When Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) offered her concession speech on Tuesday night after losing the Democratic primary to St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, she unleashed a tirade against the powerful pro-Israel lobby, which spent millions to defeat her.

Her loss, the Squad member said, “takes some strings off,” and she vowed, “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

Yet interviews with a number of St. Louis-area strategists watching the race reveal that one of its central narratives — that heavy spending by national pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel fueled Bush’s loss — is only one part of a complex picture that explains Bush’s political downfall. In fact, local issues, rather than her strident criticisms of Israel, may have played a more important role and gave pro-Israel groups an opening, they say.

Bush ultimately lost her seat because she fell out of step with her district on a range of key issues — including the bipartisan infrastructure bill and support for defunding police, while failing to provide adequate constituent service in her home district, according to strategists.

The AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project spent more than $8.5 million in the race, while Democratic Majority for Israel spent more than $500,000. But those watching the race say those attack ads wouldn’t have been effective without Bush’s myriad political vulnerabilities, most of them unrelated to her views on Israel.

Braxton Payne, a Democratic strategist in St. Louis, who did not work for either side, said anti-Bush messaging in the district focused not on her views on Israel but on vulnerabilities including missing votes, voting against the bipartisan infrastructure bill and child tax credit and otherwise breaking with the Biden administration. 

Those knocks on Bush all featured prominently in the UDP messaging campaign in the district. Anjan Mukherjee, a spokesperson for Bell, said they were also among the campaign’s key priorities.

“When she ran four years ago, one of the main things that she had talked about was serving St. Louis, and I heard from a lot of voters that there wasn’t great outreach,” Payne added. “A lot of them said that they didn’t see her come back to the district a lot — so that being a narrative especially among older voters, that I heard a lot.”

Payne said Bush had been holding fewer town halls for constituents and failing to show up for ward meetings as she did when she was first running for office.

Some in the district also saw Bush as a “ladder climber” who had failed to keep her focus on the district, focusing instead on creating a national profile, Payne said.

Payne added that the district, especially older Black voters, remains loyal to the Democratic establishment and took umbrage with Bush’s breaks with President Joe Biden. The district includes both the city of St. Louis and the surrounding St. Louis County.

Bush’s votes against the infrastructure bill lost her the support of some of the city’s key unions in the construction trade, which backed Bell. Those endorsements, which Bush’s 2022 challenger didn’t have, gave Bell “more credibility among a lot of traditional Democratic voters,” Payne said, and created a permission structure to break with Bush.

Darius Jones, the founder of the National Black Empowerment Action Fund, which sought to highlight Bush’s record to the Black community, said that polling found that public safety, jobs, the economy and cost of living were key issues that led Black voters to be “disenchanted” with Bush. Jones is also a former AIPAC staffer.

Jones said polling and canvassing showed Bush’s positions in favor of defunding the police and legalizing drugs hurt her support in the district, as did her vote against the infrastructure bill and other Biden-backed legislation and her opposition to government contracts for Boeing, which has a manufacturing facility in the city.

Jones said that Bush’s focus on “doing things to kind of advance [her] own persona” and “divisive” activist posture also hurt her among Black voters, based on polling.

Payne said Bell is well-known, especially in the St. Louis County portion of the district, having won two elections for county prosecutor, representing an early vanguard of the progressive movement.

“He was the original progressive in this area that took on a more traditional Democrat in a time where there wasn’t a Squad … and he won with little to no money,” said Payne, who worked for the campaign of the incumbent prosecutor Bell unseated.

“He became very popular with the progressive groups, so Cori Bush trying to hit him [as] a Republican or wolf in sheep’s clothing … didn’t resonate with a lot of Democratic and progressive voters and older Democrats” who had been familiar with Bell for years, he explained.

Payne said polling showed that Bell’s favorability remained consistent throughout the campaign, indicating that Bush’s hits on Bell — including attacking him for receiving backing from AIPAC — didn’t land. 

Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist who worked with several groups active in St. Louis, said that polling in the district reflected that Bush’s anti-AIPAC messaging and failure to focus on local issues weren’t effective, particularly among Black voters.

Payne said Bush might have “moved the needle a little bit” if she had deployed earlier an ad showing the father of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in Ferguson, Mo., criticizing Bell. But Payne wasn’t sure it would have been enough to save her.

Payne theorized that Bush’s funding challenges — she was putting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of campaign funds toward legal bills in an ongoing federal investigation, held her back from a more aggressive advertising effort. But he said that the scandal itself, that Bush paid her now-husband as a security guard using campaign funds, didn’t feature prominently in the race.

Payne said that younger white progressives in St. Louis city are likely to be among Bush’s strongest voting blocs, but turnout in the city was down 10% from 2020, indicating that Bush’s base wasn’t energized to keep her in Congress.

Mukherjee said that Bell had outperformed the campaign’s expectations in the city, adding that the campaign had detected a surge in momentum in his favor in the final weeks of the race.

While ward-level results aren’t public yet, Bell’s success in St. Louis County suggests strength among older Black voters, as well as the Jewish population concentrated in that area of the district, Payne added.

The “constant bombardment” of ads by UDP and other groups in the district undeniably helped Bell, Payne added, pointing to his surge in head-to-head polls from well behind Bush, Payne said.

But Reinish argued that Bush “did this to herself … Cori Bush would not have been vulnerable had she not been so far out of the mainstream, both as a messenger and as a legislator.”

Stacey Newman, a former Democratic state lawmaker who ran Jewish outreach for Bell’s campaign, told JI that she had been a Bush supporter, but that her rhetoric after Oct. 7 was a breaking point. Newman said she was contacted shortly after the Hamas attack by a group of St. Louis politicos — many non-Jewish — about an effort to recruit a challenger to Bush over concerns about her overall record and stances.

She said that the group had discussions with another candidate who had been considering a run, but ultimately declined to do so, and settled on Bell as the strongest challenger. 

They had begun to plan outreach efforts to Bell when Bell preempted them, independently deciding to drop his bid for Missouri’s Senate seat and run for Bush’s House seat instead. She said she’s not aware of any other recruitment efforts that were launched against Bush.

“[Bell] says there are several reasons why he jumped in, but I know in my heart that Oct. 7 was a prime reason for him,” Newman said.

Payne said, to his knowledge, Bell made the jump from Missouri’s Senate race into the House race because he realized he didn’t have a shot at winning the Democratic primary against Lucas Kunce.

“But he also saw a pathway in better representing St. Louis,” Payne said.

Mark Mellman, the chairman of Democratic Majority for Israel’s political arm, DMFI PAC, told JI that he recognized the primary would be difficult from the start. The group commissioned polling in January that showed Bell trailing Bush by 16 points, a deficit he recalled as “off-putting to some people we talked to.”

“But we saw the vulnerability there beneath the surface,” he stressed. “There was no question that it was tougher than the Bowman-Latimer race, but it was possible,” he said of the primary in New York’s 16th Congressional District that saw Westchester County Executive George Latimer defeating Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

Parallels have been drawn between the two races, including both candidates’ rejections of the infrastructure package and alleged weaknesses in engaging with their districts, in addition to massive pro-Israel spending and strong local Jewish engagement.

In the closing weeks of the race, DMFI PAC released its final poll, with Bell leading Bush by six points — a margin commensurate with the result on Tuesday night.

“What we saw initially was that Bush was actually a pretty popular person personally,” Mellman told JI. But voters, he said, had “serious doubts about her job performance.”

Bell, on the other hand, “was fairly well-known” in the district, Mellman said. But voters weren’t familiar with his policy initiatives as a local elected official, including a program to divert low-level offenders from incarceration that was among the issues DMFI PAC highlighted in positive ads to define the county prosecutor as a “progressive fighter.”

Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for UDP, attributed the group’s success, in part, to the barrage of ads it ran on what he described as “the issues voters most cared about.” He cited polling that showed economic issues were particularly “important” in the district, noting that Bush’s vote in 2021 against a bipartisan infrastructure bill “was a top issue that helped determine the race.”

“What else became clear was that Bush had lost a lot of local support,” Dorton said, adding that her constituents “cared that she didn’t show up for a ton of votes and had never passed a bill into law.”

Dorton said it was “not true” that UDP had targeted Bush because she called for a cease-fire in Gaza, as some of her allies have suggested. Instead, the group “focused on” Bush because of what he called her “atrocious” record on Israel, pointing to her vote against Iron Dome funding as well as a House resolution condemning Hamas, which she recently declined to call a terrorist group.

Bush, he argued, had “one of the worst anti-Israel records in Congress.”

Bell’s campaign also ran an aggressive outreach campaign to Jewish voters, which was supplemented by nonpartisan voter turnout operations from  local nonpartisan groups, St. Louis Together — which said Jewish turnout hit “historic” levels — and St. Louis Votes, as well as Agudath Israel of America.

Newman said that antisemitic hatred directed at the campaign “ballooned” in recent weeks, including frequent and aggressive protests outside the campaign office and vandalized yard signs. She thinks that that helped motivate Jewish voters to turn out for Bell.

“I think particularly volunteers and people were seeing that … they were feeling it,” Newman said. She also linked concerns back to anti-Israel protests at St. Louis’ Washington University earlier this year, blocks from the campaign office

Newman said that the Bell campaign had also brought the St. Louis Jewish community together, across partisan and denominational lines, in a way she’s never seen before.

Benjamin Singer, CEO of St. Louis Together, said the group and St. Louis Votes harnessed volunteers’ personal social networks, contact lists from synagogues and the Jewish Community Relations Council to help bring Jewish voters to the polls and provide information about early voting.

He said they aimed to “replicate” a nonpartisan Jewish turnout effort in New York’s 16th District that brought Jewish voters to the polls with the message that “antisemitism is on the ballot.”

“I think our community needs to be proud and loud and show up,” Singer said. “Our community, every community, deserves to be heard.”

Bush’s concession speech on Tuesday night, with its threat against AIPAC, will likely only further fuel fears in the Jewish community. As of early Wednesday evening, Bush had yet to call Bell to offer her concession directly, Mukherjee added.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned Bush’s comments.

“It is important that we be very mindful of what we say. This kind of rhetoric is inflammatory and divisive and incredibly unhelpful,” she said. “We’re going to continue to condemn any type of political rhetoric in that way, in that vein, and so it is important to be mindful in what we say and how we say it. But we cannot have this type of inflammatory, divisive language in our political discourse. Not now, not ever.”

Bell said in an interview that Bush’s comments are “disappointing … at this point it’s time for us to all work together if the vibrancy and success of this region is the priority.”

Payne said Bush’s comments suggesting that she’d been held back by “strings” before but was now free to unleash her full opinions were “very interesting” because he’s never known her or other committed activists to restrain their full views. “What she said last night was kind of jarring to me. Who’s advising you not to do things and what are you going to do next?”

Newman, Bell’s Jewish outreach director and a former state lawmaker, said she’s been concerned about her safety during the campaign  — something she said she’d never experienced before — and even needed to call police when she was alone at the campaign office on one occasion. Newman said that Bush’s closing speech perpetuated those fears. 

In a video released by AIPAC, Bell thanked the pro-Israel group for its support and vowed that he’d continue to be an ally.

“We’re not getting across the finish line without all of you,” Bell said. “We know how important it is to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, to stand with Israel, and as the Democratic nominee … I want you to know that you will always have an ally with me.”

Jewish Insider’s features reporter Matthew Kassel contributed reporting.