Rebecca Droke/AP Photo
Pennsylvania Democratic congressional candidate Summer Lee speaks to supporters during the primary campaign, May 12, 2022, in Pittsburgh.
Within hours of each other on Sunday, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) jumped in to contest Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District. By Monday evening, AIPAC’s last-minute investment had swelled to over $700,000.
It was at first glance an unusual choice. The election, in a Pittsburgh-based seat that is heavily Democratic, was thought to be over after the primary. There, AIPAC-affiliated PACs spent $3 million to help management-side labor attorney Steve Irwin in his race against progressive Summer Lee for the nomination. They failed, as Lee eked out victory by less than a point. But a quirk of fate has made the race competitive again, giving AIPAC a second chance to prevent Lee from making it to Washington and raising further suspicions about the organization’s vendetta against progressives.
In recent weeks, local media has reported that the retirement of incumbent Democrat Mike Doyle has led to a closer-than-expected race between Lee and a Republican who also happens to be named Mike Doyle. (The retiring incumbent and Republican nominee share no relation.) Some voters have reported preferring Doyle, while assuming he was the same Doyle who has represented the district since 1995.
That naming confusion, alongside the millions AIPAC and its affiliated groups spent dragging down Lee’s favorability rating during the primary, appears to have created an opening in PA-12, despite its D+13 partisan lean.
At least two private polls have shown the race as competitive, one conducted by AIPAC’s super PAC, and another from Lee’s supporters. The latter has the race within four points with 16 percent still undecided.
Liberal pro-Israel group J Street seized on AIPAC’s support for Doyle, claiming that it is another indicator that AIPAC cares more about uncritical support for Israel than it does the views of American Jews. In a press release Monday afternoon, J Street National Political Director Laura Birnbaum said that “AIPAC’s actions make clear that they really mean it when they say that nothing matters to them other than unquestioning support for Israel—not the survival of American democracy, nor the core values and concerns of the majority of Jewish Americans.”
The details of the NRCC’s upcoming spending are still forthcoming, but it is highly likely that its messaging ends up being identical to the strategy employed by AIPAC, whose super PAC, United Democracy Project, has paid for a mailer that is expected to hit mailboxes across the district within the next few days. That mailer, whose contents were first reported by the Prospect, echoes the weak-on-crime narrative that Republican electoral groups have pushed in races across the country, including the bitterly contested race between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat.
The advertising uses Lee’s prior statements in support of defunding the police and other similarly aggressive criminal justice reforms as evidence that she is “too extreme” for the district. As has become standard with AIPAC’s electioneering, Lee’s position on Israel policy is not mentioned.
The mailer, which cost a modest $78,000, was followed with a sweeping $627,000 independent expenditure late Monday night for television ads whose contents have yet to be disclosed. AIPAC’s blindside of Lee represents its first foray into a general-election race between a Republican and Democrat—the only other race where AIPAC has spent money is a Democrat-on-Democrat race in Northern California. All of its $26 million previously spent in this cycle was in Democratic primaries.
In an interview with the Prospect, Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for the AIPAC-affiliated super PAC that paid for the mailer and television ads, defended their approach by noting that the message “simply highlights statements and positions that are publicly available.”
Dorton declined to speak about any of the stances held by the Republican nominee. In the past, Doyle has described himself as “very conservative,” and he has repeatedly voiced a number of positions that could also be described as extreme—including support for a national ban on abortion and opposition to background checks for gun purchases.
While Doyle has not disavowed either of those deeply unpopular positions, he has made a rhetorical pivot. On his website, which does not mention that he is a Republican, Doyle has indicated that he intends to pursue “common sense solutions,” but he does not embrace any particular policy positions that could be described as moderate. Representatives for Doyle’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this article.
Doyle has also pointedly refused to distance himself from polarizing Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who has been widely condemned for antisemitic rhetoric and his relationships with several antisemitic conspiracy theorists. The day before AIPAC announced its latest attacks on Lee, Mastriano’s wife, Rebecca Mastriano, told an Israeli reporter that the couple “love Israel more than a lot of Jews do”—an apparent jab at the growing number of American Jews who have voiced criticisms of the right-wing Israeli government’s policies.
That sentiment was also recently voiced by former President Donald Trump, who has routinely attacked American Jews for being insufficiently supportive of Israel’s government. AIPAC and the United Democracy Project have not condemned Trump or Rebecca Mastriano’s statements.
They have also declined to specify whether AIPAC’s last-minute effort against Lee is an isolated event or the harbinger of a larger effort to oust the progressive candidates it failed to defeat in primary elections, like Oregon’s Jamie McLeod-Skinner and Texas’s Michelle Vallejo. But the groups’ employment of right-wing attacks on a Democratic nominee, even as they remain silent on the increasingly explicit antisemitic nature of Republicans’ support for Israel, reveals perhaps too much about which party it wants to win the midterms.
Democratic leaders have given money to Lee in the past week, and, as The Intercept’s Akela Lacy first reported, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee intends to make a six-figure ad buy in the district. But in a statement, Justice Democrats, a major Lee backer, asked them to go further. “It’s time for Democratic Party leadership,” said executive director Alexandra Rojas, “to finally denounce AIPAC’s active role in campaigning for and funding a Republican majority in Congress.”
