that’s exactly what we’re going to show again in St. Louis in August,” Bush said.

What powered Lee to victory, interestingly, was not just her enthusiastic grassroots support or unapologetic radical politics, but her ability to win over, and in some important cases take over, the party establishment. 

As a member of Congress, she helped bring back more than $1.2 billion in spending to benefit her district in her first term. Those investments helped her earn local establishment support, as those figures need a good relationship with their member of Congress if it looks like she’ll be there for a while. Lee had the backing of Democrats up and down the ladder: Both sitting Democratic senators from Pennsylvania endorsed her, including John Fetterman, the most vocal supporter of Israel’s assault on Gaza in the Senate, with whom she has had an icy relationship with over the years. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a tight ally of AIPAC, also endorsed her. So too did local unions. 

In other cases, Lee and her allies became the establishment: Sara Innamorato was elected to the state legislature with Lee in 2018, with the democratic socialist duo shaking up Harrisburg together. Last cycle, Innamorato was elected Allegheny County Executive, the most powerful position in western PA. Lee also helped elect progressive Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey who gave her a boost. Running for re-election with your allies in key positions of power is much easier than running solo against the machine.

Ahead of the election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used her leadership PAC to spend money on behalf of Lee and rallied with her, Gainey, Innamorato, and micro-celebrity Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones this past weekend.

Lee learned the value of establishment power in 2022 when she barely survived AIPAC’s spending against her in both her primary race and in the general. She very nearly lost the primary. In an interview for my book “The Squad,” she reflected on AIPAC’s attempt to block her from joining the Squad. “It’s very hard to survive as a progressive, Black, working-class-background candidate when you are facing millions and millions of dollars, but what it also does is then it deters other people from ever wanting to get into it. If you’re somebody who sat through my race as a supporter or not, someone in our district, who’s witnessing the movement that we’ve been a part of, they will look at the onslaught, they will look at what they said about me and how they conducted those campaigns, and then they would say, ‘I would never want to run myself.’ So then it has the effect of ensuring that the Black community broadly, the other marginalized communities, are just no longer centered in our politics,” she said.

“It’s a way of maintaining that status quo. But also it’s just disingenuous when we say that we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the issues. No, we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the resources.”

Facing the onslaught of AIPAC money in the closing days of her 2022 campaign, her lead of some 25 points evaporated in a matter of weeks. The charge AIPAC had made against her was that she wasn’t a real Democrat, that she was a crypto commie, essentially, who would undermine Joe Biden as president. So Lee went up on air with ads showing her on stage with Biden, while an independent expenditure put together by a coalition of progressive groups, led by Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, also came in late to buck her up.  

“When we were able to counteract those narratives that [voters] were getting incessantly — the saturation point was unlike anything you’ve ever seen — when we knocked on doors, no one was ever saying, ‘Oh, hey, does Summer have this particular view on Middle Eastern policy?’ Like, that was never a conversation. It was, ‘Is Summer a Trump supporter?’” Lee told me. “We were able to get our counter-ad up, a counter-ad that did nothing but show a video of me stumping for Biden, for the party. When we were able to get that out, it started to really help folks question and really cut through that.”

Lee's two major ads during her re-election campaign tell the story of her messaging success. One focuses on the $1.2 billion she brought back to her district and highlights her perfect record of never having missed a vote. It’s a populist message, hitting CEOs and lobbyists, but by no means does it make a sectarian left argument, and it doesn’t mention Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, or Gaza, for that matter. It’s simply classic populist politics. 

The second also hits the $1.2 billion figure and opens with a Pittsburgh-central-casting white guy vouching for her. “I’ve known Summer Lee since 2017,” he says. “I know the Republican-funded super PACs are lying about her again.” The ad highlights her battles with bogeywoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lee’s fight to protect Social Security and Medicare from Republican cuts. Using partisanship to her advantage, she turned the big money backing her opponent into a liability for Patel. By the time I finished writing this email, Lee’s lead had grown to nearly 25 points. 

“Where far-right billionaires and AIPAC megadonors see unbought, unbossed, democratically elected Black women like my sister Congresswoman Summer Lee and myself as a threat,” said Bush, “the regular, everyday people of our districts see effective leadership and a champion in the fight for justice for all.”