Politico reports:

Just one day after Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayorship, some of the self-described democratic socialist’s big-money backers gathered in Lower Manhattan to celebrate and discuss how they could build on his victory. During Mamdani’s race against former Governor Andrew Cuomo, they had spent more than $3.4 million on his behalf through a super PAC called New Yorkers for Lower Costs.

But the conversation that unfolded in the snug SoHo event space did not focus on affordability. The key seven donors gathered there saw Mamdani’s victory — after a campaign in which he vocally condemned Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war and declined to affirm its right to exist as a Jewish state — as proof that the public was with them on the issue. And they wanted to replicate their efforts across the map in congressional primaries, according to Greg Krieg, a spokesperson for the group.

Those gathered included first-time Mamdani donors and wealthy Muslim businessmen newly active in pro-Palestinian causes, who knew one another mainly from coding apps and drinking Yemeni chai together. They went around the room, each attendee pledging an amount: One person committed $250,000; someone else $50,000 with more to come later; another promised $500,000. The pledges ultimately totaled $4.5 million that day alone, enough to jump-start a new political organization aiming to reshape the way the U.S. government interacted with Israel.

Though other groups had attempted to push that policy leftward — J Street starting in the 2000s and Justice Democrats in the 2010s — the new group brought more super PAC cash to the effort than ever before. At the outset, it was a handful of donors on a text chain trying to figure out where their money should go. Dubbing themselves American Priorities, to reflect their opposition to military aid to Israel and their argument that the money would be better spent at home, they explicitly set themselves the goal of taking on one of the most powerful and well-funded groups in American politics.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee was both the primary adversary and in some sense a model for the new group. In late 2021, AIPAC had formed its own super PAC, United Democracy Project, which spent $64 million in the following two cycles. American Priorities set a goal of raising $10 million for the midterms, and came up short of that in its spending of around $8 million. Campaign-finance disclosures show UDP alone spending over $50 million this cycle through mid-October, not accounting for other AIPAC-affiliated groups. “We never thought we could outspend them,” said Mohammed Waqas Javed, a former director of engineering at the tech company AppLovin, whose $1 million in donations made him one of American Priorities’ early backers. “We wanted to be smart about where we spent, and surgically deploying $10 million was enough to run a serious operation across the country.”

But the financial mismatch was less important than the environment in which American Priorities arrived. A longstanding, bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that AIPAC had helped establish — and, more recently, enforce — was already fracturing over the war in Gaza, and AIPAC’s own role in Democratic primary politics had become controversial. American Priorities formed in part to capitalize on the shift, but its emergence was far more an effect than a cause of the public’s changing views on Israel. Indeed, candidates attacked AIPAC in races where neither its own super PAC nor American Priorities even spent. [Continue reading…]