On March 17th, candidate Daniel Biss defeated 15 other Democratic challengers in the primary election for Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District. It was one of the most closely watched in the country, in which Biss, and other candidates, were up against millions of dollars in ad spending from dark-money super PACs like Elect Chicago Women and Chicago Progressive Partnership. These vaguely named PACs were all fronts for AIPAC, the big-spending pro-Israel lobbying group that threw money and ads at various candidates in hopes of electing Laura Fine, who eventually came in third.

Biss won by putting AIPAC, and their influence, at the center of his campaign. Today on the show, Matt Stoller and David Dayen talk with Biss about what it’s like to go up against the AIPAC lobbying machine, how these super PACs use their vast resources to distort the race in real time, and what Democrats should do if they take back Congress in the upcoming midterms.

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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90.

Matt Stoller is research director at the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.