Two weeks ago, Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ) put out a poll showing him leading the July 21 Democratic primary in Arizona’s Fourth Congressional District, located in and around Phoenix, by 33 points, while carrying a massive 70 percent favorability rating. Normally, incumbents with that kind of lead wouldn’t bother putting a poll like that out; we have to surmise it was meant to either calm supporters or scare off opponents from investing money in his opponent’s campaign.
Stanton’s supporters were apparently not calmed. A week after the poll release, an affiliate of Leading the Future, one of the main electoral PACs funded by the artificial intelligence industry, sunk $227,000 into television and streaming advertising and text messaging on Stanton’s behalf. The outside expenditure isn’t enormous, but it is curious: Why are AI oligarchs defending an incumbent who is blowing out his opponent?
Maybe it’s because Stanton’s lead isn’t so secure. A more recent survey taken last week by A Fight Worth Having, a backer of his opponent, democratic socialist Kai Newkirk, shows the race narrowing to single digits. Stanton leads Newkirk 46-38, but among those who have yet to vote, about half the electorate, Newkirk leads 41-30 with 17 percent undecided. If the undecideds break for Newkirk, another Democratic incumbent could fall in what has already been a historic primary season.
Newkirk, a longtime activist and organizer, only got into the race four months ago, inspired by a deepening sense of outrage at the inadequacy of Stanton’s responses to Donald Trump’s extremism and the genocide in Gaza. As co-chair of the Arizona Democratic Party’s Progressive Council, Newkirk said they had tried to push Stanton on Gaza, including by sending a delegation to his office. But Stanton, despite making a conditional call for a cease-fire, continued to vote for military aid to Israel without conditions, voted to sanction the International Criminal Court for its charges against Israeli leaders, and criticized Joe Biden for briefly stopping the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs.
“And then, when Trump returns to office, he voted for the Laken Riley Act,” Newkirk said, referring to the immigration legislation that has helped to facilitate mass detention and deportation. “He just wasn’t showing up to push back against Trump in this seizure of authoritarian power … it was a cascade of things where I felt, as a sense of emergency and injustice and moral travesty is intensifying, that there was too much cost to having a corporate Democrat not fighting but enabling and facilitating it.”
That decision led someone who has spent a career running campaign finance reform groups like Democracy Spring, which engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience to call attention to the need to get money out of politics, to have to raise money himself for an election campaign. He has only raised $151,000 over the cycle as of June 30, but when we talked last week, he said the campaign had just had its best fundraising day. “Our job is to bring to people’s attention the big gap between the decisions Stanton has made and where Democrats stand,” he said. That includes social media and digital organization, with volunteer door-knocking that Newkirk believes is working. “My experience on the doors and what our people have seen, it tells me that it’s right there to be seized.”
Stanton has raised over $2 million this cycle, with less than 5 percent coming from small donors under $200, according to Open Secrets. Over $600,000 of his campaign haul comes from corporate PACs like UnitedHealth, Cigna, Humana, SpaceX, Walmart, Amazon, Google, Fox Corporation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Clear Channel, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, McKesson, UPS, body camera makers Axon, Waste Management, Boeing, State Farm Insurance, Medtronic, Visa, Home Depot, Tenet and Elevance Healthcare, Delta, JetBlue, and Southwest Airlines, the Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, and BNSF railways, weapons manufacturers RTX, L3Harris, General Dynamics, and Honeywell, as well as several banking trade groups, the American Hospital Association, and a bunch more. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee also contributed $6,000 directly. Newkirk, adding in AIPAC donors who have also contributed to Stanton, calls AIPAC Stanton’s top contributor.
That relates to an exceedingly unusual circumstance that Newkirk personally experienced. “Several weeks ago, I and others started getting these texts saying, ‘Do you have a minute to talk about U.S.-Israel relationship?’” Newkirk told me. “It seemed like an AI chatbot.” The texts, which provided pro-Israel messaging on behalf of “Friends for Peace” and cast doubt on atrocities in Gaza, were associated with an organization called Clock Tower X run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, whose political firm has $9 million in direct contracts with the state of Israel. They’ve been circulating since last year, but Newkirk said they appear to show up more in primaries where Israel is a major issue.
“You’d think it’s a fable but it’s true,” he said. “It’s a foreign government—not AIPAC but Israel—intervening in our politics to mold public opinion.”
Newkirk filed a formal complaint with the Arizona attorney general’s office over Israel’s election interference. He hadn’t heard back as of last week. The office did not respond to the Prospect’s request for a status update.
Despite an odd incident where the Arizona Young Democrats canceled their endorsement of Newkirk over “concerning patterns of behavior,” apparently based on a ten-year-old article that was retracted two years ago by the author and rejected by other youth organizations, the latest poll shows that Newkirk has some momentum, with attention in independent media. Meanwhile, Stanton hasn’t really made his presence felt, hoping that his name recognition and superior fundraising will carry him to victory.
Stanton has skipped debate appearances in the district and has done no town halls. Newkirk says Stanton’s events are very controlled. His campaign office is listed as a UPS mailbox. Newkirk did track Stanton down recently at a lightly publicized event around health care. “I asked him about health care in Gaza and asked if he would commit to renounce AIPAC funding, end military support for Israel, and denounce election interference,” Newkirk said. “He didn’t answer and was hustled out of the room.”
Yet when it came time for an outside super PAC to boost Stanton, it was not AIPAC’s that did the job, but an artificial intelligence–funded PAC. Newkirk has rallied opposition to an AI data center project in Ahwatukee, a city in the district. And his general platform involves progressive taxation and public provision of goods (including an innovative proposal around price caps on a basket of essential goods that was used to great effect in Mexico) to rebalance the relationship between the wealthy and everybody else.
“Political and economic power are becoming more concentrated and leading to deepening inequality,” Newkirk said. “We’ve got to break the grip of oligarchs on our democracy and move toward a shared prosperity … If we break from corporate power and make government a tool to deliver for working-class people, there’s no limit to what’s possible.”
Stanton’s campaign did not respond to multiple questions for this article.
A victory for Newkirk would show that Stanton’s sleepwalking on threats from Trump carried over into sleepwalking in his own race. Newkirk believes that the fight against Trump should be seen as existential. “We have to prove, like when FDR was fighting fascism, that democracy can change people’s lives for the better.”
UPDATE: This story has been updated to better reflect the timing of a retracted hit piece about Kai Newkirk.
