Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) speaks during a primary election night watch party, June 25, 2024, in Yonkers, New York.
The loss of Rep. Jamaal Bowman to AIPAC-backed challenger George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, is being played as a defeat for “the left” and a sign of the Democratic Party and its voters moving to the center. As The New York Times put it, “Mr. Bowman’s win in 2020 seemed to herald an ascendant progressive movement. In 2024, the center is regaining power.”
Sorry, but the reality is rather more complicated. For starters, Bowman took the seat in the 2020 primary away from the 16-term incumbent, Eliot Engel, who had neglected to pay attention to the fact that the district, based in the Bronx, had become a lot Blacker and browner since Engel had first become its congressman in 1988.
Bowman’s was a classic grassroots insurgent challenge against an incumbent who had become out of touch. Bowman was endorsed not only by leading progressives and the Working Families Party but by the editorial board of The New York Times.
But the seat was redistricted after the 2020 census, and moved more substantially into suburban Westchester County. The old seat was almost evenly divided between the Bronx and southern Westchester. In the new seat, the Bronx is less than 15 percent of the electorate.
From that moment on, Bowman was a long shot to keep the seat as soon as a plausible challenger materialized. In 2022, he got only 57 percent of the vote in a divided Democratic primary.
AIPAC’s unprecedented outside funding of Latimer was a disgrace, but Bowman did himself no favors in the way he conducted his campaign. Instead of challenging Latimer as a centrist special-interest candidate, Bowman, perhaps sensing his likely defeat, doubled down on statements guaranteed to offend many voters whose support he needed to keep.
As Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pointed out, in one of the few thoughtful commentaries on this divisive race, Bowman fell into the habit of using the word “Zionist” as an insult, and at one point dismissed reports of Israeli women being raped as lies and propaganda. As Goldberg noted, many of Latimer’s comments were at least as deplorable. He tried to racialize the campaign by referring to Bowman as caring only about his Black and brown constituents.
Bowman also passed up opportunities to criticize Latimer for opposing widely supported Democratic proposals to restore taxes on the rich that were cut under Trump—a key plank in President Biden’s re-election campaign. Latimer has declared, “I am not signing on to raising taxes.”
As a mark of the Times’ editors’ cluelessness, Goldberg’s nuanced column was originally headlined “Jamaal Bowman’s Political Malpractice.” Goldberg must have gone ballistic. Within two hours, the headline had been changed to “The Most Important Primary Election of the Year Is Also a Heartbreaker.”
That it surely was. Among the heartbreaks are deeper divisions between Blacks and Jews, as well as more veracity, courtesy of AIPAC, to the ancient slander of Jews as having dual loyalties. Traditionally, the House leadership supports incumbents against challengers, but makes an exception when challengers are supported by AIPAC.
Among the other special interests that threw money at Latimer were PACs supporting cryptocurrencies. AIPAC and corporate Democrats should take no comfort from having knocked off a leading progressive, because Pyrrhic victories like this one will only weaken the unity that Democrats need next November.
And if anyone should be charged with political malpractice, it is President Biden, for continuing to support Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu no matter what. The more Netanyahu insults Biden, the more Biden keeps sending aid for offensive assaults on Gaza and ignores his own red lines, looking weak as well as complicit.
Were it not for Israel’s continuing Gaza war, these divisions among Democrats would be far more manageable, progressives would go on winning grassroots races based on the pocketbook issues that are the Democrats’ strong suit, and we would be at far less risk of a Trump presidency.
