Mother Jones illustration; Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/AP; Mark Vancleave/Star Tribune/AP; Wikimedia; Henry A/Unsplash
Next week, Rep. Ilhan Omar will take on a familiar opponent. On Tuesday August 13, the progressive stalwart will face a second-consecutive primary challenge from Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis city council member who came within 2% of beating her in 2022.
For Samuels, that narrow margin was enough evidence to try again. But he didn’t announce his plans for a rematch against the until about a month after Hamas’s October 7 attack, as a wave of contenders emerged to take on left-leaning lawmakers who spoke critically of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza. Soon after getting in the race, Samuels staked his turf by going on TV to claim Omar had voiced opinions that were “the last straw in a long series of insensitive statements about Israel and Jewish people.”
Omar has “been raising money on the idea that AIPAC would attack her. That has not happened.”
Samuels and these other challengers stepped up as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the long standing lobbying group, announced plans to spend $100 million in 2024 to contest candidates that they’ve determined are not pro-Israel enough, many of whom, like Omar, count themselves among the group of incumbent progressive representatives known as the “squad.” The strategy paid off when Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost to George Latimer in a June race where 61 percent of the money spent was from the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated vehicle. It did so again on Tuesday night in St. Louis, as Rep. Cori Bush lost her primary to prosecutor Wesley Bell—whose campaign has been supported by $9 million from United Democracy Project.
While Samuels has made Omar’s positions on Israel and Gaza a key talking point—even calling her a “pawn for Hamas”—unlike Latimer and Bell, he has failed to garner substantial pro-Israel PAC funding. Samuels didn’t have the same issue in 2022, when United Democracy Project contributed $350,000 to his efforts just days before voting. The donation was only disclosed a month after the 2022 primary; Samuels later complained that he did not receive as much support from pro-Israel funders as the failed challenger who took on Omar in 2020.
While a similar late infusion of money, potentially spurred on by Bell’s fresh win, remains a possibility, so far FEC filings show just one minor contribution backing Samuels from a pro-Israel PAC—$5,000 from an entity called To Protect Our Heritage.
Given Samuels’ strong showing two years ago, it’s not exactly clear why he’s failed to garner such support. In August, Jewish Insider reported that while Samuels was already considering a rematch, AIPAC was instead seeking to recruit LaTrisha Vetaw, a sitting Minneapolis council member, to run against Omar. An operative involved in the discussions told the outlet that AIPAC had judged Samuels to have already “reached his capacity.” (AIPAC and UDP declined to comment on why they have not backed Samuels, or if they might still do so.)
While an AIPAC-supported Vetaw candidacy never materialized, Joelle Stangler, a Minneapolis teacher who is managing Omar’s primary campaign, says the hundreds of thousands of dollars AIPAC spent against the congresswoman in 2022 “could be seen as a bellwether” of the money spent this year taking down incumbents like Bowman and Bush. “We were a test case.”
Given Omar’s narrow victory over Samuels in 2022, Stangler admits the campaign “took our foot off the gas” in that election. This year Omar, who is one of a handful of Muslim members of Congress, has been aggressively campaigning. Another change: their 2022 primary took place about a year after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis cops, kicking off widespread and sometimes destructive protests against police violence. By suing to force the city to hire more cops at the same time Omar and energized activists were calling for the dismantling of the city’s police department, Samuels emerged, as the Star Tribune put it, as “the face of the backlash against calls to reduce the police force.” That pro-police image boosted him among moderate Democrats and was a cornerstone of his 2022 challenge to Omar—but it’s a less salient issue in 2024.
There’s no indication Samuels has the traction he did two years ago.
Omar has also already doubled the amount she fundraised in all of 2022; her nearly $7 million as of July 24 almost quintuples Samuels’ haul. Samuels has attempted to make an issue of the fact that a majority of Omar’s funding comes from out of state. “Representative Omar, with a large national fundraising base, has since November, been raising money on the idea that AIPAC would attack her. That has not happened,” says Joe Radinovich, Samuels’ campaign manager.
In June, Omar’s campaign put AIPAC aside when it released research identifying roughly $50,000 in 2024 contributions to Samuels that came from right-wing or Republican-backing donors, while noting his 2022 backers included Clarence Thomas-patron Harlan Crow and Republican-supporting super PACs.
Radinovich defends the donations, arguing “that there are a number of people out there, of all political stripes…willing to give their resources to Don Samuels, who supports universal health care, bold climate policy, a woman’s right to choose—then you know we’re going to use the money to get that message out.”
Molly Priesmeyer, a South Minneapolis resident and an Omar supporter, says Samuels’ conservative funders have become a voting issue. After people learn about “that kind of influence,” she says, “regardless of their feelings about Omar, they’re reluctant to go with Don Samuels.”
Samuels’ attacks have centered on Omar’s high number of missed votes, her foreign policy, a World Cup trip funded by the Qatari government, and an ongoing fraud case involving her husband. In spots that ran on local television during the Republican National Convention, Samuels’ debut ad slammed Omar for being “missing on the issues that matter most,” and assailed her position on police reform and her vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill.
But the ad also depicted her face on a missing persons poster—an image that immediately drew blowback from advocates from organizations focused on the disproportionate number of women of color who go missing or are murdered; one of them called it “insensitive, racist, [and] anti-women.” It wasn’t the first time Samuels was criticized for sexism. In November, Samuels spoke about Omar on a podcast, saying “You’re not cute enough, you don’t dress well enough, nothing about you is attractive enough to overcome that deficit.” Omar tweeted that the remarks were misogynist.
In the 2020 general election, Omar got about 73,000 fewer votes in her district than Joe Biden. “There is no Democratic congressional candidate in the country who trailed Joe Biden by more than Ilhan Omar in 2020,” Radinovich says, arguing that pool of Biden voters could be receptive to Samuels, who only lost by 2,500 votes last time.
But so far, there’s little indication Samuels is making new inroads, or has anything approaching the traction he did two years ago. While most polling data in the race has been released by Omar’s campaign, those figures have consistently shown her with a massive lead—numbers she released in late July put it at 27 points.