JTA — Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.

In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” in the words of The New York Times, with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent US rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge.

On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.

Since Bush’s loss in the district representing the St. Louis metropolitan region, AIPAC has become a bogeyman in the Democratic Party and Israel a major campaign issue. Other anti-Zionist members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in blue districts across the country throughout the 2026 primary season.

The changing winds might have given Bell incentive to shift to the left instead of leaving himself vulnerable to a challenger whose background and political stances are otherwise similar. But Bell has held firm in his support for Israel, enjoying the backing of mainstream Democrats and a continued financial infusion from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the tune of more than $1 million this cycle.

As a result, Tuesday’s rematch is one of the most striking tests of whether AIPAC still has traction in Democratic strongholds or whether Bush and other DSA candidates have subdued the once-powerful lobby.

“The war is a lot different today than it was two years ago,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist, told JTA, referring to the Israel-Gaza conflict that unfolded following Hamas’s massacre on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. “Sentiment inside the Democratic Party, even among the establishment, has changed.”

In the past few years, the AIPAC has faced growing hostilities from ultra-left-wing politicians, who have denounced Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the aftermath of October 7.

“AIPAC is now a household name in Democratic politics,” Payne noted.

But heading into Tuesday’s primaries, it wasn’t clear that the anti-AIPAC activism had moved the needle for St. Louis voters. While the Polymarket prediction platform has given Bell a 66 percent chance of winning, compared to Bush’s 34%, there’s a dearth of nonpartisan polling. Bush’s campaign commissioned one of the few publicly available survey results, an April HIT Strategies poll that declared the candidates “statistically tied,” with Bell in the lead at 44% and Bush at 40%.

On paper, the two candidates have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, Bell and Bush are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.

After protests for police reforms surged across the area for about a year, Bell won a seat on the city council and worked on enacting such changes. In a 2018 race for St. Louis County prosecutor, he defeated Bob McCulloch, a 27-year incumbent who had come under national scrutiny for failing to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown. Bell is now serving his first term in Congress.

Bush, meanwhile, first became engaged in politics as a participant in the Ferguson protests. Though she lost Democratic primaries for the US Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, success in 2020 led her to serve Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for two terms. But in 2024, Bush fell short, losing in the primaries to Bell by more than........

© The Times of Israel