AIPAC Going Dark Sheds New Light on the Derelictions of the Democrat Party

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright

04 Nov 2026

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AIPAC's decision to stop directly endorsing and funding candidates is merely a shift to dark money. The Democratic Party will not cut off AIPAC or oligarchic money because its leadership benefits from it.

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within... For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments..." - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Note: This piece was written before the outcomes of the midterm elections were announced.

Characterizing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as polarizing is an understatement. While they only started their political action committee and began endorsing and donating to candidates in 2021, ahead of the 2022 midterm election cycle, AIPAC has become a ubiquitous variable ensconced in the U.S. electoral equation and the larger national political discussion. Since 2021, AIPAC has become a political behemoth, buying off candidates across the political spectrum - a notion supported by its claim to have been, “dollar-for-dollar the largest contributor to candidates in American politics,” during the 2022 midterms. And more recently, AIPAC released a video claiming to be the top fundraiser for “Pro-Israel” Democrats and the top fundraise for members of the so-called Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), which is separate from the roughly $3 million doled out to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ Jeffries Majority Fund.

The price for AIPAC’s support is simple - inexorable loyalty and fealty to the zionist ethnostate of Israel, including continuation of aiding, abetting, and funding its incessant pogroms of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against Palestinian people, as well as its “Greater Israel” project lobbed against Arabs in neighboring nations like Lebanon and Syria. The cost for not supporting the zionist ethnostate - millions of dollars spent against you - even if you are Jewish, as we saw with former Congressman Andy Levin of Michigan, who was one of the first candidates to incur AIPAC’s financial and political wrath in 2022 for introducing a bill promoting a “two-state solution” that was intended to “promote a peace agreement including by preventing US aid being used to tighten Israel’s grip on the occupied Palestinian territories, and to block expansion of Jewish settlements and the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.” Levin was defeated by zionist-zealot and AIPAC sock puppet Haley Stevens, who once proclaimed, “Israel comes to me in my dreams.” Stevens recently lost her primary for U.S. Senate to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, despite receiving over $30 million dollars of AIPAC’s blood money. More on Ms. Stevens in a moment.

By the 2024 election cycle, AIPAC and its affiliated United Democracy Project and AIPAC PAC became what journalists Jessica Piper and Hailey Fuchs described as a “fundraising juggernaut” - a description that carries massive merit. As Piper and Fuchs report, AIPAC became the largest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democrat Party primaries in 2024 - and they had a proclivity for targeting “progressive” Democrat incumbents who spoke against the zionist ethnostate after it commenced its genocide against Palestinians following Hamas’s Al Asqa Flood operation that took place on October 7, 2023. Two of the more prominent “progressives” who lost their primary races in 2024 were Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of St. Louis - the former saw roughly $14.4 million spent against him by AIPAC and affiliated groups (making it then the most expensive House primary in history), and the latter saw roughly $8.4 million spent against her.

Ahead of the 2024 midterm election cycle, public sympathy shifted from the zionist ethnostate to the Palestinians, along with an increasing number of United Statesians expressing disapproval of it, due largely to the full extent of the carnage and barbarism associated with the genocide coming more into focus for the U.S. and the entire world. AIPAC was fully aware of the shifting mood in the U.S. and committed to spending $100 million taking aim at candidates it deemed “insufficiently supportive of Israel.” Bush and Bowman were not the only electoral casualties at the hands of AIPAC. Of the 469 seats in the House and Senate up for re-election in 2024, AIPAC invested in 80 percent of them (389 races) and won all but four of them.

But something has shifted in the U.S. polity since 2024. AIPAC has gone from being a “fundraising juggernaut” to an electoral albatross that has resulted in numerous lawmakers, including expected Democrat Party presidential candidates such as Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), Senator Reuben Gallego (D-AZ), Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), and Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY), proclaiming their intention to reject AIPAC money or no longer accept it. It’s clear that these altered dynamics played a role in AIPAC’s announcement last week that it would no longer endorse candidates or make “direct” contributions to them. As Political analyst Trita Parsi discusses in a tweet he recently wrote, “Rather than invincibility, AIPAC’s name now carries such toxicity that the group doesn’t want its own name on its political donations.”

That said, there is no reason to believe that AIPAC’s announcement that it will no longer endorse or directly fund candidates signals its willingness to retreat or reduce the oversized influence it enjoys in U.S. elections. As journalist Dion Nissenbaum, who just released a documentary about AIPAC, admonishes, “If AIPAC’s super PAC – the main source of its campaign donations – is going to keep operating, it may be an attempt to reinvent itself without ceding the battlefield.” AIPAC’s announcement to stop directly endorsing and funding candidates indicates their willingness to go dark —as in dark money— an idea that is shared by Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, who remarked, “[AIPAC] has already been experimenting with ways to make their support more untraceable.” And this is where we have to ask ourselves how the Democrat Party will respond to AIPAC’s announcement and its likely intention to continue influencing elections with dark money - though the answer is already quite clear.

At the time of writing this, the 2026 midterm election cycle was poised to surpass an eye-raising $11.6 billion from donors to candidates and political parties of their choice. The vast majority of these donors are billionaires using a combination of Super PACs and dark money to assist both Democrats and Republicans. As elections become even more expensive as we head into the 2028 Presidential election cycle - something that will be upon us faster than you can say, “vote blue no matter who” - it’s unlikely, if not implausible, that Democrats willingly give up their access to oligarchic largesse or blood money from AIPAC - and there’s precedent to support this.

Earlier this year, the Democrat National Committee (DNC) voted down a resolution condemning the influence of AIPAC in Democrat Party primary elections, while also tabling resolutions to condition aid to the zionist ethnostate and recognize a Palestinian state. In responding to the rejection of the AIPAC resolution, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) President and CEO, Brian Romick, quipped, “We’re pleased that the DNC Rules Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” and added, “These measures would be a gift to Republicans, would further fracture our party, and do nothing to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to peace.” This is obviously a specious and anodyne take on Romick’s part as he knows damn well that his group and AIPAC both actively work to take out “progressives” who have made attempts to bring a peaceful resolution to the zionist ethnostate’s 80-year Palestinian subjugation campaign— as noted with what happened to former Congressman Andy Levin— and prevent candidates who call for a re-thinking of the U.S. relationship with the zionist ethnostate from being elected. And it’s not just AIPAC’s blood money the Democrats don’t want to stop receiving, it’s dark money writ large.

In August 2025, DNC Chairman Ken Martin proposed a resolution to DNC members that the party was “committed to eliminating unlimited corporate and dark money in our presidential nominating process beginning in the current 2028 cycle.” Yet as reported by The Nation, this resolution “would be limited to its presidential primary—it would not apply to candidates backed by independent expenditures in congressional races or general elections.” A DNC task force did issue a report on how to make this happen, though it has still not been released to the public, leading “progressive” Democrats like Congressman Greg Casar (D-TX), who chairs the Democrats’ so-called Congressional Progressive Caucus, to opine, “Ken Martin says the work will be done in the coming months, and I want to see him finish the job. Voters deserve to see the rules for 2028 before the race begins, so the DNC should follow through on the task force’s recommendations and make them public before any candidate announces.”

It appears the Democrats are simply playing the same games they always play - talking big, but delivering nothing. Given that the DNC task force recommendations have still not been made available by the DNC, and other approving bodies inside the party were not named, a litany of questions remain pertaining to how forcefully the new “rules” banning dark money will be applied to candidates in the forthcoming presidential primary. This is why it’s curious that Dr. James Zogby, an Arab DNC influencer and staunch supporter of Palestine, believes, “The resolution that passed [banning dark money] and will now be implemented by the Reform Task Force will ban all dark money from all sources, including AIPAC.”

Zogby must know that Hakeem Jeffries and his acolytes in the so-called CBC will continue taking AIPAC blood money, thereby allowing it to pollute our politics as much as he and other elements of the Black Misleadership Class continue to pollute the struggle for Black liberation and the pursuit of people(s)-centered human rights. The same can be said for the litany of Democrat Party sitting lawmakers and future candidates who align with the white “supremacy” ideology of zionism and the idea that the zionist ethnostate can run roughshod throughout the Middle East and drag the U.S. into wars of choice and aggression against nations like the Islamic Republic of Iran. AIPAC going dark has shed light on the derelictions of the Democrat Party and offers yet another example of why it cannot and must not be trusted.

And this is where we have to discuss the Haley Stevens soap opera that just went down - because, like the rest of the reality TV series, this was not an anomaly, it was a symptom of the larger pathologies of zionism, neoliberalism, and corporatism ensconced in the consciousness of the Democrat Party. The same Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Jim Clyburn, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Democrat Party-aligned “leaders” like Jim Carville and Neera Tanden - who runs one of the Democrats’ most influential institutions, the Center for American Progress - who were rushing to condemn Stevens after she announced that she would be endorsing Dr. El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, said nothing during Stevens’ primary when she was taking record amounts of AIPAC’s tainted money. Their “condemnation” is a facade and nothing more than an attempt to wipe all the egg off their faces for propping up Stevens and, in some cases, assisting her with stroking the flames of Islamophobia all the while attempting to pit Black and Arab people against each other. Even when Clyburn criticized Stevens, he noted that he “understood,” without explanation, why she endorsed Rogers. No explanation is needed as to what he “understood” as the reason is quite lucid - Clyburn, like many of AIPAC’s purchased Black lawmakers know that they have to toe the line so as not to engender the enmity of their AIPAC alabaster puppet masters.

The Democrats are just as unserious about getting money out of politics writ large as they are about no longer taking AIPAC’s money. Because for all the talk we’ve heard on the campaign trail about reforming the way elections are funded and “overturning Citizen’s United,” Democrats know there is simply no way they can make it happen. For one, it would require at least 60 Senators to break the filibuster, assuming any bill to ban dark money in elections was successfully voted for by the House of Representatives. And even if the Senate ultimately decides to end the filibuster—an idea that has gained traction, is supported by President Trump, and is being considered by both Democrats and Republicans—there is still no guarantee that ending Citizens United would garner 51 Senate votes. But even if that were to occur, there’s also the not-so-simple matter of President Trump signing any such bill into law, which is as likely as him signing a bill into law ratifying reparations to Black folk.

In short, and in the sage words of the legendary Hip Hop group, Public Enemy - “Don’t Believe the Hype.”

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is a son of Sierra Leone, an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, a writer and policy expert residing in the United States. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST

AIPAC

Zionism

2026 Election

Dark Money

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