NEW YORK, NY — One day after AdImpact reported that the NY-16 race had become the most expensive House primary in history, MSNBC host Chris Hayes walked through the lopsided and deceptive nature of the over $20 million in outside spending flooding the race–over 80% of which is against Congressman Jamaal Bowman, and in support of George Latimer.
Hayes detailed the sole reason this race has reached record levels of spending: AIPAC’s SuperPAC, UDP, which as of this morning has spent $14 million on ads. Though AIPAC and UDP’s only concern is continuing military funding for Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, Hayes explained, “the pro-Israel SuperPAC didnt drop 14 million of pro-Israel ads in this race…in fact it didn’t mention Israel in its ads at all.”
At the same time, “most of UDP’s top funders are Republican megadonors,” including former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus, New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, and Paul Singer, known for taking Justice Samuel Alito on an unreported luxury fishing trip.
“This is what Citizens United has wrought,” Hayes said in his closing statement. “Enormous swarms of big money from anodyne-sounding groups, pounding a candidate while concealing what their own interests are. It’s a bizarre perversion of genuine democratic discourse that does not serve voters. But it works great for megadonors.”
“Just about every voter in NY-16 has asked us ‘what is going on with all these ads?’”, said campaign spokesman Lawrence Wang. “Chris Hayes laid out the answer every voter should see: that Republican billionaires are spending the most money ever in a primary against Jamaal Bowman while hiding not just who they are, but the issue they are trying to influence.”
The segment also shone a spotlight on the more than $2 million in ad spending by Fairshake, a cryptocurrency industry-funded SuperPAC which also does not talk about its main issue, crypto currency deregulation, in its commercials.
In addition to receiving the majority of his record-setting financial support from AIPAC, George Latimer was also recruited by the lobby group to run. This segment also comes on the heels of a report revealing George Latimer’s multi-decade history of obstructing federal desegregation efforts, which Congressman Bowman called out in a recent TV debate, and increasing scrutiny for comments involving race.
The report comes in the midst of early voting which saw a record high turnout for the first day of early voting in Co-Op City, and high new voter registration numbers, particularly in majority Black and brown areas of the district like Yonkers and Mt. Vernon.
About Jamaal Bowman
Congressman Jamaal Bowman was an educator and advocate for public schools for over 20 years and previously served as principal for the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action (CASA), a public middle school he founded in 2009 in the Baychester neighborhood of The Bronx. Rep. Bowman is a life-long New Yorker who lives in Yonkers with his wife and children.
