Four years ago, Valerie Foushee’s support of Israel helped get her to Congress. On Tuesday, it could send her home.
The politics surrounding Israel have shifted so much since the war in Gaza began in 2023 that a candidate who benefited from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending more than $2 million to shore up her 2022 primary win has now disavowed the group entirely. Now, Foushee has spent her reelection bid fending off well-funded attacks from the left over her former ties to the group.
And that was before this weekend’s joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran cast an even brighter spotlight on the issue.
Foushee is locked in a tight and expensive rematch of her 2022 race with Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, a Bernie Sanders-backed progressive who is the first Muslim woman to hold political office in the state. This time, Allam is backed by heavy spending from a coalition of groups, led by a new super PAC founded to counter AIPAC’s influence, and supporters of both candidates say the race is vanishingly tight.
The election is being fought over a whole slew of issues and interests, including cryptocurrency and AI, but it’s Israel as a political issue that has fueled the big spending against Foushee. The new anti-AIPAC group, American Priorities PAC, is the single largest spender in the race, and it makes up the majority of pro-Allam advertising spending. And Allam and her allies have leaned into the topic: Every single ad supporting her over the last week has mentioned AIPAC.
The joint attack on Iran has pushed the U.S.-Israel relationship into the headlines again in the final days of the primary — and Allam has jumped on the topic.
“Trump’s illegal and reckless war will inevitably be on voters’ minds as they head to the ballot box on Tuesday. They are ready to hold every leader who co-signed a blank check to the Israeli war hawks accountable — including my opponent,” Allam said in a statement to POLITICO after the attack.
Foushee has also been sharply critical of Trump’s attacks on Iran, promising to do everything she could to stop Trump’s “illegal war with Iran.” She also defended her views on Israel again in the wake of the Iran strikes, emphasizing that she broke with AIPAC last summer during a town hall and urging voters to “check my voting record to see how I have voted and what I have voted for as it relates to the people of Gaza.”
“My voting record and support for legislation to stop arms sales to Israel speaks for itself. It is clear to me and my constituents that the Netanyahu government’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians cannot continue,” Foushee said in a statement, highlighting her votes against military aid to Israel and her refusal to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in 2024. That came after she was part of an AIPAC-organized trip to meet Netanyahu in March of 2024, something her opponent has mentioned repeatedly on the campaign trail.
It’s the latest flashpoint in a primary that’s been consumed by nearly all the tensions rippling through the Democratic Party — generational change versus institutional experience, the U.S.-Israel relationship, battles over Big Tech, the influence of dark money, Black leadership in the party.
The primary results from the safe-blue chunk in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, coming Tuesday, could yield early clues for the rest of a chaotic and crowded primary season for a party still finding its way out of the political wilderness.
“It’s establishment versus upstart … it’s a debate about style versus substance,” said North Carolina Democratic state Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, who has endorsed Foushee in the primary, adding that the results “could provide a peek into what the 2026 primaries and the 2028 presidential nomination fight might look like.”
The race has attracted more than $3 million in outside spending, part of an explosion of money that special interests from crypto and AI-backed super PACs to pro-Israel groups are dumping into Democratic primaries across the country, looking to shape the internal politics of the party.
Foushee has the backing of a mysterious pop-up super PAC and one aligned with the AI company Anthropic, which together have spent more than $1.1 million on ads boosting her campaign.
Foushee, a former state legislator, is endorsed by dozens of elected Democrats in the state, including Gov. Josh Stein, as well as the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The 69-year-old sophomore lawmaker, facing an opponent less than half her age, pushed back on the idea that the seat needed a younger face.
“I think the American people are looking for strong leaders, and I don’t think that they’re attaching a generation to it,” she said in an interview.
Allam is a 32-year-old savvy social media campaigner who worked on Sen. Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. She has argued Democrats must be more forceful in attacking Trump over his immigration crackdowns, which included the Raleigh-Durham area last fall.
Democratic voters in 2026 want to “use the leverage that a safe blue seat has to put up the strongest fight against right wing extremism,” she said in an interview.
The multi-candidate primary in 2022 drew nearly $4 million in outside spending, a record for a single North Carolina congressional primary at the time. Foushee was the primary beneficiary of that cash, with help from both AIPAC and a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC funded by Sam Bankman-Fried, and she defeated Allam by nine points.
The outside spending landscape has shifted this year.
Allam initially benefited from the lion’s share, with American Priorities PAC’s $1 million supplemented by $400,000 in spending from David Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve, a group focused on electing generational change candidates, and a smaller sum from the left-leaning Justice Democrats.
That left the incumbent heavily outspent, since Foushee’s biggest 2022 backers stayed out this year: Bankman-Fried is currently serving time in federal prison for fraud and AIPAC is staying out after Foushee disavowed them.
“Rep. Foushee rejected AIPAC support and we are not involved in or participating in any way in this race,” Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, told POLITICO.
But a pair of super PACs have popped up in the last two weeks to back Foushee, helping even the scales. Jobs and Democracy PAC, the Anthropic-aligned super PAC is spending nearly $1 million to boost her in the final days, while Article One PAC — the new group whose funding will not be disclosed until after the primary — has spent about $300,000.
“The establishment at the last minute is panicking and throwing in millions of dollars when the cake is baked,” Hogg said.
Allam and her allies are attacking Foushee over her backers. Sanders (I-Vt.) says in an Allam campaign ad that she is the only candidate with “the courage to take on all of these special interest groups who think they can buy American democracy.”
In a video posted to Instagram, Foushee said there has been a lot of “misinformation” surrounding her position on data centers and that she does not support one being built “in the heart of our district.” Still, she said she trusts local leaders to make the final decision.
Some establishment Democrats believe targeting a Black woman is the opposite of what the party needs.
“For Justice Democrats to target an African-American female, is just, is disappointing, very, very, very disappointing,” said former Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.).
Butterfield said it “is important to reelect Valerie, not just because she’s an African-American female, but because she’s getting the job done.” But he acknowledged that “there is an element within the fourth district that just wants change.”
