Why did super PACs spend millions lying to Illinois voters?

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Brian Mackey: From Illinois Public Media, this is the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. In the primary election season that just ended, a number of fairly progressive Democrats were targeted by tens of millions of dollars in misleading advertisements. [hawked - unclear audio]

[00:00:25]
Taped Audio: LeShawn Ford Corruption, fraud, self-dealing, not who we need in Congress. Fairshake is responsible for the content of this ad.

[00:00:33]
Brian Mackey: Fairshake is a crypto industry super PAC, a political action committee. Even though individual candidates have strict limits on how much money they can raise for their campaigns, these super PACs can raise infinite cash and say whatever they want. In addition to crypto, there was also big spending against progressives by artificial intelligence interests and groups that were quietly affiliated with the pro-Israel AIPAC. 

Among the people targeted by these ads was state Sen. Robert Peters. He's a Democrat from the South Side of Chicago, the same state Senate district once represented by Barack Obama. But like Obama, Peters was looking to move up in this year's primary, seeking his party nomination for the 2nd Congressional District, which goes from the south side of Chicago all the way down to Danville. Ultimately, he got just 12% of the vote, coming in third behind the winner, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, and former Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., who gave up the seat more than a decade ago before pleading guilty to federal corruption charges. 

Nevertheless, Peters thinks these ads made a difference in his campaign. He wasn't available to join us live this morning, but I spoke with him yesterday afternoon. State Sen. Robert Peters, welcome back to the 21st Show. Thanks for being with us.

[00:01:48]
Robert Peters: Thanks for having me.

[00:01:49]
Brian Mackey: So let's begin by establishing your progressive, uh, bona fides. What about your experience, endorsements, affiliations, and so on would you cite to prove you are a true progressive?

[00:02:00]
Robert Peters: I mean, uh, endorsed by Bernie Sanders, endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, uh, Working Families Party, uh, the People's Lobby, a whole host of progressive unions, and, uh, a whole host of progressive electeds, you know, up and down the ballot, uh, including Delia Ramirez, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez. Um, I would say that I — and then of course I've got a long history of organizing. I did progressive organizing for five years before I became a state senator and then as a state senator, uh, you know, I was able to pass, uh, you know, progressive pieces of legislation over the last six, seven years and, uh, I have a strong track record of, uh, supporting progressive policy, uh, both as I would say, organizing in the streets and down in the Capitol.

[00:02:49]
Brian Mackey: So I'm trying to remember the phrase, was it corporate shill? What, how did you find out these ads were targeting you?

[00:02:56]
Robert Peters: Yeah, uh, so, uh, some of the greediest people in America, crypto people, uh, who also have a deep relationship with AI folks, um, decided to — they had a lot of money and so they could go around and basically, uh, outspend me to, uh, spread a message to the public, um, that misrepresents who I am and, uh, lies about my record. 

And I found out word had spread first, you know, as things do, you tend to hear that something was coming, and then, um, you know, I think people on my staff or somebody had gotten some information that showed that a mailer and then of course TV ads were spent — about a million dollars or $800,000-plus dollars were spent, uh, to attack me.

So what did that feel like? Oh, frustrating and disgusted. I mean, I, I was, I was upset that there were people — these are the greediest worst people in this country. I, I don't know how to describe it, but to the listener, just so you know, they don't care about your well-being. They want your money to make themselves rich, and if that means you're miserable, uh, so they don't care. Um, they're one of the greediest groups of people in America, and so, um, there was being first anger that the greediest people, people who have a deep relationship with the Trump administration, I mean like in a very close ties to the Trump administration who benefit from the Trump and Republican, uh, policies that allow them to get richer and richer on the backs of working people were doing this, so that was, that was immediately upsetting. 

Then they were doing it lying about who I am because they — they used — they understand the public does not like what they do and so they use the language of the progressive movement to attack a progressive member of the legislator, a progressive organizer. So there's that and that was, that was upsetting because it was misrepresenting who I am, misrepresenting my record, and it was in service of their greed that they were doing that. 

And then, uh, to me I was the third one that made me really, you know, angry, ticked off was it was lying to the public. It was intentionally trying to dupe the American public, especially in the 2nd Congressional District, a district that is one of the most working-class districts in the country.

[00:05:24]
Brian Mackey: Why do you think you were targeted?

[00:05:26]
Robert Peters: 'Cause they know I have a history and a track record of holding these folks accountable, uh, right? I co-sponsored and, you know, voted to pass a bill that regulated crypto. Um, I have taken, uh, I've been a part of a task force around AI regulations and recommendations around regulating AI, um, and I have a history of speaking up, particularly around the Palestinian human rights and so, um, I faced a gauntlet of, you know, $5 to $7 million from these three mega aligned super PACs because they didn't want to be held accountable. They didn't want someone who, uh, you know, really has values rooted in justice and integrity and who has a track record of being able to not only, you know, like caring about these things, but actually working on things and getting them done. And so, um, I was targeted because these people were scared of me and, um, that's at least something I can take away from this.

[00:06:27]
Brian Mackey: So, so what do you do when this happens, right? What, what is your, your team's — how do you, how do you respond, right, in this media environment where so many people, you can barely get people to pay attention to politics as it is, especially in a primary. How do you try to get the word out there about this not being true?

[00:06:43]
Robert Peters: I mean, see, I was running in a working-class district. I had, I took no corporate money. I was entirely funded by grassroots donors. People gave $15 to $20. And so, you know, we tried to do what we could with the money we had to be able to communicate and then of course, we spoke to the press and tried to speak to — in a media environment where we had, um, press really engaged on this. And you know, I gotta give credit. There's, uh, I think it's Matthew Eadie who's a local journalist in Evanston who was maybe the most engaged in this election cycle compared to anybody — a local underpaid journalist in Evanston. But he was mostly covering Illinois Nine, and it was frustrated because I think that there was a story to be told what was happening in four major congressional races in the Chicagoland area, but especially ours, which was the most working-class district of the four. 

Um, and I felt there was a very, very serious story to be told, and I think really it represents a bellwether for the party because it's going to be districts like Illinois Two that get targeted by these types of special interests. They, they're gonna be targeted by mega aligned interests who want to be able to buy up these districts because they know it's hard to fundraise and they know, like, working-class people, they don't have all the time in the world. They might be working two jobs, right? They might be struggling just trying to get by. They can only consume so much information. 

Oftentimes people blame working-class people for things that happen in politics when really it's the conditions that they're in. People who have a lot of money have a lot of time. Time is money. People are working-class don't have, they're not afforded that. And so in the little amount of time they're able to process information, they're being bombarded with misinformation and lies. That's a problem. And that's not a problem that gets blamed on the voter, that's a problem on the greedy people who are spreading that kind of information.

[00:08:38]
Brian Mackey: How influential do you think these ads were?

[00:08:42]
Robert Peters: I would say pretty influential. Um, they do two things and I think it's important that people understand this, especially people who may want to have a political future, but for them to understand it — one, when you spend that much money, it's because they saw that in polling that if I communicated, I really grew. And so they wanted to get ahead of that. They wanted to prevent me from being able to grow and expand my ability to, to gain support. So they want to stop that in the tracks, which they did, right? That's what they did. 

And then the second part is, um, they wanted to scare anybody who wanted to support us. So they wanted to dry up my money. Uh, and so by spending this much money, I just want you to know like, a lot of folks in D.C. tend not to put a lot of support in working-class districts. Usually college towns tend to get a lot of attention, um, when it comes to progressive candidates, so it's usually college towns or upper-middle-class communities. Working-class districts, it's a little bit harder. You really have to rely on a whole lot of people to support you financially, um, that normally wouldn't, right? 

And so in this situation, there are progressive, you know, folks who you normally would go to who again, they have limited amount of money and they see the behemoth of, you know, crypto or AI or, um, AIPAC money coming in and it frightens them. And so it then dries up your ability to fundraise like you need to to be able to communicate, um, to fight back. And so it did two parts. It prevented me from being able to grow my support, expand beyond my base, and it prevented me from being able, um, to raise enough money and to get enough support, um, to be able to, to either fight back or to counter or to continue to grow our ability to spread our message.

[00:10:32]
Brian Mackey: I, I don't want to overstate an equivalence here, but, but I have seen Democrats do this kind of thing to each other where they say, oh, that this Democrat's really secretly a Trump supporter kind of thing. What what do you think about the morality of this kind of advertising regardless of who's funding it?

[00:10:47]
Robert Peters: I think that the way I put this is that you don't need to support, it's not necessarily about supporting Trump writ large. It's the idea of where will you stand when it comes to war, right? Like, so right now we're at war with Iran. So, money comes with the idea of like, where do you stand when it comes to war or military aid. Money comes with where do you stand on holding AI, you know, accountable, like regulating AI and making sure it's not, you know, doing anything insidious to our neighborhoods. Where do you stand in regulating crypto? 

And so 90% of the time you can agree on something, but it depends that 10% could be massive in its impact, right? If you don't, if you vote against regulating crypto, that could have a massive impact, particularly on working-class communities. If you vote against regulating AI in a place, in a time in which AI swaps is just absolutely atrocious and the economy is built off of very, very shaky AI grounds, that's very risky and of course tends to end up — if, if that bubble bursts, it bursts in the face of working-class people. And if you vote to send billions of dollars to go to war, to perpetuate a massive large-scale violence. 

Those things do matter and I think that this money is about who, who, who you're representing in those moments, right? You know, if you're getting, our campaign was backed by people who spent $15 to $20, right? We have 30,000 individual contributions with the average contribution being under $21. That's a lot of people it takes to be able to raise the amount of money that we need to raise to be able to, to fight. And I would say I would prefer a politics where people are funding campaigns with $15, $20 and not one in which, you know, a downtown Chicago billionaire puts $300,000 into a PAC. I, I'd rather have it be regular people who can every once in a while give a few bucks to support our politics, not where relative you can just buy up a scene.

[00:12:52]
Brian Mackey: Well, as you know, the U.S. Supreme Court has said money equals speech, and there have been attempts to limit it, but those have not succeeded. What can we do about this in the future?

[00:13:05]
Robert Peters: I think the first thing to know is that when we look at Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, we do know money speaks to them very heavily, right? Uh, they, they, the Supreme Court has become synonymous with a level of corruption because of some folks on that court. And so, it's really sad because I think we're losing — our institutions have lost legitimacy and are rapidly losing legitimacy. And so, we already have that issue. Public do not have trust in our institutions and our institutions have done nothing to deserve that level of public trust, especially recently. 

I think what we can do is we need to, Democrats need to ask themselves, is this gonna be good for the Democratic Party, um, in the long run. And I don't think so. And so when we get to power, we need to do two things — we need to attack money and politics, and I think we need to have a conversation about ranked-choice voting. We need to think about how we're expanding democracy and making it easier for people to participate in that democracy and not leaving it in the hands of people who can just spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars on the elections.

[00:14:14]
Brian Mackey: State Sen. Robert Peters, I'm, I'm sure it's not easy to keep reliving this campaign. So thank you for sharing your experience with us.

[00:14:20]
Robert Peters: Of course, thank you so much for having me.

[00:14:23]
Brian Mackey: State Sen. Robert Peters continues to represent the 13th District in the Senate on the south side of Chicago. We're back live now. I, I'd love to hear from you about this at 800-222-9455. What do you think about what you just heard and the influence of crypto, AI and AIPAC money in this year's Illinois Democratic primaries? 800-222-9455. Did you see any of these ads? And here's a little bit of a harder question. Did they make you question what you thought you knew about the candidates? 

No one wants to feel like they were duped or lied to, but you know, it's OK to tell us if you were persuaded. These ads are carefully designed to do that. 800-222-9455. And finally, what do you think of this lying mode in political advertising? I mean, American politicians have been exaggerating and lying about each other since Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, but is it different that it's crypto money and AI money and pro-Israel money doing it today? 800-222-9455 to join us. We're on this topic for about the next 20 minutes or so. 800-222-9455. 

Turns out Illinois is not the only place where this kind of thing is happening. So, after the break, we're, we're going to try and put this phenomenon in a broader national context. We'll talk with David Weigel, a national politics reporter at Semafor. He reported several stories on this out of Illinois around the primary. Again, we'll talk with him after a short break. You're listening to the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. Stay with us. 

It's the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. We're talking about the flood of super PAC money in this year's Illinois Democratic primaries. It was largely aimed at defeating progressives by misleading voters about their records. Turns out this is not unique to Illinois. It's been happening for years. Among the reporters covering it is Dave Weigel of Semafor. David Weigel is his byline. He reported several stories out of Illinois this month on what he calls the rise of the bizarro-world super PAC. Dave, welcome back to the show.

[00:17:09]
David Weigel: It's good to be back. Thank you.

[00:17:11]
Brian Mackey: So what, what prompted you to turn the eye of Semafor on Illinois?

[00:17:16]
David Weigel: Oh, that sounds ominous. Well, I've been covering this phenomenon for, well, five years because in 2021, AIPAC, which has been involved in American politics for, for decades, started a new strategy of, of funding super PACs which would launch in races they were targeting, spend lots of money, and the first, the first example of them doing this was Ohio. A former Bernie Sanders campaign leader, Nina Turner, was running for Congress. AIPAC super PAC helped beat her, but it beat her not by saying she was anti-Israel. And beat her by saying she was unloyal to Joe Biden, who at that point was quite popular with Democrats, uh, that she was against Medicare for All, which she wasn't. It was that she voted against the plank of the Democratic platform. 

Uh, the, the enmity between progressives and AIPAC began long ago, before the October 7th period and before everything that's happened since then. Uh, the extending it to the, the AI and crypto PACs you're talking about, they're, they're seen in the same light, I think as Sen. Peters was explaining that there is a lot of money flowing into politics dishonestly, untraceably, and it is, is overwhelming the progressive messaging and, and I'd say a tenet of progressive politics is if there was an equal, equal playing field, if billionaires didn't have so much influence, then people would naturally be more inclined to vote for them.

[00:18:40]
Brian Mackey: Yeah, so, I, I, I don't know, it sounds like you did get to hear my interview with Robert Peters. I know you talked to him for one of your stories too. Is there any context you'd add to what he had to say? Anything you'd clarify or, or amend?

[00:18:51]
David Weigel: It was, it was fair because, again, the ads run against him were not saying Robert Peters is too left-wing for this district. They were saying Robert Peters is, is corrupt, he's he's bought by corporations. There's a, it's almost self-parodying now, the way the disclosure works in these elections. Now we have a sense of who donates to Fairshake, and Fairshake has been, uh, for the most part this cycle, running ads with its own branding. 

Uh, there's much more annoyance, and that's too small a word, at AIPAC for funding things like the Chicago Progressive Partnership and Elect Chicago Women, and, uh, just PACs with different names where the funders were not known until after the primary that are attacking candidates for the donations they get, which are public. I think that that has really been elevating the anger you see from Democrats and progressives especially that on the one hand, and people who donate to them are, are known. 

And let's say this happened in, in the Peters race. Oh, you're getting five figures worth of donations from some, some corporation that's maybe unpopular in the district. Well, who's donating to the PAC that's running that ad? You don't know until after the primary, and there is not much space to change those campaign finance laws between who controls Congress right now, more importantly, who controls the Supreme Court, because this is the Supreme Court that, uh, for 17 years has ruled that money is speech and you, it's, it's every limit it can take away on spending in, in campaigns, it, it takes it away. 

There's no Democratic plan really for them to change the 6-3 conservative makeup of the court that believes in that. That's not how the court ruled 20, 30 years ago. It's how these conservatives in the court right now, and it's been very helpful for stopping progressives from getting elected.

[00:20:34]
Brian Mackey: How were we? How were people like you and, and the campaigns able to piece together who, you know, uh, Elect Illinois Women or whatever? Who is really behind that?

[00:20:44]
David Weigel: Well, I'm glad that the senator gave some credit to, um, to the Evanston Now and Matthew, Matthew Eadie and the work that was done locally, uh, to do this. You have to kind of sleuth out who is, who is working for the PACs, who the contractors are, who the consultants are, that's not that, that secretive. They, they have to disclose that to some, to some extent. It's but the, the money is very dark, and some of it's guessing. Some of it is also, how do I put this, uh, the ball gets hidden until after the election's over. 

And I've seen situations where the funders of these PACs don't admit that they're funding it, they will dispute that they're funding it, and then admit after they win that they were funding it. This happened in Oregon last cycle, that there is a PAC that start spending against a left-wing candidate and ended up electing another left-wing candidate who ended up becoming critical of Israel too, but beside the point. 

Uh, this PAC was spending in Portland in a congressional race. It accused people, uh, of the PAC said that people who were linking them to AIPAC were dishonest. Once the campaign finance reports came out, they, they weren't dishonest. People had, had deduced that the, the, the donors and consultants who funding that PAC were directed from AIPAC. And does that get covered or does that get the same awareness as the ad itself? It obviously doesn't. 

Uh, this is, this is, this is some of the problem people have too, is that you see the ad, you can search online for information about where this money is coming from, or at least what the PAC stands for, and you find almost nothing in the, in the Chicago case. Um, if you got mail or saw an ad for Elect Chicago Women, you could go to the Elect Chicago Women website, which was, um, created in January and had, uh, I can't prove that it was ChatGPT writing, but very AI reminiscent writing that was kind of gibberish about the importance of electing women in politics. 

So who, what was their goal? Who, what was the purpose of these people funding that? Whereas in a campaign finance report, you, let's say you got money from a bunch of people who work in the pharmaceutical industry, OK, you can deduce that this person has a good relationship with people in the pharmaceutical industry. What do you deduce from an ad that doesn't have its donors, uh, revealed? Um, and the final thing I'd say is when they're, when they're not pressing their actual agendas in these ads, that even more distrust comes out of that. 

What is the actual groundswell of support, let's say, uh, for the crypto regulation that the industry wants? Well, we don't know because their ads don't mention it. The ads don't say vote for this candidate because they're going to create a great legal regime for, uh, crypto investments. They say whatever is popular in the district.

[00:23:20]
Brian Mackey: I'm looking at the electchicagowomen.org right now. Women leaders in Chicago have long been the backbone of progressive change, turning community care, courage, and conviction into real policy wins for working families. Tiny American flags for everyone.

[00:23:34]
David Weigel: Very inspiring, yeah.

[00:23:37]
Brian Mackey: So, uh, we, we, uh, I, I asked people to call in what they think about this — 800-222-9455. We're talking with Dave Weigel of Semafor. Let's go to the phones now. We've got Morgan calling from Lostin on line one. Morgan, thanks for calling in.

[00:23:53]
Morgan: Hello.

[00:23:54]
Brian Mackey: Yes, what, uh, what did you get in the mail? Tell me about your, your, uh, mailbox this election cycle.

[00:23:59]
Morgan: Yeah, this election cycle in probably the maybe a week or two before the election, I got at least five mailers saying that Juliana Stratton was basically saying that she was funded by ICE. Um, it was so many that actually circled around into being incredibly suspicious. I mean, I initially found it a little bit dubious just, you know, given the situation in Illinois. If you're running in a primary, it seems like that'd be an odd choice for her, um, but also I, I know how much it costs to send out mailers like that. I'm somewhat involved in local politics myself, so knowing how much money had to have been spent to send out these mailers that were very, very similar to each other, essentially said the exact same thing. And in such a short succession right before the election, I just found it kind of suspicious.

[00:24:46]
Brian Mackey: Yeah, Morgan, can I ask, do you look when you get a mailer like that? Do you look to see who it's from?

[00:24:51]
Morgan: I do, yeah, I saw it was from, I think it was just called like Progressive Values Illinois, which is also very vague, and I'd never heard of them before.

[00:25:00]
Brian Mackey: So interesting. All right, thanks for sharing your experience, Morgan. I appreciate it. Dave, what do you make of the content strategy here you mentioned, right? These, these like the crypto, they're not extolling the virtues of bored ape or whatever, right? Talk about what they're doing.

[00:25:14]
David Weigel: Uh, no, exactly, and the call, the caller had come up with a very good example there. So, uh, Juliana Stratton is a lieutenant governor. There's a lieutenant governor's organization that took money from an ICE contractor, a private prison contractor, and that contractor is given to people around the country. It's given to other political groups, uh, and that organization tried to give the money to, to charity. I think it might have succeeded, but it had some stumbles. 

Uh, the way that appeared in the ad is that there's a super PAC for Juliana Stratton that takes money from ICE, therefore she takes money from ICE. One thing I'll say about this, if people wanna feel optimistic that voters are not being misled, is the Stratton campaign found that where that, where those mailers were going and where those ads were run, uh, and this is mostly kind of downstate outside Chicago where Stratton didn't have the money to run her own ads. They, they backfired that she got better voter ID or I should say name ID with voters, and the attack wasn't very well believed because she's part of the, the Pritzker administration. And if you are a Democrat voting in the primary you're paying any attention, you, you, it's not credible to you that that JB Pritzker's lieutenant governor is pro-ICE in some capacity. 

So it was too clever by half, this, this particular attack that it was very mercenary. Uh, this is something that will hit this person hard. Let's use it and let's not have our real fingerprints on this. Yes, there, there, there comes a point when people see that and it doesn't work, it backfires. That's, that's the dream of any candidate is that the negative ads against you are gonna backfire. It's happened a lot to Donald Trump. I mean there, there's so many attacks Democrats have lodged against him that people just don't believe, uh, even if they're, even if they're true. 

Uh, but that's what happened with that that one particular ad. But it's the totality of it, and that's what I think Sen. Peters is getting at. If you're wildly outspent and you really cannot raise the money to compete with this, if you don't have an ID in the first place, Juliana Stratton was campaigning with JB Pritzker, he wasn't. He was a progressive state senator who you, you know, if you are a Bernie Sanders supporter for years, you've heard of him, you're somewhat aware of him. If you're hearing about people for the first time, uh, without another validator, then, like in any walk of life, you know, the, the first person who knocks on your door, uh, the first ad you see when you Google for something, everyone else has to compete with that, right? 

Everyone else has to get into your head and tell you that the first thing you heard was wrong. Uh, so candidates who have the ability to build their own brand before they run, they've always had an advantage. It's, it's a doubly, doubly robust advantage now compared to these people who can be drowned out by, by that kind of advertising.

[00:27:44]
Brian Mackey: So let's, let's come back to AIPAC because I, I heard more about AIPAC from listeners and stuff this year than I ever remember. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone talking about it in the past. You point this out, that it really kind of broke through as an issue in and of itself this year. I think the reasons for that are, are kind of obvious. Democrats are, well, progressives at least are increasingly suspicious of the Israeli government, at least, if not Israel itself. Um, talk about, you know, how they did in Illinois, right? Their scorecard.

[00:28:13]
David Weigel: So they won two races and lost two races that they invested in. AIPAC did not invest in the Senate race. It, it, it's PACs invested in the open-seat House races, not, not Chuy Garcia, that's kind of famous, so he, he, he dropped out too, too late for anyone else to enter the primary, but his chief of staff. But, uh, the 2nd, the 7th, the 8th, and the 9th districts, which were open, which are safely Democratic, uh, AIPAC spent in those. Its goals were, I say two, I say it one and two and it lost two. It had preferred candidates in, uh, in the 8th District, which is the one Raja Krishnamoorthi just vacated, it wanted Melissa Bean, every PAC that's spent in the race, every one of the PACs we're talking about, wanted Melissa Bean, the moderate former congresswoman, uh, and it was successful there. 

It was successful in the, in the 2nd District, uh, of beating Jesse Jackson Jr. who, who had lots of problems, which we don't need to get into. It was unsuccessful in those other races, but kind of spun that it was successful. Uh, now, what was important that the campaigns that found in these races though is that being connected to AIPAC was very unpopular, and it was, again, having covered this since 2021, explaining to Democratic primary voters what AIPAC was and why you might want to vote against its preferences, that was very tough. Nina Turner couldn't really do it. Other candidates had had trouble explaining. They, they would say something like this is a, uh, Republican donor operation because some of these donors gave to Trump and they gave to January 6thers — all true, there's donors who give to all that. 

The sentiment against supporting Israel in the Democratic Party has skyrocketed since 2023, um, and for a number of reasons. The main one, you'll even hear Josh Shapiro, who's very pro-Israel, governor of Pennsylvania, say he's sick of the Netanyahu government. It's making it very tough to support Israel. Uh, but among Democrats, Israel, it's not their top issue, they generally are now distrustful and look at NBC's polling on this came out a week ago nationally — about 57% of Democrats have a negative opinion of Israel, about 13% have a positive opinion. 

If you can communicate in a race that your opponent in a Democratic primary race, your opponent is the candidate of AIPAC, it is now unpopular. It wasn't two years ago, it wasn't four years ago, it is now. And it was very effective for Daniel Biss, the winner in the 9th District, one of the ones that AIPAC — AIPAC got behind Laura Fine, the state senator who, uh, was credible, elected in the district, had a base. The fact that she was supported by AIPAC, Biss's campaign found that that was terribly unpopular. They defined her very quickly as the AIPAC candidate, and she hit a ceiling. 

There are, there were a lot of voters, progressive voters, they're going to vote Democratic in November too. They heard AIPAC and they turned away. That brand damage took some time, and the, the, the role of AIPAC in Democratic politics is, is, is very, it's very degraded right now. I mean it's happening week by week. It is getting tougher for candidates who've ever been supported at AIPAC to talk about it. You saw this from Gov. Pritzker. He was on the board, one of the boards of AIPAC, uh, years ago. He now says he wouldn't, he wouldn't take support from it. Uh, that so. 

What is the role of a PAC that has a toxic brand in Democratic politics? So, David Hogg, who's not the first, only person who said this, David Hogg, the, um, the youth activist in Democratic politics, briefly DNC vice chair, told me that it's the new — for Democrats, it's the NRA now. It's, it's, it's about as toxic as, um, you're running a campaign, your opponent gets support from some PAC that's tied to the NRA. You point that out to Democratic voters and they'll, they'll turn against it. 

This is a change for AIPAC which, uh, not that long ago had support from both parties, supported the majorities of, uh, members of Congress. AIPAC becoming personally toxic among Democrats is significant, and Democrats becoming aware enough to say, I'm gonna vote against the AIPAC candidate. That is a new phenomenon in this cycle. Now, it didn't help Robert Peters in his race, it helped Daniel Biss in his race. Uh, it helped LaShawn Ford in his race. He's one of the other, the other winners that AIPAC didn't support in the 7th District. 

Uh, and that is, that is very new. Like that as somebody who's covering this just, this is the thing, uh, I think Stephen Sondheim had this line about West Side Story. He was told, um, it had no hummable melodies, then all of a sudden the studio spent millions of dollars to promote it and the melodies were hummable. Like it takes some time to get people aware of something and forming an opinion about something 'cause they're busy, they're not, you know, they're living hopefully healthy lives where they're not paying super close attention to all these D.C.-based PACs.

[00:32:37]
Brian Mackey: Yeah, not sickos like us. All right, just less than one minute left, maybe 30 seconds. You mentioned Supreme Court's no, money is speech. Is there anything that anyone is talking about that has any chance of doing something about this, at least disclosure right before the election.

[00:32:51]
David Weigel: So disclosure has been, has held up. There have been, uh, I mean there are libertarian attorneys who are and a lot retired to the Republican Party who will find a favorable court, sue against some sort of disclosure requirement, try to get overturned. The court has not gotten rid of that. And if you read the court's original rationale in, uh, in the Supreme Court case in Citizens United, it was pretty naive about what would happen to politics. It's pretty naive about how distant, uh, the funding and the messaging could get if people were willing to be dishonest. So the court —

[00:33:18]
Brian Mackey: The court has not overturned [Alito taking umbrage] with Obama at the State of the Union.

[00:33:22]
David Weigel: Alito taking umbrage with him, yeah, yeah, but that is that is, and this was where Democrats wanted to go in 2009, 2010 before the problem rooted its head. That's probably what they can do when Democrats say we want to ban super PACs. This Supreme Court will say that's unconstitutional, that's against the First Amendment. Um, there are, there's talk about starting a, a, a movement for an amendment to change the Constitution, change the First Amendment. That's all it's gotten, and I've been pretty skeptical talking to Bernie Sanders to Democrats. Here's our plan.

[00:33:51]
Brian Mackey: We're gonna have to leave it there, Dave. We're gonna have to leave it there. Dave Weigel, thanks so much for being with us from Semafor. This is the 21st Show.