Across the US, progressives are upending Democratic primary races. Will it happen in Missouri?

The pastor of a historically Black church on St Louis’s north side, Rodrick Burton has watched with bewilderment as the congressional race in his district has drawn national attention not about the bloodshed in his community, but rather in Gaza.

“As a pastor who’s had eight members murdered, violence over there is terrible,” Burton said of the conflict in the Middle East.

“We have to deal with the problems right in our metropolitan area,” Burton added. “While there’s kinship and stuff … you’re talking about blood overseas, blood on the TV. We got blood right here in our metropolitan area.”

In Tuesday’s Democratic congressional primary, voters in Missouri’s deep-blue first congressional district will decide whether to give pro-Israel incumbent Wesley Bell a second term, or replace him with Cori Bush, a former progressive congresswoman who accuses Israel of perpetrating genocide in Gaza. Along with a heated primary in Michigan, the contest has become a proxy battle over the Democratic party’s role in supporting Israel’s military before the November midterm elections, which will determine which party holds the majority in both chambers of Congress.

After losing to Bell two years ago, Bush is vying for her seat back, and a Super Pac linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) has so far spent more than $3m to try to keep her out.

In recent weeks, Democratic voters in New York City and Denver ousted incumbents in favor of candidates who promised they would take a hard line against support for Israel. In Congress, large shares of Democrats have voted for unsuccessful efforts to block arms sales to the country’s security forces, and progressives hope that a win by Bush will underscore their movement’s momentum.

“I think her victory this cycle would be monumental,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats,which has long supported Bush and backed several of the other insurgents who ousted Democrats in recent primaries, though it is not channeling funds into the campaign this year.

“We haven’t had a lot of cycles to try this out, but this would be the first time that we would be able to take a seat back from Aipac after they bought one and deliver it back to working-class people.”

African Americans make up about half of the district’s population, and Burton said some draw parallels between their history in the United States, and how Palestinians have been treated in Israel. Others’ views have been affected by conflicts with Palestinian shopowners in predominantly Black neighborhoods, said Burton, who hopes that whoever wins does not forget the community’s needs.

“It’s caused a level of divisiveness that really we don’t need in our community, in the light of what the African American community is dealing with, with the Trump administration and the various policies. We really don’t need these type of hard divisions and bitter feelings,” Burton said.

Ubiquitous ads

Elected in 2020 after beating long-serving incumbent William Lacy Clay, Bush was a member of “the Squad”, the informal grouping of progressive lawmakers of color that also included congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.

Following the 7 October attack, Bush was one of the earliest and most forceful objectors in Congress against Israel’s counterattack in Gaza, staking positions on which many other Democrats were hesitant to join even as it became clear that Joe Biden’s support for Israel was complicating both his and, later, Kamala Harris’s campaign to keep Donald Trump out of power.

It also put her in the cross-hairs of Aipac, with the group and its allies spending heavily to unseat both Bush and New York Democratic congressman Jamaal Bowman.

In an interview, Bush said their defeats changed how her party thought about Israel, and how they voted on issues like the Massie amendment, a recent proposal in the House of Representatives to block some military aid to Israel that failed, but only after receiving votes from nearly half of the Democratic caucus.

“If Jamaal and I would still be in Congress, we’d still be voting no on some of these bills, and … people would just be going on as if Aipac was not still influencing elections,” Bush said.

“I credit the fact that we didn’t stop, that we grew the coalition, and then having the loss grew the coalition even more.”

Bell and Bush can both trace their political journeys to the unrest in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown. Bush was an activist in the protests that followed, while Bell unseated the longtime St Louis county prosecutor after promising voters he’d reopen the case of the police officer who killed Brown, but ultimately decided not to charge him.

“The people in St Louis, they want someone that cares,” said Maria Miller, a Democratic candidate for state legislature who met Bush during the protests in Ferguson. “And once you betray them from that trust, it becomes like a war, because they’re very combative, and I just don’t feel that Wesley Bell’s earned that trust.”

Though international conflict overshadows the race, both candidates have made prominent campaign promises to counter Trump, help the city and county recover from a deadly tornado last year and reverse years of divestment and high crime.

While polling in the race is scarce, Bell is the clear leader in fundraising, having brought in $3.5m, for his own campaign in addition to the support from the Aipac-linked Super Pac United Democracy Project.

Ads from his campaign and his supporters are ubiquitous in the district, with Bell making his case that Bush was an ineffective lawmaker, citing her no vote on Biden’s 2021 infrastructure legislation, as well as a comment where she appeared to accuse both Biden and Harris of “fascism”. Bush has responded that she voted against the infrastructure bill because it did not include additional social spending Biden had promised voters, and that the “fascism” comment was taken out of context.

Each candidate has accused the other of corruption, with Bush noting protesters arrested at a town hall the congressman held last year have sued him and his security guards for allegedly assaulting them. Bell has seized on reports that Bush is paying her husband with campaign funds to provide security, and noted the justice department investigated her while in Congress. She has denied any wrongdoing.

In an interview, Bell emphasized he can’t coordinate or control the spending by outside Pacs. He describes Israel as an ally worth supporting alongside Ukraine, Taiwan and western Europe, and said he opposed the Massie amendment as “more of a show, as opposed to serious public policy”.

“I’m not a fan of Netanyahu, but I think it’s important to stand with all of our allies,” he said.

Bell rejected the idea that the trends that unseated 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Denver, or Adriano Espaillat in New York, chair of the congressional Hispanic caucus, would oust him next: “What happens in New York is not the same as what’s on the ground in Texas, is not the same as what’s happening in Wisconsin, and it’s not the same in St Louis.”

Sean Fauss, the chair of St Louis City Democrats, acknowledged the potency of concerns about Israel, but said Bush had made significant errors during her two terms.

“I have my differences with Congressman Bell on that very issue,” Fauss said of the congressman’s views on Israel. “But I’m not going to support a candidate who made speaker Pelosi have to count on Republican votes in order to get president Biden’s infrastructure bill across the line, and that’s what Cori Bush did.”

Russell Gunn, a Democratic former state lawmaker who is supporting neither candidate, warned that the Aipac-linked spending was “a liability” for Bell because of the controversy surrounding it.

“But I don’t think it’s a big enough liability that he’s going to lose the election,” he said. “It helps him in some areas, and it hurts him in others.”

‘Because of Trump’

Bush’s campaign has raised a comparatively small $1.3m, and is going without the assistance of Justice Democrats’s Pac, which spent $2m trying to keep her in office in 2024. Andrabi said the group’s “limited set of resources” and long list of candidates it is backing has kept it from spending on Bush.

On an uncomfortably hot afternoon, 22-year-old Alec Martirez joined a small group of volunteers for Bush who went knocking at the doors of voters in the leafy suburb of Maplewood, which had only recently been added to the district after Missouri’s Republican leaders redrew their maps to oust the state’s only other House Democrat.

A former co-chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at the University of Missouri, Martirez had hosted Bush on the campus, and was drawn to her views on Israel after watching the invasion of Gaza play out over social media.

“I just thought that was unacceptable that somewhere halfway across the world there was a genocide taking place with money that I was giving my federal government here,” he said.

A few days prior, Bush and Bell had met for a combative debate on St Louis Public Radio, where Bell had pressed his challenger on the allegations of financial mismanagement.

When Martirez knocked on the door of a white brick home, the woman who answered said she’d watched the encounter hoping to hear an explanation from Bush.

“She didn’t satisfy my concerns and I’m pretty sensitive about that right now because of Trump,” said the woman, who did not want to give her name but said she had cast an early ballot for Bell.

The views were reversed further down the block, when Katie Davies, 44, emerged onto her porch and declared she was ready to vote for Bush, saying she didn’t feel Bell had done enough to help the city recover from the tornado and found Aipac’s involvement in the district’s politics unseemly.

“Blind support for Aipac candidates is not leading us to anything,” she said.

As he walked away, Martirez pulled up an app on his phone that allowed him to track which houses he’d visited and how they were leaning. “I think I’ll mark her down as a supporter,” he said.