The Latimer campaign’s first mailer is an approachable affair. It capitalizes on the “all politics is local” principle and the Latimer campaign’s very intentionally chosen theme: “real results, not rhetoric.” Nonetheless, the messaging reveals one critical fact and a strategic weakness for the Latimer campaign.

One critical revelation, and one practical piece of guidance for residents focused on human rights.

The critical revelation is that in this Congressional race – which a local talk show said has “been turned into a referendum on Israel,”1 in which Latimer was 42% funded by pro-Israel lobbying and campaign finance group AIPAC as of February 1, 2024,2 in which it is credibly reported that AIPAC now intends to spend twenty million dollars3 – Latimer’s first introductory mailpiece to voters doesn’t mention Israel at all. Israel/Palestine, or the U.S. politics of Israel/ Palestine, are treated as something voters aren’t interested in, defying a certain on-the-ground reality.

Reflecting the local topicality of the Israel/Palestine issue, two evenings before the mailer reached voters, three police agencies – including Latimer’s County police and with a helicopter overhead – descended on the first night of Purchase College’s human rights encampment demonstration. Over seventy students and faculty were arrested at the small liberal arts college.4 The president of the College’s faculty, Andrew Solomon, issued a distraught letter arguing that the over-the-top police response to the protesters “represents a catastrophic failure by the administration to uphold the fundamental pillars of justice, academic freedom, and the democratic principles our institution” and that “the leadership has chosen a path of alienation, vilification, and unjust criminalization of responsible free expression.”

Latimer’s first mailer reflects an apparent strategy of appealing to voters based on local, practical issues, like completing a long-stalled project to re-open an athletic complex in Mount Vernon, and offering fare-free Bee-Line Bus Service, even while the campaign draws the plurality (if not the majority) of its financial backing from donors who are laser-focused on supporting the government of Israel in its war.

The campaign’s extremely close ties to a hawkish pro-Israel constituency are clear to any careful observer – indeed, the hardline pro-Israel position may be the primary reason for the campaign’s existence in the minds of nearly half of its donors. Yet, the campaign doesn’t view its pro-Israel position as fit for public consumption, at least not based on the contents of this first, four-page mailer.

We should take that fact as immensely revealing of the position the campaign finds itself in as American public opinion on Israel’s war shifts rapidly. And it’s not surprising that the Latimer campaign finds itself on unsolid ground. Polling results have reversed, with fewer than four in ten Americans supporting Israel’s military action in Gaza today, and even fewer among Democrats.5 The conditions faced by Palestinians have become extreme and now exceed the comfort level of many Americans. Cindy McCain, the widow of the late U.S. Senator John S. McCain III and the Executive Director of the World Food Programme, told Meet The Press on May 3, 2024 that “there is full-blown famine” in northern Gaza and that “it’s moving its way south.”6 McCain clarified that “Based on what we’ve seen and what we’ve experienced on the ground . . . it is [full-blown famine]. It’s horror. It’s so hard to look at and it’s so hard to hear, also.”

We come next to the campaign’s embrace of the slogan “Results Not Rhetoric” – or, as Latimer’s army of social media followers deploys it as a hashtag, #RealResultsNotRhetoric.7 The logic of the hashtag is that Latimer has a long, local career as a public servant, with practical results, whereas (according to the Latimer campaign’s messaging) Bowman is more of a showman, appreciating high-profile issues and energetic rallies but less serious about rolling up his sleeves for constituents.

Yet there is a sublime irony to Latimer’s chosen hashtag. The strategic vulnerability has to do with the value-neutral nature of the terms “real” and “results.” “Results” are comforting if one has a basic faith in the system. “Results” can be scary if one feels the system has gone awry. In the case of a broken system, a violent system, a system beset with unfairness and human rights violations, voters’ mental associations with the term “results” may be negative instead of positive. A “result” that might come to mind is a young college student’s testimony in The Journal News: “I saw a kid get body-slammed. He was taken down by about four police officers, and he didn’t resist . . . . A few peers of mine were violently arrested.”8

The perception of Bowman as a less-than-effective, showman of a candidate, even if as widespread as the Latimer campaign might like to believe, can be turned into an asset. Latimer achieves “real results,” but the results are the thump-thumping of a police helicopter’s blades late at night as orders are blared out over megaphones and students and professors at a small liberal arts college run and scream. The gears of the police response meshed and turned perfectly – the carefully-planned interagency “mutual aid” agreements that allow one police agency to call in personnel from another went off without a hitch – and the result was harm. In the Gaza strip the “real results” yielded by Latimer’s embrace of unreserved Israeli ultra-nationalism are far too real: we see images of aircraft firing hellish ordnance, entire neighborhoods reduced to dusty rubble, houses of worship – including a Palestinian Christian church9 – destroyed, children waiting for meager food rations, mass graves filled with body-bags.

If Cindy McCain is right, future images from northern Gaza might show the emaciated and the wasted away, images far harder to explain than those who have simply died in the din and chaos of combat. Unlike deaths incident to military assaults, there is no explicable relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu’s ostensible efforts to bring the 133 Israeli hostages home, and the starvation of Palestinian families in a strip of land that’s both on the Mediterranean Sea and not even an hour’s drive from large Israeli cities.

In this new framing, Bowman’s less robotic approach, the fact that he doesn’t constantly grind sausage out from the gears of government, reflect not an indolent man, but a decent man – a man of peace. A man who refuses to license genocide even when it’s the mandatory position of the political class; a man who freely rejects AIPAC’s brutal bargain with Members of Congress; a man whose open-mindedness and lack of rigidity means he’ll be far less likely to buy political dogmas about why children must die, about why an entire population must be treated as surplus and threatened with liquidation.

  1. This comment appeared in the original version of the Feb. 12, 2024 episode of 914Wired, but appears to have been edited out. The comment continued to appear for a while in the transcript (but not the video) of the show available on YouTube. NewYork16.org retained a screenshot of the relevant transcript section. ↩︎
  2. The Intercept, Akela Lacy, Feb. 1, 2024, “AIPAC is the Largest Donor, By Far, to Jamaal Bowman’s Primary Challenger.” ↩︎
  3. The Intercept, Akela Lacy, May 3, 2024, “AIPAC’s Next Top Target? Rep. Jamaal Bowman.” (“AIPAC is expected to spend at least $20 million in each race, according to Democratic operatives with knowledge of both primaries.”) ↩︎
  4. The Journal News, Alexandra Rivera &
    Gary Stern, May 3, 2024, “Over 70 SUNY Purchase students, faculty arrested at pro-Palestinian encampment.”     ↩︎
  5. The Washington Post, Philip Bump (Analysis), Apr. 19, 2024, “How Americans view the conflict in Gaza.” ↩︎
  6. NBC News, Meet The Press, May 3, 2024, “‘Full-blown famine’ in northern Gaza, says World Food Programme executive director Cindy McCain” (YouTube clip). ↩︎
  7. E.g., #RealResultsNotRhetoric as a Facebook hashtag. ↩︎
  8. The Journal News, Alexandra Rivera &
    Gary Stern, May 3, 2024, “Over 70 SUNY Purchase students, faculty arrested at pro-Palestinian encampment.”     The Purchase College activist group “Raise the Consciousness at Purchase” documented another arrest on its Instagram page, of a student whose only crime appeared to be having been present at the previous night’s encampment. ↩︎
  9. CNN, Jan. 7, 2024, “One of oldest churches in the world reduced to rubble in Gaza” (news video clip) (reporting the destruction of the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius). ↩︎