JNS
“People are distressed,” Ben Chouake, president of NORPAC, told JNS. “Israel is at war. The house is on fire. People are more active.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which sharply boosted its lobbying last year in the midst of Israel’s war with Hamas and a corresponding surge in antisemitism, more than doubled its political action committee campaign spending as Americans elected a new president and decided whether Republicans or Democrats would control Congress.
AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC United Democracy Project reported spending $95.1 million on the 2024 elections, including donations to endorsed candidates and independent advertising campaigns on behalf of them, according to new Federal Election Commission filings.
That’s more than double the $44 million spent during the 2022 races and mirrors the large increase in lobbying spending last year by Jewish groups last year.
“Certainly, the attack on Oct. 7 and the resulting war has brought a lot of these issues front and center to the public consciousness and within the halls of Congress,” Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, told JNS.
Scherb said that the higher spending is a way to force these concerns on the congressional agenda amid plenty of other topics.
“All this political spending shows the continued salience of these issues,” he said. “It’s often to compete with the limited attention and limited bandwidth of Congress.”
The super PAC reaped seven-figure donations from both Democrats and Republicans, including investor Jonathon Jacobson, the investor Haim Saban (who produced Mighty Morphin Power Rangers), the late Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus and hedge fund manager Paul Singer, the seventh-biggest donor to outside groups in 2024, according to the research group OpenSecrets.
AIPAC outspent every other political committee identified as pro-Israel by OpenSecrets. Some of that money went to oust former Democratic representatives Cori Bush, of Missouri, and Jamaal Bowman, of New York, two members of the far-left “Squad,” who voted against most pro-Israel resolutions supporting Israel and criticized Jerusalem’s response in Gaza to the Hamas attacks.
“In the aftermath of the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, pro-Israel Americans were deeply engaged in the political process to ensure the election of a pro-Israel Congress,” a source familiar with AIPAC’s spending told JNS.
AIPAC’s super PAC spent $14.6 million on the Bowman race and $8.6 million on the Bush race, its two highest-spending contests last year, according to OpenSecrets.
That level of spending drew criticism from then-Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). Leaders of the caucus have recommended that the Democratic National Committee ban super PACs from spending money in party primaries.
“Those two individuals had a lot of big money come in against them,” Jayapal told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Every election you have to convince voters. It gets very difficult, when you get enormous amounts of money coming in, to make your case. I don’t think there’s any big lesson to learn from it other than big money.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition also ratcheted up its spending in what spokesman Sam Markstein called “the most important election of our lifetimes.”
“For Jewish Americans, who care deeply about combating antisemitism on our streets and college campuses and strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship, 2024 was a life-saving election,” he said.
“With the stakes so high, the RJC was laser-focused on helping deliver the presidency for Donald J. Trump,” Markstein told JNS. “The results from coast to coast are clear: President Trump received a historic share of the Jewish vote in 2024, and we are gratified to have played a significant role in moving even more Jewish voters to the GOP.”
Miriam Adelson, widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, gave the RJC super PAC $5 million. She was the largest individual donor to outside groups in the 2024 election, according to OpenSecrets.
The third biggest PAC by campaign spending, J Street, increased its 2024 campaign spending to $14.6 million, up from $8.6 million in the previous election. (The liberal Jewish group describes itself as the “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy movement.”)
JNS sought comment from J Street and from Democratic Majority for Israel, the only one of the five biggest-spending PACs focused on Israel that saw a dropoff in dollars in the 2024 election compared with 2022, per FEC records.
DMFI reported spending $4.8 million in the 2023-24 election cycle, compared with $7.7 million two years earlier.
NORPAC, though, increased its spending to $2.7 million in the 2024 elections from $1.6 million in 2022. The group hosts fundraising events for favored candidates and increased them from about 40 a year to 60.
“People are distressed,” Ben Chouake, the president of NORPAC, told JNS. “Israel is at war. The house is on fire. People are more active.”
