After four years in office, progressive Missouri representative Cori Bush lost her primary to Wesley Bell. Bell, a Democrat backed by the country’s most powerful pro-Israel group, got 51 percent of the vote while Bush got 46 percent, per the New York Times.
Bush made history in 2020 when she became the first Black congresswoman to represent her district after beating William Lacy Clay, a centrist Democrat who had been in office for 20 years. Bush — a nurse, pastor, and Black Lives Matter activist — was quickly dubbed a member of Congress’s “squad,” the left-leaning group of congressional Democrats that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and others.
Bell, a St. Louis prosecutor, ran as a progressive but used his campaign to emphasize that he would be more pragmatic than Bush. He brought up the Department of Justice and House ethics investigations into Bush’s campaign spending and claimed that she was out of touch with voters at home, arguing that she was more focused on the fame that came from being in “the squad” than looking out for constituents. But the most contentious part of Bush and Bell’s race was where they stand on Israel and the U.S.’s role in the ongoing war in Gaza.
In October, Bush was one of the first members of Congress to call for a cease-fire, and she has repeatedly described Israel’s attacks on Gaza as “genocide.” Meanwhile, Bell received $8.5 million from the United Democracy Project — a super-PAC connected to the biggest pro-Israel lobby in the country, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — and other pro-Israel groups. In July, he said, “We don’t want to see any innocent Israelis or any innocent Palestinians harmed,” and that the U.S. has “an obligation to stand with our fellow democracies to be reliable partners to our reliable partners and stand against terrorism.”
Bush is the second member of “the squad” to lose her seat this summer: In June, Jamaal Bowman lost his New York primary to George Latimer, who, like Bell, was heavily backed by pro-Israel groups. In her concession speech, Bush vowed to “keep supporting a free Palestine” and added, “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”
