Adam Hamawy has a checkered past. He once interned for a foundation that allegedly served as an Al Qaeda front. He’s been accused of lying in court to protect Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. the “Blind Sheikh”—a terrorist who inspired the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Nonetheless, in November, he will almost certainly be elected to represent New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District in the House of Representatives.
Had the Egypt-born, South Brunswick-located doctor run in one of Congress’s ever-fewer competitive districts, this record might have brought him down. But NJ-12 is a deep-blue congressional seat, which means Hamawy’s victory in the June 2 Democratic primary effectively secured his election to Congress—and therefore gave his ideas and sympathies new currency in the Democratic caucus.
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His victory came courtesy of a $2 million intervention from a pro-Palestine Super PAC. By contrast, there was zero organized effort to oppose Hamawy. That so little opposition materialized against a candidate whose record would trouble many Americans says something about the state of the Democratic Party and about the relative strength of groups that might have opposed Hamawy.
The lack of organized opposition to Hamawy is especially puzzling because his race was not an impossible one to influence. Hamawy prevailed with just 27 percent of the vote in a crowded field. The pro-Israel runner-up finished with 17 percent, while several other moderates clustered behind him. Such a divided field is where outside spending can make the most difference.
Yet AIPAC—the organization routinely portrayed by its critics as an all-powerful force in American politics—didn’t jump in. In a special election earlier this year, its Super PAC spent heavily in nearby NJ-11 to stop former Congressman Tom Malinowski. That move backfired with the election of an even more Israel-hostile candidate, Rep. Analilia Mejia. AIPAC stayed on the sidelines in Hamawy’s race.
Some Jewish communal leaders deferred to that choice. “If they stay out there’s a good reason,” Jason Shames, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, told Jewish Insider. Shames explained that he gave AIPAC “the benefit of the doubt” because the organization is “very careful” and “more strategic” than its critics.
But political organizations are not omniscient. Sometimes their judgments are wrong. Like any other interest group, AIPAC occasionally misreads races, misallocates resources, and misses opportunities.
Our point is not that AIPAC should now intervene against Hamawy, whose election in November remains a foregone conclusion. Rather, it’s that the group should not be understood as omnicompetent, either by its detractors or its supporters.
AIPAC’s decision to pass on this race is ultimately less important, however, than what Hamawy’s victory reveals about the Democratic Party itself.
The modern Democratic Party increasingly resembles a coalition without a commanding general. The party’s elected officials, donors, unions, advocacy groups, activist networks, and online influencers often pull in different directions, with no leader possessing the authority or willingness to impose discipline. As a result, candidates who the party might have successfully sidelined in the past can now rise largely unchecked through activist ecosystems and fractured primaries. Once elected, those individuals then pull the center of gravity of the party away from the median voter and toward the extremist fringes.
True, Democrats can sometimes stop candidates they might find problematic. Texas Democrats recently demonstrated as much when they moved decisively against Maureen Galindo after it became impossible to ignore her calls for imprisoning “American Zionists” and other overtly deranged rhetoric.
But despite its efforts, the Democratic establishment has had less luck sidelining the party’s Nazi-tattooed socialist Senate nominee in Maine or the Islamist-sympathetic leftist candidate favored to secure Michigan’s Senate nomination. These two will reshape the party if and when they reach the Senate—especially if Democrats seize a narrow majority in which they become the deciding votes.
Republicans have had their own problems with fringe figures—Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie are just two examples. The difference is that President Trump has demonstrated a willingness and an ability to discipline bad actors.
Does he sometimes target less-offensive Republicans? Yes. Ask Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn. But however one views Trump’s interventions in intra-GOP fights, they reflect the existence of a power center capable of imposing direction on the party.
Democrats possess no equivalent mechanism. As Alicia Nieves recently observed, much of the party’s energy increasingly flows through a decentralized network of activist groups, advocacy organizations, and ideological pressure campaigns that often exert more influence than party leaders themselves. The result is a party that can occasionally remove the most cartoonish offenders but struggles to stop the more sophisticated radicals advancing through its institutions.
The lesson from NJ-12’s Democratic congressional primary is simple. A party that cannot marshal the institutional will to stop a candidate so likely to shock the average American is a party that has lost control over its own coalition.