Pro-Israel GOP donors fueling Rep. Stevens' Dem primary in Michigan

The August 4th Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat pits Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), backed by nearly $15 million (to-date) in support from a super PAC controlled by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), against Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate who characterized Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide” and blamed “the impact of AIPAC in our politics” for the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. Stevens and the AIPAC-backed United Democracy Project (UDP) find themselves in an expensive battle against the Democratic Party’s own voters. (Pew found that 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents nationally hold an unfavorable view of Israel.) To underwrite this costly effort to stifle Democratic criticism of Israel, UDP is turning to Republican and out-of-state megadonors.By outward appearances, AIPAC is badly losing the public opinion battle, particularly within the Democratic Party; this rank-and-file dissatisfaction is starting to transmit into votes on the House floor. Legislation introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to cut aid to Israel garnered unprecedented support from Congressional Democrats in a vote last Wednesday. The legislation, an amendment to a broad national security bill, lost 104-314, but the support from roughly half of House Democrats is strong evidence of the Democratic Party’s growing unease with U.S. assistance to Israel.Stevens, who voted against the amendment to cut aid, is receiving support from some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors. The largest individual donor to UDP is billionaire Paul Singer, who served on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition and, after expressing initial reservations about Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016, came around to offer his support. “I voted for [Trump],” Singer told Bloomberg TV in 2017. “I was not going to vote for Hillary Clinton as some of my Republican friends did.” Singer, whose political giving is almost entirely to Republicans, contributed $2.5 million to UDP in this election cycle.WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, another Republican billionaire, contributed $1.6 million to UDP via Manzanita Action Fund, a group linked to him via FEC records. Koum, who rarely speaks about his politics, contributed $5 million of Meta stock (the company that bought WhatsApp and made Koum a billionaire in 2014) to Trump’s super-PAC in 2024.Excluding $30 million in contributions made directly from AIPAC to UDP, a review of large ($50,000 and greater) donations to UDP reveals that 36% of large contributions came from donors with visible a trend of giving to Democrats while 22% came from those who exhibited a trend of giving to Republicans; 26% had a mixed record, and 15% were indeterminate. (The total value of these individual contributions was $57 million.)That balance is surprising considering that 87.5% of UDP’s spending in this election cycle has been in Democratic primaries, compared to only 12.5% in Republican primaries. And while UDP has made the Michigan Democratic primary contest a top priority in its overall spending, only 1.7% of the super PAC’s money comes from donors in Michigan.In short, UDP is intervening in a Michigan Democratic primary contest utilizing resources flooding in from members of a different party and by donors outside the state.The anomalies don’t stop there. While UDP’s website describes the group’s missions as “help[ing] elect candidates that share our vision and will be strong supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship in Congress,” its political ads are noticeably devoid of any mention of the foreign country 6,000 miles from Detroit. In fact, a review of UDP’s ads on Facebook reveals that the AIPAC affiliated super PAC avoided mentioning Israel in ads in this election cycle.Instead, UDP has recently focused its advertisements on tying Stevens to former President Barack Obama via misleading ads that strongly implied Obama had endorsed her (he had not) and suggesting that El-Sayed had a “history of disrespecting women,” pointing to his characterization of former First Lady Michelle Obama as “uninspiring.”Given the toxicity of AIPAC and Israel in the Democratic Party, UDP’s decision to talk about anything other than the unpopular foreign country whose interests it promotes may be a shrewd decision. However, the group’s ads shifted into outright hypocrisy when it accused El-Sayed of receiving help from Republican donors. “Republicans are helping Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic Primary, because they know he can’t win in November,” said the UDP, a particularly audacious claim from a group that’s received at least $12.76 million in large donations from Republican-aligned donors and is now trying to use those funds to deliver Haley Stevens a victory over Abdul El-Sayed.