Activists hope grassroots outreach can overcome pro-Israel money as Cori Bush primary race enters final days

As Missouri’s August 6 primary election day rapidly approaches, over $9 million of AIPAC and AIPAC-adjacent dollars have already flooded the race to unseat incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush who represents Missouri’s First District in Congress. The asymmetrical deployment of resources against her may be paying off too as the latest Democratic Majority for Israel poll shows Bush’s challenger, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, with a 6-point lead just ahead of election day on August 6.

Bell pulled out of his race against right-wing Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley to primary his fellow Democrat in October 2023 shortly after Bush introduced the Ceasefire Now Resolution into the 118th Congress. With a king’s ransom of cash to spend in St. Louis’s relatively inexpensive media market, the money storm has led to so many false and misleading claims about Bush’s record in ads and campaign literature that they’re outpacing news organizations’ fact-checking capacity. 

Jay Ozier is president of The Coalition of Black Trade Unionist St. Louis Chapter, one of nine labor unions who’ve endorsed Bush’s reelection campaign, and is a seasoned veteran of the rough and tumble of St. Louis politics.

“I’m going to say there have been at least about 10 different types of ads on TV, and they’ve been showing up on YouTube, too. I don’t know what’s going on with TikTok and all that. I’m just guessing they’ve had over about 20 different mailers that came to my house,” he said, “and I probably didn’t get everything that everybody else got.” 

Though he sees the overkill as an attempt to disempower voters, he says voters know what they have to do.

“We can’t fall for the okey doke,” he said, “because the people to put all this money in there, they don’t live in the first district of St Louis.”

Megan Green, president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, told Mondoweiss that most of Bell’s St. Louis area donors and supporters live in the 2nd congressional district and that she wishes he’d run there against Republican Ann Wagner. 

Green’s constituents are telling her the Bell campaign’s negativity and outsized spending are a “turn off.” She endorsed the Congress member’s reelection early on and also has personal experience coming out on top in races where she’s been overspent by the opposition. She’s expecting a close vote resulting in a Bush victory. “Cori’s close with the grassroots,” Green said. “She’s our moral compass.” 

Bell’s campaign, however, was recently dealt two serious blows, the impacts of which are unaccounted for in polling. 

The first was on July 19, when St. Louis Public Radio analyzed a Prosecutor Watch report evaluating Bell’s performance in the role. The jail population stats for the county have regressed to pre-Ferguson Uprising numbers—a core betrayal. Then on July 26, Mike Brown Sr. stood on Canfield Avenue near the spot where his son was slain on August 9, 2014, appearing in a Bush campaign video. Brown Sr. got three heavy things off his chest: 1) Bell never marched in the streets of Ferguson with the Brown family, 2) Bell used their tragedy to gain power, and 3) Bell failed to prosecute Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown Jr., the one task he promised the community in return for votes. 

Ground game up for grabs 

Demographically, Jews make up around two percent of the 1st district’s population, according to Michael Berg, a member of Progressive Jews for St. Louis (ProJo). But he said, with AIPAC’s help Bell’s game plan is for Jewish voters to make up six to seven percent of the vote count. “Which can tip the election, and dilute the Black vote,” Berg advised. “This is the kind of message that can get out. And is getting out.”

Berg admits concern for how the aggressive voter turnout tactics of St. Louis Votes, beginning with the inflammatory rhetoric on its website’s landing page — “Antisemitism is on the ballot!” — could poison the atmosphere in the district. He canvasses wearing a purple and orange “Jews for Cori” t-shirt and it’s in the Jewish areas where he’s been met with the most hostility.

“I was knocking doors in Olivette and one woman threatened to call the police on me. She said she thought I was in Hamas,” he said.

The St. Louis rabbinate has been silent on the Gaza genocide but has twice published writings denigrating the Congress member— the first, an open letter to her, published in the local Jewish press on November 1, demanding an apology. By November 1, it was known that in just 19 days of war, Israel had killed at least 7,028 people – including 2,913 children. Eight months later on July 8, after that number had multiplied many times, 17 rabbis publicized a call to action for Bell in which they called the Congress member an “unashamed enemy of Israel.” 

Keen to defend Bush’s record, Berg co-signed a letter which was published a few days later; but another letter submitted that same day considering the shame of genocide, and the double shame of rabbis extending it moral cover, was not. That letter, which was shared with Mondoweiss, began:

In a recent letter to the editor, 17 St. Louis rabbis implied that the re-election of our Congresswoman, Cori Bush, is bad for the Jewish community. Our tradition charges us to “distance ourselves” from falsehoods (שמות כ׳׳ג:זי Exodus 23:7), and as Jews from a range of traditions, we wholeheartedly reject their characterization of Bush. We applaud Congresswoman Bush’s principled stance against genocide and her solidarity with Jews fighting anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.

“If Bell does end up winning,” Berg said, “it’ll be because of low information voters who are voting based on lies spread with money. I hope we can stop this.”

Hannah Rosenthal, one of ProJo’s co-founders, fundraised this cycle with two national organizations If Not Now and JVP Action, along with Linda Sarsour, Marc Hill Lamont, and Naomi Klein. Plugging into their networks, Rosenthal said, they raised over $55,000 for Bush while “uplifting what’s happening on the ground here.”

“There are real threats to Jewish people coming from Christian nationalism,” she warned. “Overlooking Wesley Bell collaborating with Josh Hawley’s funders, this is not caring about Jews and this is not caring about antisemitism.”

Rosenthal is a trauma therapist who says there’ll be no curing the Zionist fever without contesting notions of antisemitism that conflate criticism of Israeli policies with the dehumanization of Jews. ProJo is canvassing primarily to amplify the Bush campaign’s message, St. Louis is Not For Sale. But while stumping for Bush, she welcomes dialogue about what antisemitism is and is not.

Yael Shomroni, an Israeli-born naturalized American citizen, has been active in pro- Palestinian activism since she got her U.S. citizenship a few weeks before Obama’s second term. On July 30, she hosted a house party so her neighbors could meet Bush personally.

A ceramicist, Shomroni has been an observer of how the Jewish establishment in St. Louis has built power over the forty years she’s lived there, mostly watching how it functions in art spaces— promoting or denying exhibitions and grants to this Israeli artist, rejecting that Palestinian one, leveraging donations to dictate artistic direction.

“You have the Federation, JCRC, ADL, AJC, all making up the Jewish establishment. They are represented on every board in St Louis, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the Craft Alliance or the ACLU or Planned Parenthood or a museum or a university like Wash U,” she said, “it’s filled strategically with Jewish establishment people.” 

Steve Tamari, a Palestinian American, whose ribs and hand were broken by police in a mass arrest on the Washington U campus, has been canvassing daily wherever the campaign sends him. He has faith that St. Louis will send Bush back to DC to represent her city for another term. 

“It’s faith that the arc of history is bending,” he said, “and that these one on one conversations are important.”

The other day for the first time in a canvass, he and his wife Sandra decided to bring up the fact that they were Palestinian-American and began telling people that’s why they were supporting Cori Bush. 

“Black voters responded very positively to that,” he said. “Actually, in some cases it switched everything around because they know that’s what she’s being targeted for.”

He said that led into a discussion of, well, where does Wesley Bell get all this money? Why did he get into the election in October? 

“There was somebody who told us he was a retired executive from Ameren. When we started talking he was upset with Cori for some little thing, one of the lies in the Bell literature. But when I said the reason I’m supporting her, I think it changed things. It happened a couple times, maybe not that dramatically, but people started listening differently.”