The Road Not Taken: Hard Truths about Jamaal Bowman’s Loss

Don't blame AIPAC. Political malpractice by the incumbent plus bad advice and self-delusion from national groups did him in.

In case you haven’t read my previous coverage of the Jamaal Bowman-George Latimer Democratic primary in NY’s 16th district, start here with “Jamaal Bowman, George Latimer and The Israel-Gaza War at Home” from May 24; then read “All Politics is Local: Notes on NY CD-16 as Primary Day Approaches” from June 6; then scroll to the middle of “On Antisemitism and the Fight for Democracy,” from June 12; and then read “The Empire Strikes Back: Latimer v Bowman Goes Down to the Wire” from June 21. This is my last piece in that series. It’s not often that the national political circus comes to your backyard, but honestly folks, I’m not sad to see it go.

First, though, a note to President Joe Biden: When you are young, you think the struggle to make the world better is a sprint. As you get older, you think it’s more of a marathon. But when you reach your later years, you learn the truth. It’s a relay race. And it’s time to pass the baton, Joe!

Losing hurts. It especially hurts when you put your heart behind a candidate, and they get shellacked. Having to watch the winner’s side gloat makes it hurt even more. Especially when some on that side take pleasure in stomping on the losing side, sometimes in really ugly ways.

So I get why the progressive Democratic groups and activists that hurled themselves into the fight to defend Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s seat in Congress are now insisting that the main reason he lost to Westchester county executive George Latimer by 59%-41% (with 95% of the ballots counted) is because AIPAC and its allies on the pro-Israel right spent close to $25 million against him. Akela Lacy of The Intercept has done a nice job of collecting such statements from If Not Now, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, all making that point in various ways. I won’t repeat them all here, save this one from Maurice Mitchell of the WFP, who is the dean of the school. “Republican billionaires just bought a safe Democratic seat through a Democratic primary,” he told Lacy. “That’s something that should alarm everyone in the coalition, not just progressives.”

Nope, that’s not what progressives should be taking away from this debacle. Instead, what’s needed is some serious introspection about how Bowman lost touch with Democrats who backed him 55%-40% in the 2020 primary against incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel and 54%-25%-19% in a three-way primary in 2022, after the district was redrawn to include less of the northern Bronx and more of southern Westchester.

Here’s the bottom line. Jamaal lost because he didn’t have the right political strategy to hold the seat. Yes, the job comes with a lot of scrutiny and in the final weeks of the campaign he was under intense pressure, including death threats. Every one of us might have cracked or messed up in those circumstances; there before the grace of God we all go. People are human, they make mistakes, and that is not the sum of who they are. But having put almost five years myself into working closely with and for him, I’m not willing to let AIPAC get even half the blame (or credit, which it craves) for this election’s outcome. This seat was lost well before AIPAC’s millions started hitting the airwaves in May. Jamaal just didn’t do his job well enough.

The most obvious example of this was apparent last summer for anyone who bothered to look. This was before he embarrassed himself by pulling a fire alarm on Capitol Hill in September to delay a vote and before October 7 led him into a complete rupture of his relationship with the liberal Jewish voters who were a critical part of his success in 2020 and 2022. His FEC filing in July showed that as of the second quarter of 2023, he had just $121,000 in his campaign account. Why? Because apparently he hated to do call time, the onerous hours that Members of Congress devote to dialing for dollars. That summer, as local Jewish leaders who were already upset with Bowman’s increasingly strident pro-Palestinian advocacy tried to convince Latimer to run, Bowman’s meager warchest was a giant blinking green light. It said, “You can catch this guy in the money primary in a heartbeat.”

Three months later, he had just $182,000 on hand. Had Bowman paid any attention to his relatively weak showing in 2022, when 44% of his district voted against him, he would have diligently built up his bank account to help fend off any serious challenger. A million-plus in that account would have made someone like Latimer think twice. As it is, Latimer proved his viability as a contender by out-raising Bowman $1.4M to $725,000 in the last quarter of 2023—nearly three-quarters of that coming from local donors. That, more than anything else in the political game, is what surely drew AIPAC in. It smelled blood.

But it’s not just that Bowman didn’t like having to raise money. He also didn’t like doing retail politics. And this is not just a knock on his failure to show up at meetings of local Democratic committees. In many cases those places were unfriendly to him from the start, when he was frequently not invited to such meetings and then undermined by local Dems spreading nasty gossip about him not showing up. He also didn’t go to chat with constituents at little league or football games very much. Even if that was because he preferred to prioritize communities in crisis, these absences added up.

Worse, while he talked about the need to organize and build community power, he didn’t do it. Here’s an example. Last July, I got an invitation to attend a conversation at the Yonkers Arts center between him and Antjuan Seawright, co-hosted with the Democratic National Committee’s task force on black men called “Black Men: Our Votes…Our Voices…Our Issues.” About 75 to 100 men attended, feasting on some delicious fried chicken and then participating in a spirited discussion about power building. I was the only white person there (you can kind of see me in the background here) but I felt totally welcome.

What I remember most distinctly about the conversation was how enthusiastically the various folks there, including ministers, imams, and entrepreneurs, ranging in age from old grey-beards to young teens, responded to Bowman, and in particular to his urging that “we” needed to get more organized to build real power to address the needs being expressed, for action on gun violence, housing and jobs. As he pointed out, if Black men had registered and voted in their full numbers in Yonkers, they could have picked the city’s mayor, who had just won his primary with less than 6,000 votes. When the meeting concluded, Bowman promised that he and his staff would be back in touch to continue the work.

In fact, there was no follow up. The next time I got a message from Bowman’s team reviving this thread of work, it was Saturday June 22, three days before the election. The “Black Male Voters Task Force of Congressman Bowman” was inviting me to “assemble as members of the Black Community to enjoy food, music, drinks, and share critical issues with our Congressman to hold him accountable through an authentic agenda for the Black Community.” The invite added, “feel free to extend this invitation as we discuss our needed sense of community for Black participation in civics.”

So, Sunday night, two days before the election, I went down to Off the Hook in Yonkers, a black-owned restaurant that had also hosted Bowman’s campaign launch party last winter. There was plenty of free food, but the room was nearly empty. I sat next to a 64-year-old Black woman named Deborah who lived nearby. She told me that she wasn’t sure who she was voting for, but that she listened to her nephew, who said all politicians were liars and that she should vote for the lesser evil (meaning Bowman). She also told me she wished somebody would improve local county bus service, so that she could swipe her Metrocard and know how much she had left on it, so she wouldn’t always need to carry extra cash for the bus. When Bowman showed up, he shook her hand and those of the handful of other people there and swept out, not staying to talk. Later, the room filled up with staff and volunteers from the campaign, most of them white and not from the district. Deborah left before I did.

To be sure, Bowman had real support in the Black communities of the district, particularly in Coop City, New Rochelle and Mount Vernon. He mentored several young activists in places like New Rochelle and Mamaroneck who are now local electeds with promising futures. “Literally no one else at any level of government has brought us so many fantastic young candidates from the community,” Jennifer Cabrera, the co-chair of the local Working Families Party chapter, told me. “Maybe one or two have brought a single individual to us, but Jamaal did repeatedly and we were always so impressed by the people he found.” He was also devoted to many local community non-profits that do grassroots violence prevention and mental health work. But he never built a real base in the district’s black churches, whose politics and style are more moderate than his. Nor did he raise money needed to support the kind of organizing he said he favored.

Of course, if a progressive like Bowman was going to hold this seat, he had to do so by building and sustaining a “rainbow coalition” of support that combined the Black community that was his main electoral base along with Latinos and progressive whites. As I’ll explain in a second, he failed most obviously in doing that with liberal Jews. But he also misread other opportunities too. As mentioned above, in 2023, Yonkers—the biggest city in the district and the third largest in the state—had a mayoral primary. That winter, a nascent progressive coalition had come together to try to stop Mayor Mike Spano from extending term limits to an unprecedented fourth term and it was now trying to take him on in the primary. But it was split between a brave Latina city councilor, Corazon Pineda-Isaac, who had stood up to the Spano machine multiple times and had the backing of the WFP and other local groups, and Rev. Margaret Fountain-Coleman, the wife of the head of the local NAACP chapter. Bowman did nothing to help with the term limits fight, and then stuck with Fountain-Coleman, a personal friend, instead of Pineda-Isaac, who hadn’t endorsed him in 2022. The two women lost badly to Spano, but Pineda-Isaac got twice as many votes as Coleman, in part because the Latino community is much bigger than the Black community there. This year, Pineda-Isaac returned the favor to Bowman by endorsing Latimer.

About the Jewish vote

Much has already been written about how the Westchester Jewish community mobilized to defeat Bowman in response to his strident and often inartful pro-Palestinianism. Both Daniel Marans in the Huffington Post and Alexis Grenell in The Nation have produced excellent stories covering the main details. Out of the 130,000 Jews in the district, at least 15,000 were turned out by a well-funded nonpartisan GOTV operation run by Westchester Unites, which had identified a larger universe of 27,000 likely Jewish Democrats (including about 2,000 Republicans and independents it had earlier convinced to switch registration in time for the primary). They focused on about 40 synagogues, where in many cases between 60 and 90 percent of their members voted. According to Maury Litwack, director of the Teach Action Fund, WU’s parent group, Jews were 2.5 times more likely than others to vote in this primary. This is an astonishingly impressive achievement. (And it also may be part of a trend of hyper-engaged local Jewish communities mobilizing against incumbents seen as too-far-left post October 7, if these results from Colorado and Toronto are indicative.)

While the relationship between Bowman and local Jewish leaders was never cozy, it didn’t have to become so polarized. In the fall of 2020, after he had sown up the Democratic nomination, Bowman was challenged by Riverdale Rabbi Avi Weiss, a stalwart of the pro-Israel right, who accused him of being anti-Israel in an open letter to the Riverdale Press. Bowman wrote back eloquently, avowing that while he would fight for Palestinian liberation, he also understood that “many of my Jewish friends see Israel as the result of thousands of years of struggle for Jewish rights and security,” adding, “And I will stand with you to defend that achievement.”

That response inspired many Jews in the district, both in Riverdale and in Westchester, to support Bowman. One of them was Julia Muggia, a member of the Larchmont Temple who lives in New Rochelle. In 2022, she hosted a “meet and greet” event for Bowman at her mother’s home in Mamaroneck, deep in the heart of one of his primary opponents’ home turf, which is where she and I first met. Recently, she told me, “I was very moved by the letter in the Riverdale Press, where he was responding to a rabbi who had concerns about him, and that was the Jamaal that I really supported and thought was centering humanity. He saw who we were. And after October 7, he stopped seeing us, and he didn't want to see us anymore, and he shut us out. And I think he decided he really didn't need our votes. He didn't need us to win.”

But Muggia didn’t give up on Bowman right away. At the end of October, she texted him and they had a long phone conversation. But Bowman’s comments at the end only alienated her more. He said to her, “Now I want you to go talk to all your Jewish friends and tell them that you spoke to Jamaal Bowman for an hour and a half.” She said, “I felt really gross about it, quite honestly. I felt like a token.” Muggia ended up writing in a different candidate in the primary.

Bowman treated his relationship with the J Street Westchester chapter the same way. Though the national organization had endorsed him after he beat Engel, the local group—which I am a part of—struggled to find its footing with him. Things started badly in early 2021, when without any advance notice to his Jewish allies or interlocutors, he signed onto a bill sponsored by Rep. Betty McCollum that sought to ensure that no US military aid to Israel would be used to detain or torture Palestinian children. You may think this an uncontroversial issue, but to Jews who view any bill or statement singling out Israel for human rights violations without mentioning how the Palestinian Authority or Hamas treats their own people, it’s seen as an attack. A Riverdale rabbi who had urged his own congregants to give Bowman a chance called me to complain—is this is how he’s going to treat us, he asked. With J Street, Bowman promised to consult in advance about his statements and votes, but that kind of co-governance was inconsistent at best—I think he was far more comfortable with leftwingers who told him what he wanted to hear, and who, frankly, were using him for their own purposes rather than helping him succeed.

Gary Trachten, the longtime local co-chair of J Street Westchester, acknowledges that, not unlike Riverdalian Avi Weiss, much of the local organized Jewish community in Westchester had a chip on its shoulder against Bowman from the start. He commented, “But I can also tell you that with the J Street community he was all about telling us what we should do for him (e.g. ‘I don’t need to speak to those assholes, that is your job’) while he never kept his repeated commitments to confer with us before votes or statements that we were, without input, expected to defend and explain.” And those statements and votes got increasingly difficult to support.

As late as this fall, after October 7, Bowman and his staff were asking liberal Jewish supporters for help connecting him with rabbis or Hebrew School principals that might be willing to meet with him to talk about their concerns of rising antisemitism and how he could help. I personally gave them the names of two rabbis who were expressly ready to meet. Bowman and his team did not follow up and those meetings never happened. His decision to appear at a January event at the Andalusia Islamic Center in Yonkers featuring anti-Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein, who Bowman said he was “starstruck” by, was another unforced error. And that’s the straw that broke J Street’s back and led the national organization to take the unprecedented step of withdrawing its endorsement of him, removing whatever political cover he had to connect with liberal Jews.

Instead, he and his allies chose to stake most of his campaign on demonizing AIPAC as a tool of “MAGA Republican billionaires” and painting his opponent as Southern-style racist. Not only did these messages fail to penetrate, they made Latimer’s supporters—including the hyper-mobilized Jewish community—more determined to push Bowman out. Nationalizing the race brought Bowman lots of out-of-state volunteers and phone-bankers, but they were selling a flawed product with a flawed strategy. The idea that he could win simply by whipping up his turnout with identity-based appeals was the wrong approach to holding the seat.

Things cracked at a rally in the South Bronx Saturday before the election hosted by his ally Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and featuring Senator Bernie Sanders. The rally was supposed to be a culmination of the campaign’s themes, but all we will remember is how Bowman shouted, “We’re going to show fucking AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx,” he roared. “People ask me why I got a foul mouth. What am I supposed to do? You coming after me, you coming after me, you coming after my family?” He added, “I’m not supposed to fight back? We are going to show them who the fuck we are!” This display seriously hurt him with some older black voters in Westchester, who expect their leaders to operate at a high level of decorum.

Hard truths about progressive campaigning

To be sure, the groups that showed up for Bowman worked hard. The Jews for Jamaal coalition, which included JFREJ, The Jewish Vote, Jewish Voice for Peace Action and If Not Now, knocked on tens of thousands of doors and made more than 100,000 phone calls. So did activists from the Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement. By election eve the campaign had knocked on 178,000 doors, dialed more than 1.2 million phones, mailed 30,000 postcards to voters and sent nearly 500,000 texts. Its internal data model suggested that Bowman had won slightly more than half of the 28,000 people who cast early votes. In fact it appears Latimer won the early vote 53-47. Data models are only models after all, and they are built on past behavior; the surge of Jewish voters mobilized by Westchester Unites obviously tipped those scales.

Regardless, the Bowman field operation was state-of-the-art; but here’s the first hard truth: in-person voter outreach can only shift the result of an election by a few percentage points. Furthermore, Bowman’s progressive backers made the same mistake that Democrats make constantly in electoral politics—they invested late in field organizing and relied heavily on outsiders. While there were a few dozen local activists like the Westchester Progressives group that pulled together a valiant “#LatimerLostUs” messaging effort, most of Bowman’s army came from places like Brooklyn, Cambridge, Providence and Philadelphia with far more radical politics than locals, judging by the people I talked to. I was at Bowman’s election night party in Yonkers and the crowd was much whiter and more leftwing than the one in Mount Vernon I hung out with two years earlier celebrating his 2022 victory. The locals had been displaced.

It's also not true that Bowman lost so badly because the Democratic establishment redrew the district lines to handicap him. Matt Karp, a radical history professor at Princeton, made a particularly flawed version of this argument in the socialist magazine Jacobin, which is widely read by the hashtag left. He writes, “Last year NY-16 was redrawn so that the Westchester share of its primary vote jumped from about 60 percent to over 90 percent. This was of course the story of the entire election.” As the article Karp linked to makes clear, the redistricting change made last year did no such thing but in fact kept the district 90 percent in Westchester while adding a Bowman stronghold, Co-op City, in exchange for shifting a slightly smaller Bronx neighborhood, Wakefield, out. That was actually meant to help Bowman and was probably the one tangible thing that Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries did behind the scenes to assist his embattled colleague. Given that Bowman won re-election in the more Westchester-heavy district in 2022, had he not committed so much political malpractice he could have certainly held it again.

Results based on 99% reporting. Credit: Benjamin J. Rosenblatt, or @BenJ_Rosenblatt and @cinyc9

Obviously, a big part of the reason Bowman lost is because of Latimer’s deep ties in the district. He had the vast majority of local elected leaders on his side, though a rump group of about 70 such folks, including many Democratic district and ward leaders, came out fairly late in the race as Bowman backers. Latimer also had some of the worst people in the county Democratic party on his side, including the aforementioned Mayor Mike Spano of Yonkers as well as the local Carpenters union, which was highly visible and sometimes intimidating in its support for him. Bowman had some labor support too, but it was mostly missing in action—I never saw or heard of anything done on his behalf by the SEIU, UAW or DC37, all of which nominally endorsed him.

What should progressives learn from this debacle?

Some people are asking good questions. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos wrote a sensible piece, arguing: “If an elected official wants the freedom to cast statement votes, they need to rely on a strong base of supporters ready to have their back for casting those statement votes. And that brings us to some of the people Bowman has allied himself with … Our political system has degenerated into an ungovernable mess where people think screaming and threatening is an effective way to influence policy and politics. Daily Kos has always promoted a programmatic politics in which we build public support before demanding our elected officials take on contentious issues. It does no good to force elected allies to cast futile votes that will hurt their chances of being reelected—and our chances of building political power to create lasting change. Unfortunately for Bowman, he doesn’t seem to have that base of support in his district. Instead, he’s tried to court a far-left that appears to have little interest in engaging electorally.”

Waleed Shahid, former spokesperson for Justice Democrats, the group that first propelled Bowman onto the national stage, and a former senior advisor to him, posted a long introspective essay the day after Bowman’s loss that deserves close reading. In a nutshell, he says the pro-Palestine movement has to out-organize AIPAC if it wants to achieve a change in US policy toward the region. This is kind of obvious. But it’s far from clear to me why progressives overall should make Israel policy their most salient issue—especially if the working assumption is that Palestinian rights should be centered above everything else instead of Israeli-Palestinian peace and security.

But leaving aside that pivotal question, Shahid is right to admit that Bowman’s defeat has exposed the incompleteness of the Justice Democrats’ whole approach to building progressive power. Finding and elevating charismatic local leaders and offering them training, money and technical support in order to get elected isn’t enough. After he won his first election, Bowman was left far more on his own than anyone wants to admit. Shahid makes the case for building ongoing funding networks, year-round “authentic membership organizations that go beyond social media followings,” and continuous leadership development for early and mid-career staff. He admits that “Bowman’s campaign needed broader support from Black, Hispanic, and Jewish communities, reflecting a gap in coalition-building.” And he doesn’t deny that “Palestinian-led youth organizations” have helped “undermine candidates like Bowman.”

Lest readers think that I’m criticizing Bowman for daring to speak out about the need to protect Palestinian lives, let me be clear. I’m frustrated that he did so in ways that have hurt far more than helped that cause, with the clincher being his rejection by the district. Being outspoken about Gaza doesn’t have to be a political loser, by the way, if Rep. Summer Lee—another Squad member who fended off a much weaker challenge earlier this spring—is any indication. Here’s a picture of her from last week at the dedication of the new building at the Tree of Life synagogue, site of 2018’s horrible antisemitic mass shooting. Like Bowman, Lee boycotted Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s speech before Congress last year. She was also an early supporter of a ceasefire resolution and voted against an October bill condemning Hamas, which led to a public letter of concern from more than three dozen Pittsburgh-area rabbis. She’s called out Israel for “war crimes” in Gaza and voted against unconditional US aid. But unlike him, she built herself a healthy campaign war-chest, with $1.2 million in cash on hand as of the end of last year. And as a veteran of the state legislature, she has navigated the local political scene more deftly than him. And notably, she never lost her endorsement from J Street.

My friend Lara Putnam, a University of Pittsburgh professor who is a close observer of the whole Pennsylvania political scene, told me, “Summer is part of (and in fact, herself helped create) a pretty functional broad left-through-center organizational-interpersonal ecosystem in and around Pittsburgh, with lots of lateral personal ties spreading between different nodes, including the great majority of current elected Democratic officials here.” She adds, “Some very smart, very experienced, and very pragmatic SEIU healthcare leaders, playing the long game in a town where unionizing UPMC hospitals is basically, for the future of organized labor, the whole enchilada, have been central, if largely invisible, players in all of this.”

On the Gaza war, Putnam says, “Summer has been outspoken but intentional — the few times she’s been about to make an unforced error since Oct 7, she’s tacked quickly, which makes me think relevant people have her phone number and she knows when to listen to them.” She points to the Tree of Life groundbreaking, where Rep. Lee was surrounded by the Allegheny County state legislative delegation as indicative of her skills. “If her positioning on Israel/Gaza had made her persona non grata at this event, she would have been in trouble in the primary: it’s a testament to her consistency and care that it hasn’t, and there she is. I also appreciate the mention in the tweet of federal appropriations for the project — as a first term congressperson, Summer has systematically focused her in-district public profile on the federal dollars she brings in: I joke she’s the John P. Murtha of the Squad.” Putnam’s conclusion: “Bottom line: she understands the job.” Bowman didn’t.

During his concession speech Tuesday night, Bowman declared, “This movement has never been about one person. This movement was never just about me. It was never just about NY-16. It was never just about this race and this moment. This movement has always been about justice, it has always been about humanity, it has always been about equality, and it has always been about our collective liberation.” No, I’m sorry. A movement needs a base. And in our diverse district, it was always about NY-16.