https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/22/aipac-politics-endorsements-israel
Aipac, which only launched its political action committee and started endorsing candidates three cycles ago, is hardly getting out of US elections. It pledged to maintain the work of its deep-pocketed Super Pac, United Democracy Project, and to continue to funnel millions of dollars to prop up pro-Israel candidates through individual donors and Aipac members. The shift in strategy was a sign it was adapting to a changing political landscape, not that it was giving up its efforts to shape it.
“Historically, AIPAC sustained an aura of invincibility that ensured it won most battles by walkover – if you are perceived as invincible, the other side doesn’t even bother to fight you,” the political analyst Trita Parsi wrote. “Rather than invincibility, AIPAC’s name now carries such toxicity that the group doesn’t want its own name on its political donations.”
Aipac did not respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Aipac, which normally backs Democrats, was planning to give as much as $9m to a Pac supporting Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. The group had already spent $32m seeking to defeat El-Sayed, an outspoken critic of Israel, in the primaries.
But the announcement that it would stop directly backing candidates going forward was seen as tacit recognition that Aipac’s open support risked hurting pro-Israel candidates more than it helped them.
“Through this shift, AIPAC openly admitted that their brand has become toxic in the political world,” Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, one of Aipac’s most vocal critics, said. “Fewer and fewer candidates are willing to be publicly affiliated with this extremist, warmongering group. This is a clear signal: being pro-genocide is bad politics and bad policy.”
In a letter from Aipac to members first reported on by Jewish Insider, the group’s leadership seemed to acknowledge that its once formidable power in US elections had suffered as more candidates openly distanced themselves from Israel and from the group itself. In the letter, they noted that the 2026 election was “one of the most challenging environments in recent memory” for the group and predicted that the “challenges we are confronting will continue to grow in the years ahead.”
“To win the fight for the future of the country and the U.S.-Israel alliance, we must build a more strategic, consequential, and nimble political operation,” they wrote. “The only tactic we’re married to is the most effective one.”
While Aipac boasted that it helped 290 candidates this election cycle, leading to the defeat of 29 candidates it described as “anti-Israel”, the group has also suffered major blows – including in Michigan and New Jersey. More than a dozen candidates who took Aipac contributions in the past have since publicly distanced themselves from the group, and New York congressman Pat Ryan announced last week that he would return nearly $250,000 from the group, the latest of several elected officials to return Aipac funds or say they would turn it down.
Dion Nissenbaum, a journalist whose documentary on Aipac was published this week, featuring interviews with former Aipac insiders, told the Guardian that the announcement appeared to be the “first real admission from Aipac that their campaign strategy has backfired”.
Still, he warned, “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.”
That is more than enough of the item to get the drift. People voted as if genocide and ethnic cleansing was noticed and met with disapproval. The Guardian item continues, and readers have the link at the top of this post. An enduring policy of ongoing land theft and extreme hostility against those whose land is to be expropriated is not one easy to love. AIPAC is seeing this in real time, and not quitting its throwing its weight around as much as taking a breather to reevaluate its ways and means.
In short - it ain't going away. And, not in the article by name, it still owns Jeffries and Schumer.
With those as Dem leaders, AIPAC can feel comfortable in catching its breath.