Florida primaries are yet another example of how the anti-Israel fever that has swept through the Democratic Party remains a very online phenomenon in the GOP.
Tuesday’s Florida primary results provided yet another example of how the anti-Israel fever that has swept through the Democratic Party remains a very online phenomenon among Republicans.
In Angie Nixon, Democrats nominated another socialist for Senate who has made opposition to Israel a key campaign issue, while Republicans roundly rejected two Republican candidates who also tried to mobilize the anti-Zionist and antisemitic right.
As a Republican gubernatorial candidate, James Fishback sounded all the notes that have proven successful in Democratic primaries. He decried Israel’s actions as “genocide” and pledged to divest Florida from Israeli bonds. He was touted by Tucker Carlson, on whose show he appeared, and used terms popular among Nick Fuentes’s supporters, such as referring to college cafeteria food as “goyslop” (which relates to a conspiracy that Jews save all the good food for themselves and feed junk to non-Jews). Fishback got trounced by the nominee, Representative Byron Donalds, finishing with barely over 10 percent of the vote.
Dan Bilzerian went even further as an online provocateur, exceeding garden variety anti-Zionism with more direct rhetoric — fantasizing about killing Israelis, calling the Jewish religion “terrible,” claiming Jews knew about 9/11 and were responsible for the JFK assassination. He lost by nearly 40 points to incumbent Representative Randy Fine, one of the most in-your-face Jewish supporters of Israel in Congress.
This is not isolated to Florida. Running the familiar script against supposed AIPAC control of the U.S. government has won nominations for Democratic candidates from New York to Colorado and along the eastern seaboard from Maine to now Florida. But it has failed repeatedly in Republican primaries. The two most outspoken Republican critics of Israel in the current Congress — Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie — will not be part of the next Congress. Greene was driven to an early retirement, and Massie was defeated in a primary.
The most prominent example of an insurgent candidate ousting a member of the Republican establishment was Ken Paxton’s defeat of Senator John Cornyn. But Paxton in no way ran on the idea that Cornyn was too in bed with Israel. In fact, while he has questioned foreign aid as a general matter, he has described Israel as an important ally. As attorney general, he enforced Texas’s law against efforts to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, which is among the strongest in the nation.
There are no doubt other factors in all of these races. President Trump opposed most of the losers, and despite being the most pro-Israel president in history, his opposition was for other, non-Israel-related reasons. It could also be argued that the fact that Bilzerian and Fishback got into the double-digits is in itself alarming, especially given polling suggesting that it’s the younger voters who oppose Israel. None of these anti-Israel candidates were winning Democratic primaries 20 years ago, but the party changed over time. In theory, you could argue that as older Republicans die off, the GOP could change, too. But that is all speculative. For now, they keep losing.
There has always been a strain of anti-Israel sentiment within the Republican Party. Pat Buchanan sounded alarms about AIPAC decades ago, and he gained traction in the 1990s, even winning the New Hampshire primary in 1996. But by the time he ran as a third-party candidate in 2000, he couldn’t even crack 1 percent of the vote. In 2008 and 2012 Ron Paul similarly combined anti-Zionism with his libertarianism. He developed a cultish following, raised a ton of cash, dominated online surveys and straw polls, but consistently underperformed in actual primaries.
Podcasts and social media did not exist when Buchanan ran and were just getting started when Paul did. So it’s possible that this wing of the party is better equipped to get its message across to the next generation of Republicans. But it’s also possible that the way social media amplifies the most provocative voices is just providing us with a warped picture of what the Republican electorate actually looks like.