Where Did a Pro-Israel Super PAC Spend in California Congressional Races?

In a statement to KQED, an AIPAC spokesperson said the results of the 2024 election “reflect America’s pro-Israel sentiment.”

“Our 5 million grassroots members have been deeply engaged in the democratic process to support Democratic and Republican candidates who stand with Israel, as it battles aggression from Iran and its terrorist proxies,” the spokesperson said.

The United Democracy Project is one of the highest-spending super PACs in the U.S. — the biggest being Make America Great Again Inc., which spent $376 million during the 2024 election. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling in 2010, super PACS have no limit on how much money they can spend to influence elections through independently produced advertisements, messaging and events. (Super PACs cannot, however, make donations directly to candidates like PACs can.) For example, the United Democracy Project contributed $5 million to Standing Strong, a super PAC supporting Adam Schiff’s run for California senator. This support sparked criticism from pro-Palestinian activists.

“Candidates do not control spending from outside organizations, and Senator-elect Schiff is one of the staunchest supporters of overturning Citizens United, authoring the principle constitutional amendment to do so,” a Schiff campaign spokesperson said to KQED in an email. “Adam is grateful for the outpouring of grassroots support he received throughout his campaign and looks forward to representing all Californians.”

According to Open Secrets, AIPAC and its affiliated PACs contributed over $200,000 to California congressional candidates in the 2024 election cycle.

Additionally, Open Secrets tracks individuals associated with AIPAC — including employees, members, and their immediate family — and how they donated. These donations totaled over $2.7 million in California.

View the full amount of money given to California’s congressional candidates in the table below, with highlighting showing candidates from the nine Bay Area counties.

Among the Bay Area’s recipients, incumbent Rep. Jimmy Panetta of the 19th District — which includes most of Santa Cruz county — received the most money from both AIPAC’s affiliate organizations and individuals associated with AIPAC. Panetta's constituents in Santa Cruz protested his ties to the pro-Israel lobby with an August sit-in.

Other Bay Area recipients of AIPAC PAC money include Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Josh Harder, who also won their elections.

In SoCal, two key races see AIPAC spending

In Southern California, the United Democracy Project focused its largest spending on two congressional races. In Los Angeles County's 34th District, the super PAC spent over $1.7 million supporting incumbent Jimmy Gomez and $576,454 against progressive challenger David Kim, who had called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

Kim gained 44% of the vote — a decrease from 47% in 2020 and 49% in 2022. In an email to KQED, Kim said “outside AIPAC money contributed to” this loss, noting “the sheer amount of mailers and ads we saw flooding our mailboxes, computer screens and TV screens with AIPAC-UDP-paid ads boosting the incumbent, and attacking me.”

Representatives for the United Democracy Project did not respond to KQED's repeated requests for comment for this story. When Gomez won the race, AIPAC congratulated him on social media, saying that they’d “proudly helped pro-Israel progressive leader Jimmy Gomez defeat a challenger who ran on an overtly anti-Israel platform.”

But quite a different dynamic played out in the Southern California city of Irvine’s open-seat race for the 47th Congressional District, where Democrat Dave Min faced Republican Scott Baugh. According to Open Secrets, the United Democracy Project spent over $4 million against Min, funding multiple television spots and mailers attacking him.

Many of these ads did not touch on Israel or Palestinians at all, instead focusing on Min’s past drunk driving arrest.

AIPAC’s strategy surprised political analysts and pro-Palestinian activists, since Min rarely commented on the siege of Gaza and was endorsed by another pro-Israel advocacy group, Democratic Majority for Israel. Min’s campaign claimed that the opposition was driven by his private conversations with AIPAC members in which he criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for security failures on Oct. 7 and said he opposed the annexation of the West Bank.

Despite the considerable spending against him, Min still won the Orange County seat.

‘Good policy and good politics!’

The day after Election Day, AIPAC celebrated that most candidates they'd endorsed won their races, declaring on X that “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”

However, political analysts note many candidates AIPAC has supported are incumbents, who historically are more likely to win reelection. And advertisements funded by AIPAC and its affiliates “actually don't really talk about the war in Gaza or U.S.-Israel relations,” according to The Guardian reporter Joan Greve.

Instead, “they choose to focus on other aspects” of a candidate they may be targeting — “particularly progressive candidates who they deem insufficiently supportive of Israel,” Greve told KQED’s Political Breakdown in May.

The scale of AIPAC's financial influence has raised concerns for candidates critical of Israel’s government who fear being targeted by well-funded attack campaigns — with resources that pro-Palestinian advocacy groups don't have.

In contrast to the more liberal pro-Israel organization JStreet whose PAC and affiliates also give significant amounts of money targeting candidates throughout the country, AIPAC has shown more support for Netanyahu’s government and military. The group has also leaned much more right politically, such as backing Republicans who attempted to block President Joe Biden’s victory on false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, stating that there is “no moment for the pro-Israel movement to become selective about its friends.”

In a statement to KQED, however, a spokesperson for AIPAC emphasized its support for members of groups like the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, saying “it is entirely consistent with progressive values to stand with the Jewish state — the region’s only genuine democracy.”

When it comes to super PACs like the United Democracy Project, “we now have a much more deregulated campaign finance system than we had before,” said Richard Hasen, professor of political science at UCLA and the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project.

Super PACs allow the wealthy to have “undue influence” on campaigns of “people who are supposed to represent all of us,” said Los Angeles activist Estee Chandler of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, a group of Jewish activists that organizes for Palestinian human rights.

“This is the very, very problematic way that our election campaign financing has been set up,” she said. “We're something that resembles an oligarchy much more than an actual democracy.”

Open Secrets also tracks who is donating to the United Democracy Project, and — like the FEC — has a search tool to look up donors.

The largest donation to the super PAC came from WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, who is based in San Mateo County. Koum donated $4 million in Sept. 2023 and then $1 million in Oct. 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks. Koum also contributed $251,000 to Daniel Lurie, who went on to win the San Francisco mayor’s race.

See the top ten highest donors to AIPAC’s super PAC below:

What are pro-Palestinian activists trying to do?

As many Americans — especially younger ones — show more sympathy for Palestinians, and Democrats become more willing to express more criticism of Netanyahu’s government than ever before, advocates are forming their own coalitions and lobby groups in an attempt to contend with AIPAC’s influence, even if they can't compete with their financial power.

Prominent among these groups is Reject AIPAC, which has support from progressive PACs like Justice Democrats, minor political parties like the Working Families Party, and activist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. Reject AIPAC publicly lists members of Congress who vow to turn down AIPAC donations — although none are from California. In their pledge, the group says that “Domestically, AIPAC supports and amplifies far-right politicians and candidates, including insurrectionists, putting our very democracy at risk.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also recently called out AIPAC’s donations, calling it a “special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda,” in response to criticism of the Democrats’ 2024 political strategy.

Pro-Palestinian activism is “at a resource disadvantage against pro-militarism candidates,” said Samer Araabi, a member of San Francisco pro-Palestinian advocacy group Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC) Action. But “what we have on our side is broad popular support,” he said. Seventy-seven percent of Democrat voters disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza, according to a Gallup poll this summer, and some young voters have cited U.S. support of Israel’s military to explain their lack of enthusiasm about this year’s election.

In the absence of AIPAC-level funding, AROC Action’s focus is on effecting change at the local level, said Araabi. The group endorsed Lateefah Simon, who has made several public statements on decreasing a global military budget and went on to win a congressional seat in District 12, which includes Oakland. According to Open Secrets, the United Democracy Project super PAC did not spend money against Simon.

“I am very clear that when I go into the halls of Congress, that we keep the value of peace central,” Simon told her supporters in her election night victory speech. “That we will never, ever support endless wars that kill children.”

But progressives like Simon will be serving under a second Trump administration — which may crack down on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States given Trump’s own connections with Netanyahu. Many advocates are especially concerned about bills like HR 9495, which would allow the federal government to designate some nonprofit organizations as “terrorist supporting organizations” and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Joint Resolutions of Disapproval, which would have blocked the sales of weapons to the Israeli military, failed to pass. AIPAC had also worked to denounce that bid.

Araabi calls the post-election landscape “a dark moment” for activists like him, and sees the financial might of AIPAC as “a smaller part of a larger phenomenon.”

“Anti-cease-fire or pro-militarism candidates have access to a lot of money and resources because they have the backing of powerful corporate interests and things that benefit from the ongoing wars,” he said.

But for Araabi, the question now is how pro-Palestinian advocates can mobilize that “broad popular support” that’s shown among many voters — and “inform the citizenry of what's going on here.”

“When they know, I feel like they vote accordingly,” he said.