Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
Yesterday, we took a look at the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District. A new poll of 500 likely voters in the district out yesterday found self-funding multimillioniare state Rep. Shri Thanedar had jumped into first place at 22%, followed by nonprofit CEO Portia Roberson at 17% and state Sen. Adam Hollier — backed by pro-Israel groups — at 16%, with 16% undecided.
The race is currently too close to call, according to Ed Sarpolus, the director of local firm Target Insyght, which conducted the poll. The poll, with a margin of error of 4.5%, found the rest of the field trailing nearly 10 points behind the three frontrunners. Attack ads flying between Thanedar and Hollier are generally accruing to Roberson’s benefit, he said.
That’s not the only new poll of interest, as we approach the final weeks of some of the most-watched campaigns of the midterms. In New York’s redrawn 17th District, internal polls from the campaigns of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) and state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi show Maloney with a double-digit lead over his progressive challenger.
Down in Florida, AIPAC endorsed Jared Moskowitz in the competitive Democratic primary in the state’s 23rd Congressional District, where all three leading Democratic candidates have cast themselves as staunchly pro-Israel. Moskowitz said having the endorsement of “the leading organization that supports people who are pro-Israel” will help him step into the shoes of outgoing Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) as a champion of U.S.-Israel relations.
Moskowitz also said that fellow Democrats criticizing AIPAC’s involvement in Democratic primary races and its endorsements of Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results are applying “a separate set of rules” to AIPAC than other political groups, “just like those same people want to apply a separate set of rules to Israel.”
Campus beat
Department of Education to open probe into USC over antisemitism allegations

Carol Lynn Folt, the 12th president of the University of Southern California during the 2022 commencement ceremony in Los Angeles on Friday, May 13, 2022.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is opening an investigation into allegations that campus administrators at the University of Southern California did not adequately address claims of antisemitism targeting a Jewish student leader, who resigned from her leadership position within the school’s student government in 2020 after a sustained campaign of online harassment, Jewish Insider’s Melissa Weiss reports.
Background: The investigation comes nearly two years after Rose Ritch, then a rising senior at USC, resigned as the student body’s vice president, following a stream of documented online harassment and calls by students for her resignation that centered on her identity as a pro-Israel individual. In one Instagram post, a resident assistant on the campus wrote, “Even if all the orgs on campus that r Jewish r also Zionist That’s not an excuse For you to join That’s still blood on ur hands.” Prior to being elected, in early 2020, Ritch was asked at a candidate forum how her involvement with Trojans for Israel, the campus’ pro-Israel group, would affect her ability to govern, which she told JI at the time was a way for students to express antisemitic sentiment “under that kind of cloak of anti-Zionism.” During that campaign, the complaint alleges, Ritch’s “campaign posters were repeatedly vandalized and the campaign posters of other Jewish students running for Student Senate were pulled down.” The complaint goes on to say that campus administrators “did nothing” after Ritch reported the incident.
Student protections: Ritch graduated in 2021 and now lives in Washington, D.C. She told JI she was “grateful” that the Office of Civil Rights was opening an investigation. “This has been an issue on college campuses for a long time, but I think, really, in the past couple of years, it’s really just increased. And so I hope that this can offer a little bit of hope or something to students in that what they are experiencing is not OK, and that they do deserve and should be and need to be protected by their universities.”