Progressive gains in Illinois 9th District race challenge Israel lobby

Whichever of the two progressive candidates wins the buzzworthy Illinois 9th District primary, the result will register as a meaningful precedent for a Democratic Party that is slowly recalibrating on Israel. The race to replace Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who first won the seat nearly three decades ago, has narrowed to three frontrunners. Two of them, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and first-time candidate Kat Abughazaleh, are running from the left, supporting Palestinian statehood and opposing unrestricted U.S. arms transfers to Israel. The third, state Sen. Laura Fine, is running on her legislative record and happens to be the candidate boosted by the Israel lobby. Fine is polling third and sinking.

The most recent poll from March 10 has Biss at 24 percent, Abughazaleh at 20 percent and Fine is at 14 percent. Her net favorable rating collapsed by 23 points in just over two weeks, dropping to minus-22 in early March — making her the least popular of the three leading candidates in a district where she is a state senator. AIPAC-affiliated “shadow” PACs like Elect Chicago Women have poured upward of $5 million into the race, funded ads promoting Fine and attacking her rivals; one ad flagged Abughazaleh’s support for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign when she was in high school. Yet the barrage seems to have had the opposite effect, in part because the progressive candidates have made the outside spending itself a major campaign issue.

By most conventional measures, Fine ought to be competitive here. She supports universal health care, Medicare for All and abolishing ICE, and has a 13-year record in the General Assembly. That résumé, in another cycle, might have been enough to outlast two less-established challengers who are to her left but lack her establishment footing. She is not some centrist interloper. But it’s a moot point. In a district this attentive, the AIPAC association has made her candidacy a non-starter.

As the Chicago Tribune reported, “a substantial share of Fine’s most recent fundraising — close to $1 million last quarter out of $1.3 million raised — came from contributors who matched the names and zip codes of those who previously gave to AIPAC or an affiliated super PAC.” Though Fine claimed these donations reflected confidence in her legislative record, all they’ve done is reinforce her opponents’ narrative.

As Biss told the American Prospect, voters who see the negative ads “trashing [him]” know the money is coming from right-wing, out-of-state donors trying to buy the seat. The two progressive candidates have spent portions of the campaign in a squabble over which of them AIPAC has attacked more aggressively. 

The 9th District ranks 4th in Illinois in residents 65 or older, which makes the backlash here all the more notable. Among younger voters, pro-Palestinian sentiment is a given: they show a hostility toward the old bipartisan consensus on Israel, much of their exposure to Gaza has come from social media — where Palestinians on the ground have documented the destruction in real time — and AIPAC’s efforts to suppress student activism, from backing legislation targeting campus speech to funding opponents of pro-Palestinian candidates, have made the lobby a mobilizing issue. But Illinois’s 9th District is a useful barometer for the shift reaching older, educated Democrats.

The fallout certainly seems to have reached California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is positioning himself for 2028 as the opposition to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s cautious ambiguity on Israel and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s staunch support. On a recent Pod Save America appearance, Newsom went full frontal — calling the Jewish state “sort of an apartheid [one].” On other occasions, he’s disavowed AIPAC and talked about going on pro-Palestinian pundit Hasan Piker’s livestream. Newsom did soften the apartheid language not long after. But whatever you make of Newsom, the man has a nose for where the zeitgeist is at, and he doesn’t stick it out for nothing. What is unfolding in Illinois is precisely the primary electorate signal a presidential supplicant like Newsom cannot afford to ignore.

This tracks with the national turn in the Israel-Palestine information war. For the first time in 25 years of Gallup tracking (since 2001), Americans say they sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, Democrats having already moved sharply in that direction by 2023. The broad-based erosion of America’s pro-Israel tilt is something the 2024 election foreshadowed, with many Biden 2020 voters who didn’t support Harris citing U.S. policy on Israel as their top reason.

AIPAC has amassed nearly $100 million for the 2026 cycle, but the early results point to a waning payoff. In New Jersey, the group spent $2.3 million attacking Tom Malinowski, a moderate, only to watch voters select a pro-Palestinian progressive who was further from AIPAC’s preferences than Malinowski had ever been. 

Still, there is something worth pausing over in a dynamic where a candidate who wants to abolish ICE is not considered progressive enough because she is insufficiently critical of Israel. On the left, the most practical framework for this is what might be called a pro-Palestinian omnicause — one that seeks to explain all of America’s failings, from immigration enforcement to environmental degradation, as mirroring or even resulting from Palestinian oppression. And the Israel lobby has done a lot to make it persuasive.

William Liang is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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