Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, recently met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. McMorrow, a state senator representing parts of Wayne County and neighboring Oakland County near Detroit, told the powerhouse pro-Israel lobby at the August meeting to stay out of the primary.

In September, one of her rivals, Abdul El Sayed, went one better: The former health director for Wayne County, encompassing Detroit and inner-ring suburbs, wouldn’t even meet with AIPAC, he said in an ad.

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The scramble in the “who can be meaner to AIPAC” stakes is an extraordinary reversal of fortune for the lobby in the state: As recently as 2022, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who, like McMorrow and El Sayed, is running to succeed retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), welcomed a vast infusion of AIPAC money to secure her House seat in Detroit’s northwestern suburbs.

It’s a notable turn in next year’s wide-open Michigan Senate race, and U.S. politics more broadly. McMorrow, El Sayed, and Stevens are already in a heated fight ahead of the August 2026 Democratic primary. The winner will face off against Republican nominee-in-waiting Mike Rogers, who, from 2001 to 2015, represented a south central Michigan House district, the final four years as chairman of the lower chamber’s Intelligence Committee. Rogers narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024, the same year President Donald Trump won the Wolverine State for the second time in his three White House bids.

The Michigan seat is crucial to both parties’ ambitions to win a majority in the Senate, where Republicans now hold a 53-47 edge.

AIPAC money and, more broadly, support for Israel look likely to become a central issue in a state where politics have traditionally pivoted on protecting the auto industry and repairing the roads. Stevens and pro-Israel funders have yet to say what role they will play in her Senate campaign. An AIPAC spokesman said to ask again in a few months.

“We haven’t made any endorsement decisions yet for the cycle,” said Brian Romick, the president of the Democratic Majority for Israel.

The group backed Stevens in the past and has played a leading role in recent years, supporting pro-Israel candidates in critical primaries.

“But Haley is a good friend, and has always been a good friend, and we look out for our friends,” Romick said in an interview.

How AIPAC went in four years from inevitable to untouchable among some Democrats has primarily to do with the Gaza war, launched on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas massacred close to 1,200 people inside Israel, while also taking 251 hostage.

Some analysts say then-President Joe Biden’s backing of Israel contributed to the defeat of his endorsed successor and vice president, Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic nominee.

Long-simmering tensions

Ronald Stockton, who teaches Arab American studies at the University of Michigan campus in Dearborn, where much of the Arab American population is concentrated, noted an effort some of his students joined not to vote for Biden in the 2024 presidential primary as a protest of his support for Israel.

That ballooned into the uncommitted movement. The initial goal was to get 10,000 people to vote “uncommitted,” about the same margin as Trump’s Michigan victory over 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The uncommitted effort rapidly increased to more than 100,000 voters in Michigan alone, Stockton noted.

“Young people were taking positions that the war was so important to them in a way that their parents and certainly their grandparents couldn’t even recognize,” he said.

An increasing number of Democrats are voting to cut off defense assistance to Israel, and some are joining claims that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

The preeminence of Israel in the campaigning stands out because the primary otherwise appears to be typical of intraparty rivalries focused on domestic policy. Each of the three candidates has deep roots in Michigan politics and policy and is relatively young. Also, all hew to one of three camps in the party, staking claims to be the best means of wresting Congress back from Republicans.

Stevens, 42, who worked under former President Barack Obama on steering car manufacturers through the recession, flipped a Republican seat in 2018 by appealing to the swing state’s centrists. McMorrow, 39, who went viral in 2022 with a speech excoriating a Republican state Senate colleague who accused her of “grooming” children, spoke at last year’s Democratic National Convention as a model for how to stand up to MAGA Republicans. El Sayed, 40, who was a Rhodes Scholar and earned his medical degree at Columbia University, has held top public health posts and ran for governor in 2018 on a medical care for all platform. El Sayed has the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the de facto leader of progressives.

The campaigns reported similar fundraising numbers in July: Stevens raised $2.8 million, McMorrow brought in $2.1 million, and El Sayed earned $1.8 million for his campaign. Much of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary campaign will focus on state issues and how best to defeat Rogers, the anointed GOP nominee, who has the backing of Trump.

But as the posturing by McMorrow and El Sayed shows, Israel’s war conduct has, since the Oct. 7 attacks, become a lightning rod in U.S. politics.

Some Democrats are souring on Israel

Pro-Israel officials and donors are alarmed at what the race in Michigan says about the trajectory of the party. The lobby that once could guarantee the backing of more than 80% of Congress for its initiatives is toxic among substantial portions of the Left.

“There’s no argument that this poisonous narrative is becoming normalized within the party,” said a top pro-Israel donor who has backed Stevens and who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “That tells you what you need to know in terms of how they’re reading the politics.”

The El Sayed and McMorrow campaigns did not return requests for comment. A spokesman for the Stevens campaign pointed to two statements that suggested how Stevens is navigating a fraught political moment.

One, an Aug. 1 statement on social media explaining why, as a senator, she would not vote to defund Israel, indicated that she wanted an “enduring ceasefire” once Hamas returned the captives it still holds — differentiating her from Democrats who want an immediate ceasefire. Nonetheless, she also said there was “devastating” starvation in Gaza, rebuffing a claim by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denying starvation conditions.

The other item Stevens’s spokesman forwarded was Sept. 14 a clip on NewsNation, in which an anchor asks her directly about the drift away from Israel support among Democrats and the criticism El Sayed has leveled at her. She repeated her alarm at the images from Gaza but soon pivoted to explaining how she would defeat Rogers.

“Mike Rogers says that he wants to rubber-stamp Donald Trump, and that’s not going to cut it in our state,” she said.

Alarmingly for pro-Israel officials, the perceived toxicity of AIPAC seems to be spreading from the left toward the center. Among the Democrats vowing not to take AIPAC money this cycle are centrists in swing states, such as Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC), Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for the Senate as a centrist Democrat, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Slotkin, like Stevens, in 2018 flipped a GOP-held House seat in Michigan by appealing to independents and Republicans — and then prevailed over Rogers in the 2024 Senate race by the slim margin of 48.64%-48.30%.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the House Armed Services Committee ranking member and the panel’s former chairman, said in August that he was open to leveraging defense assistance to Israel. Slotkin opted to appear on late-night TV rather than attend a vote on a bill that would have cut assistance to Israel.

McMorrow has said she has a respectful relationship with the lobby. Her husband, Ray Wert, is Jewish and interned for AIPAC.

“I think they understand the shifting dynamics not only in Michigan but around the country and the world,” McMorrow told Punchbowl News in August, speaking of AIPAC and her message to the lobby to keep away from the race. “People are very attuned to the deep influence PACs have that outweighs the influence of people and voters.”

McMorrow and El Sayed both said they would have voted for a Senate bill advanced by Sanders restricting arms sales to Israel, and Stevens said she would have voted against it.

A leading Jewish Democratic fundraiser said McMorrow’s distancing from the lobby likely represented the future of the party.

“We are going to see this play out in other states and other races around the country,” said the fundraiser, who asked not to be named so as not to appear to be favoring a candidate in a primary race. “So long as this war drags on and the humanitarian situation in Gaza continues, I do think we’re going to see this play out, and that’s not what I want to see, but I do think that it will continue.”

Shift in AIPAC political tactics

The drift in the Democratic Party since the Oct. 7 attacks is not the only factor explaining the trajectory of AIPAC in four years from queenmaker in the Stevens House campaign toward pariah status in the state.

Michigan itself is unique in that it is the only state in which an Arab American population is large enough to sway elections.

Attacking AIPAC may resonate in a state in which 3% of the population is of Middle Eastern descent, and many of those people are making their anguish over the war clear to their friends and neighbors, said Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson, a professor of political science at Wayne State University in Detroit.

“Haley Stevens is the front-runner in the primary polls,” she said, referring to a Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce poll in May that showed Stevens with the highest name recognition and the highest approval ratings.

“If you’re hoping to catch up with her, then you know that would be one way to do it,” she said, referring to the Gaza issue. The state has 300,000 people of Middle Eastern descent, and 150,000 votes or fewer have swayed the critical swing state in the last three presidential elections in Michigan.

Sarbaugh-Thompson said her impression of a campus with a substantial Arab American student body was that the anger was not limited to students of Middle Eastern descent but to those who are close to them. One of her doctoral students has five family members who have died in the war.

“They and their friends, how incredibly powerful that issue is when people have family members who are being killed on a daily basis,” she said.

AIPAC’s decision ahead of the 2022 midterm elections to directly endorse candidates for the first time also played a role in making it a richer target for Israel-critical candidates.

For decades, AIPAC avoided direct involvement in elections, seeking to preserve what it saw as a gold standard of bipartisanship. Donors were encouraged to campaign and fundraise for pro-Israel politicians of both parties — successful campaigns earned donors prestige and lay leadership positions within the organization — but at a plausibly deniable remove.

The lobby was so meticulous about keeping away from partisanship that when it rated lawmakers’ pro-Israel records, in votes and signatures on letters, it did so by printing books made available only to donors. Spokespeople turned away media requests for such information with a derisive laugh.

Fundraising for politicians was never carried out within shouting distance of an AIPAC event. Instead, a donor would reserve a room at a hotel within walking distance of an AIPAC conference to fundraise for a favored candidate.

That abruptly changed ahead of the 2022 midterm elections when the lobby set up two political action committees: AIPAC PAC, a conventional PAC, and United Democracy Project, a super PAC, which is allowed to raise unlimited funds but may not coordinate directly with a candidate.

The rationale was the trajectory now visible in the Michigan Senate race: Democrats were drifting away from Israel, and the lobby thought making an explicit show of its strength was the best means of sustaining pro-Israel influence among progressives.

It worked to a degree: Spokesman Marshall Wittmann said 96% of AIPAC PAC’s endorsees win.

“It has become crystal clear that being anti-Israel will have a negative effect on a candidacy,” UDP spokesman Patrick Dorton told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2022, a year that combined UDP and AIPAC PAC spending on Stevens topped $3 million.

But because AIPAC is now unabashed in its endorsements, it’s easier for Israel-critical and Israel-hostile politicians to turn an AIPAC affiliation into an albatross.

Drop Site News, a pro-Palestinian news site, recently revealed that the McMorrow campaign’s relationship with AIPAC was friendly despite her appeal to the lobby to stand back. It included a portion of a recording of a conference call between McMorrow’s campaign staff and Michigan Jewish pro-Israel donors.

El Sayed promptly unleashed an ad that said even meeting with AIPAC was too much.

“Every candidate in this race has met with AIPAC — except me,” the ad says. “Sitting down with AIPAC means agreeing to play by their rules — and I will never do that.”

Pro-Israel insiders say they are rattled enough by the guilt-by-association tactics that they are considering backing Stevens the way AIPAC-affiliated donors did before 2022 — without the lobby’s fingerprints.

Republicans see an opening in the intraparty fighting for a pickup in a Senate cycle in which Democrats are already struggling to fund a path to win back the Senate. Karl Rove, the veteran Republican strategist, mapped out a path to victory for Rogers.

“Mr. Rogers should make the case that none of his squabbling opponents share the values of ordinary Michiganders,” Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

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That may be wishful thinking in a midterm election, when congressional voters often turn against the incumbent president’s party. Saeed Khan, an associate professor of Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State, said Rogers has already stumbled, backing Trump’s threat to send federal troops into Detroit.

“He’s presuming that he can write off Detroit, because it tends to vote Democratic,” Khan said, but that ignores the effect such statements have on turnout in Democratic strongholds. “There’s no better way to motivate people to come to the polls next year than to go ahead and disparage the city or at least seem to be in favor of a military presence in the streets.”

Ron Kampeas is an Arlington, Virginia-based journalist. He was JTA’s Washington bureau chief for more than 20 years, and previously reported for the Associated Press from the Jerusalem, New York, London, and Washington bureaus.