Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has declared the race her most pressing electoral priority. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is slated to join her for a pre-election rally in the Bronx. And a powerful pro-Israel lobby working for the other side has already shattered spending records.
The House primary between Representative Jamaal Bowman, a left-wing Democratic darling, and George Latimer, a more moderate challenger, was always expected to be a marquee showcase of their party’s divisions over the Israel-Hamas war.
But with early voting underway, the June 25 contest in New York has exploded into a proxy war for the Democratic Party’s future, tearing open old wounds over race, class and ideology in the heart of a presidential election year.
On one side, nearly the entire local Democratic establishment, including Mr. Sanders’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, has lined up behind Mr. Latimer, the Westchester County executive. So has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby that has already spent $12 million — more than any other race in its history — to try to defeat Mr. Bowman over his criticism of Israel.
On the other side, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the other members of the House’s left-wing “squad” and their progressive coalition are undertaking a desperate rescue mission, draining bank accounts and leveling increasingly personal attacks as polls indicate that Mr. Latimer has opened a commanding lead.
Mr. Bowman’s allies fear his loss would not merely deprive the movement of one of its most charismatic spokesmen but might also embolden forces trying to pull the party back toward the center on issues like climate change, immigration policy and the war in Gaza.
“I cannot think of a single race that better exemplifies the battle, frankly for our democracy, between everyday people choosing their representation and big money coming in and choosing it for them,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.
The result has been exceedingly ugly, a Democrat-on-Democrat fight rife with competing accusations of antisemitism and racism.
Mr. Latimer, who is white and first took elected office in the Reagan era, has belittled Mr. Bowman’s record and dismissed the district’s first Black congressman as an extremist more interested in social media stardom than serious governance.
“He doesn’t really study government,” Mr. Latimer, 70, said at a recent event for seniors. “He doesn’t really understand it. He’s out there on a soap box, talking what he feels.”
Mr. Bowman, a former middle-school principal, has accused his opponent of selling out to “a genocidal organization like AIPAC and racist MAGA Republican” donors in order to silence him for challenging the status quo.
“It’s the progressive grass-roots movement, all of us, against the establishment,” Mr. Bowman, 48, said in an interview after touring a new supportive housing facility in Yonkers, his hometown.
Mr. Bowman is not the only “squad” member to face a primary challenge this year after speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza. Representative Summer Lee of Pennsylvania prevailed in her own primary in April. Representative Cori Bush faces a more formidable opponent in St. Louis later this summer.
But the New York race has taken on particularly potent symbolism for both sides. The 16th District includes some of the country’s wealthiest suburbs and a large Jewish population; it is also majority nonwhite, with many Black and Latino voters.
Those communities helped propel Mr. Bowman to a surprise victory in a 2020 primary against Eliot L. Engel, a longtime incumbent and staunch supporter of Israel. Running in the midst of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, Mr. Bowman campaigned on “jobs and education, not bombs and incarceration.”
Mr. Bowman appeared to be cruising toward a third term last fall, relying on a record of fighting evictions and gun violence. He condemned Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack forcefully, but emerged afterward as one of the leading champions of the Palestinian cause in Congress.
“I can’t stomach the bombing of children. Like, I can’t stomach it,” he said in the interview. “It’s cruel. It’s inhumane. It’s evil.”
His allies point to statistics showing that most Democratic voters, including some Jews, support a cease-fire and agree with his criticism of Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But the hard divisions caused by the attack ended a tenuous truce between Democratic factions, and Mr. Bowman’s stance led AIPAC, a group of local rabbis and supporters of Mr. Engel to help recruit Mr. Latimer into the race.
Supporters of Israel have since provided Mr. Latimer with a huge financial advantage. AIPAC has been his top campaign bundler, helping him amass $2.5 million in cash for the race’s final sprint, compared with Mr. Bowman’s $1 million.
Spending by AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has dwarfed those figures and could make the race the most expensive House primary in history. Another group, Democratic Majority for Israel has spent almost $1 million against Mr. Bowman, and Fairshake, a cryptocurrency-focused super PAC, plans to spend $2 million.
By comparison, groups backing Mr. Bowman on the left — including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Courage to Change PAC — have spent roughly $2 million altogether.
Patrick Dorton, a United Democracy Project spokesman, said the group was determined to “shine a spotlight on Jamaal Bowman’s atrocious anti-Israel record.”
Its ads, though, have mostly been about other topics, including one that casts Mr. Bowman’s vote against President Biden’s infrastructure bill as an act of disloyalty. Mr. Bowman said he opposed the bill for strategic reasons, to try to ensure the passage of companion legislation addressing climate change.
AIPAC’s spending has become a centerpiece of his case against Mr. Latimer. Mr. Bowman and his supporters criticize his challenger sharply for aligning himself with a group that has backed conservative Republicans opposed to abortion rights and that receives a significant amount of funding from Republican donors.
“It is reckless, and it is antidemocratic,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.
But even some of Mr. Bowman’s allies, including Democratic House leaders who prioritize protecting incumbents, say his electoral woes are at least partially of his own making.
Where other Democrats with large Jewish constituencies or prospective primaries have shied away from inflaming tensions, Mr. Bowman has doubled down on his pro-Palestinian views. He was among the first House Democrats to call for a cease-fire and to accuse Israel of genocide.
He has also endured a string of embarrassing episodes, including the recent resurfacing of old poems and essays dabbling in conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In the middle of it all, Mr. Bowman pulled a House fire alarm that he said he believed would open a locked door, leading to his censure and guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge.
“The best thing and the worst thing about Jamaal Bowman is that he is not a traditional politician,” said Rebecca Katz, a strategist who advised his earlier campaigns.
Mr. Latimer has tried to run a more scripted campaign, staking out safe Democratic positions on abortion and gun safety while avoiding detailed positions on issues that could alienate potential supporters.
In the interview, he ducked questions about Israel’s wartime conduct and Mr. Netanyahu. He also refused to say clearly whether he supported raising taxes on wealthy people, a popular position with Democrats that Mr. Bowman embraces.
“There’s a fatigue with the ideological politics if all it’s going to be is bickering and ‘if I have a snappy tongue, I’ll get attention,’” he said.
Mr. Latimer, who lives in suburban Rye, has accused Mr. Bowman of ignoring the whiter, affluent suburbs that were added to the district when New York redrew its congressional map in 2022.
“You don’t mention people who are not Black and brown,” he said in another debate this week. “There’s a whole district, Jamaal, that you’ve ignored.”
Some local officials say Mr. Bowman does seem less connected to certain segments of his district.
“I deal with thousands of complaints a year and do it personally, and I reach out to every elected official,” said Paul Feiner, the town supervisor of Greenburgh. “I practically never get a response from his office.”
Mr. Bowman said he would always stick up for Black and Latino communities that he has called “the least, the last” and, he asserted, left behind by politicians like Mr. Latimer. (Mr. Latimer has bristled at any accusation of prejudice.)
“He did in the beginning disturb the status quo,” Niki Armacost, the mayor of Hastings-on-Hudson, said of Mr. Bowman, adding: “He may not be spending so much time with politicians. He’s with the people, though, I can tell you that.”
Polls and interviews suggest voters are also splitting along racial and geographic lines.
At a train station in Pelham, Lawrence King, a small business adviser from New Rochelle who is Black, said Mr. Bowman was “walking on the wild side” challenging his party — but he liked it.
Mr. King, who works at Columbia University, said he agreed with Mr. Bowman’s position on Gaza and worried that Mr. Latimer would be “a return to a stale, more traditional kind of politics.”
That, on the other hand, was precisely what Paula Frezzo, who helps administer financial aid at Fordham University, was looking for.
Waiting down the platform, Ms. Frezzo, who is white, said she had ignored the “garbage” ads on television but had been turned off by two things: the sluggish response she got when contacting Mr. Bowman’s office about a federal funding issue, and his left-wing stances.
“I don’t like anyone who’s extreme on either side. That’s tearing our country apart,” she said. “So no for him.”