A new super PAC is throwing its weight behind progressive Democrats in upcoming midterm election primaries to counter the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobbyist that has recently hidden behind “shell PACs” to fund its preferred candidates, as opposition grows to its unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, sources told the Prospect.

The new PAC, American Priorities, filed a statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission last Thursday. It’s committing to spending multiple millions of dollars across several races, the sources said, beginning with a focus on a pair of Democratic congressional primaries in the South, where progressive candidates are up against establishment opponents.

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It has so far spent $550,000 on Durham, North Carolina, County Commissioner Nida Allam, who is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee for the state’s Fourth Congressional District seat. INDY Week, which highlighted American Priorities spending in the race, found that the PAC is also funding mailers and has “quickly become the single largest spender in the 2026 election” for the Fourth District.

Foushee previously accepted nearly $3 million from Israel lobbyists, according to the accountability website Track AIPAC, but last August dramatically broke with the group and said she would no longer accept their money. Allam is the first Muslim American woman elected official in state history and has the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). (Read Prospect executive editor David Dayen’s companion piece about that race here.)

The other race American Priorities is spending on right now is in the 30th District of Texas, where the PAC is spending on the Rev. Frederick Haynes to take over the seat of Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who is running for Senate. Haynes is Crockett’s pastor and has her endorsement. The Haynes and Allam spots, which are positive and biographical in nature, are running now in their respective districts.

Both candidates are endorsed by Justice Democrats, which is also spending money of its own in the races. The North Carolina and Texas primaries are on March 3. But this is only the beginning of American Priorities’ investments.

The American Priorities statement of organization lists as its campaign treasurer Mark Hanna, a Zohran Mamdani donor who was once on the board of Yalla Brooklyn, a kind of precursor to the Mamdani movement in New York City. It is the second major spender to emerge ahead of the 2026 midterm elections with the goal of shaking off AIPAC’s stranglehold on political spending. Last week, the newly formed Peace, Accountability, and Leadership PAC (PAL PAC) joined with the national progressive organization Justice Democrats to support pro-Palestine candidates. The partnership’s first endorsement is activist and journalist Kat Abughazaleh, who is running for Congress in the Ninth District of Illinois.

But American Priorities is the first organization that may be able to match AIPAC one-to-one in some races. Sources would not say how many races it will support, but suggested it could be as many as a dozen, with significant commitments that will make it a leading outside spender for the candidates it supports.

Fight Agency, which did media for Mamdani, and Middle Seat, which works with progressive candidates, are doing paid media for the effort.

The spending comes as AIPAC is using innocuous-sounding shell organizations to fund its chosen candidates, with names like “Elect Chicago Women” or “Affordable Chicago Now,” as David Dayen reported in early February and The Washington Post re-reported yesterday. It is already pouring millions into pro-Israel candidates, such as in the Seventh District of Illinois, where it plans to spend millions of dollars on ads for Melissa Conyears-Ervin via its designated super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP).

AIPAC and UDP recently attempted to exact revenge on former Rep. Tom Malinowski for saying that he would be open to U.S. military aid to Israel coming with conditions. UDP ran attack ads against him in the primary race to replace New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill in Congress, though he is a longtime supporter of Israel who previously took AIPAC money. Malinowski’s strongly pro-Palestine opponent, Analilia Mejia, won the primary as a result.

Sources close to American Priorities said taking an explicit pro-Palestine stance is a winning position for Democrats, despite the squeamishness of party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), who has accepted $6.4 million from the Israel lobby and its mega-donors as of this month, according to Track AIPAC. By last October, support among Democrats for imposing sanctions on Israel had grown to a supermajority, IMEU Policy Project and Gen-Z for Change found.

Polling shows that it’s a winning position for Republicans, too. Forty-four percent of Republicans overall and a majority of voters under 45 said in a December poll IMEU released that they’d vote for a Republican candidate who supported cutting military aid to Israel.

The attempted concealment of AIPAC spending in races in Illinois serves as an indication that the organization understands the toxicity of its politics and the dim view that Democratic primary voters take of it. Now there’s some firepower coming from the other direction in the ad wars.

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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines.