Westchester County Executive George Latimer defeated Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th Congressional District, ousting a member of the left-wing Squad faction of the Democratic Party after a blistering contest that divided the candidates on race, class and the Middle East conflict and cost more than any House primary in history.
Meanwhile, Squad leader Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez clobbered her primary challenger, retired insurance executive Marty Walsh, garnering more than 80 percent of the vote in New York’s 14th Congressional District.
Top Democrats usually go all in on protecting incumbents but that wasn’t the case for Bowman, an outspoken Black member of Congress who was defeated Tuesday.
Outside spending in the race neared $25 million, and New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer was the first congressional Democrat to endorse Latimer, a pro-Israel centrist, over Bowman in their bitter New York primary battle.
The fierce contest became a proxy battle between differing ideological factions of the Democratic Party, with the pivotal issue separating the candidates being their stances toward Israel amid the country’s ongoing war with Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Nearly 21,000 children are missing in Gaza, according to the British aid group Save the Children, and since October, relentless violence in the occupied territory has killed over 37,000 Palestinian people, mostly women and children.
The barbaric war is a response to an attack in Israel by the armed terrorist group Hamas, which killed over a thousand people, including at least 33 children, and kidnapped 253 hostages, almost half of whom are foreign nationals or Israelis with multiple citizenships.
The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Bowman opposed the continued supply of American weapons to Israel, accusing the Netanyahu government of committing genocide in Gaza, where thousands of Palestinians have died in military strikes.
With the victory, Latimer has almost certainly ousted one of the most liberal voices in Congress and one of its most outspoken critics of Israel.
Latimer also secured high-profile endorsements from former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and most of the political establishment organizations in the 16th Congressional District.
Bowman, a married father of 3 living in Yonkers, grew up in public housing to a single mom, and has seen firsthand how the system fails the poor and working class.
Latimer benefited from his own incumbency, building on deep roots in the community after decades spent in local politics. He was also aided by massive spending against Bowman, mostly by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, which aims to unseat lawmakers it deems unsupportive of Israel.
More than 60 percent of that money came from one group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which poured more than $14 million into the race over the course of five weeks. In total, progressive groups backing Bowman spent $1.75 million on the race.
AIPAC’s spending funded ads that clogged TV spots in New York, as well as a barrage of mailers, text messages, and phone calls attacking Bowman and supporting Latimer. The expenditure — unmatched by any other single outside group spending on Democratic primaries this cycle and historically unprecedented — has turned the race into a referendum on the power of the pro-Israel lobby to oust progressives critical of Israel’s human rights abuses from Congress.
Bowman and his allies railed against the money that special interests spent to take him out, calling the heavy spending of Latimer and his supporters a threat to democracy.
Bowman slammed Latimer for being backed by wealthy voters in Westchester County and said three decades in public office on the Rye City Council to the County Legislature to the State Legislature and his current position of Westchester County Executive, Latimer could not understand the needs of poorer constituents in and around the Bronx, a largely Black borough of New York City, where Bowman was a middle school principal before running for office.
Bowman is the first incumbent to lose a primary to a nonincumbent this year. His defeat represents a major blow to the most liberal contingent of the House Democratic caucus, which has grown its ranks in recent years.
The bitter primary resurrected old rivalries between the party establishment and the far left, with Hillary Clinton endorsing Latimer and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) backing Bowman. It raised issues around age and race. Latimer is a 70-year-old White man and Bowman is a 48-year-old Black man. And it exposed deep rifts in the party over ideology, especially the war in the Middle East.
Bowman had been seeking a third term, representing a district in New York City’s northern suburbs. His defeat is a blow to the party’s progressive wing and a potential cautionary tale for candidates trying to shape their messaging around the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Latimer will be the prohibitive favorite to win in the general election. The district, which includes parts of Westchester and a small piece of the Bronx, is a Democratic stronghold.
As the world’s attention continues to be focused on the remaining hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, the plight of “the other hostages” — thousands of innocent Palestinian adults and children seized and held by Israel without charge — is largely ignored.
“There are currently about 9,200 prisoners in total from the West Bank and the Occupied Territories,” said Jenna Abu Hsana, international advocacy officer at Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.
“Of those, we believe about 3,200 are administrative detainees.”
Administrative detention “is basically a tool that is used by the occupation to indefinitely detain Palestinians for a prolonged period of time,” in prisons run by the Israel Prisons Service,” Hsana said.