Good Wednesday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we cover the results of the Massachusetts Senate primary and highlight Rahm Emanuel’s call for Democrats to unequivocally condemn Hasan Piker’s antisemitic rhetoric. We also cover a House vote to adopt a Republican-led resolution condemning socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America, and report on allegations made by Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) that an unregistered spending campaign illegally interfered in his congressional race, to aid his neo-Nazi opponent. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Alberto Barbera, Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman.

Ideological progressivism and incumbency proved to be more potent advantages than an argument for generational change in the Massachusetts Senate primary, where Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) easily dispatched a challenge from more-moderate Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who nonetheless swung leftward during the primary campaign. 

Markey, a lifelong politician first elected to Congress in 1976, locked down support from the state’s leading progressives, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) — and won backing from the stars of socialist wing of the party, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). 

LAS VEGAS — Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) alleged in an interview with Jewish Insider this week that an unregistered spending campaign, to the tune of millions of dollars, illegally interfered in his congressional race to aid his neo-Nazi opponent, influencer Dan Bilzerian. Fine added that the money backing that campaign may have come from foreign sources.

Fine, speaking to JI on the sidelines of the Republican Jewish Coalition summit this weekend, said that the group, Florida First Action Network, spent millions on television and mail advertising attacking him without registering with the Federal Election Commission, as required by law.

More than six months into the conflict between the United States and Iran, House lawmakers remain split largely along partisan lines on whether the Trump administration’s strategy of targeted economic pressure and naval blockades is helping Washington gain a strategic edge in the conflict. 

While the administration recently has said its focus remains on carrying out a new economic campaign against the regime, recent military flare-ups between the two sides threaten to drag the conflict back into broader hostilities. On Tuesday, the U.S. resumed strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran, CETNCOM announced, following Iran’s weekend attacks on American forces in the region and two Iranian strikes on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday.

The House voted 220-192 on Tuesday to adopt a Republican-led resolution condemning socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America. The vote fell largely along party lines after GOP leaders attached language to the resolution backing President Donald Trump’s priority voting rights legislation.

Introduced by Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO), the resolution “condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.”

Middle East experts urged members of Congress on Tuesday to empower the Yemeni government and resume diplomatic efforts to constrain the Houthis in Yemen, warning that the Trump administration’s bombing campaign against the Houthis and the subsequent ceasefire have failed to deter the group from targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

At a House Foreign Affairs Committee Middle East subcommittee hearing on the threats posed by the Houthis to U.S. interests in the Red Sea, Nadwa Al-Dawsari, an associate fellow at the Middle East Institute, and Allison Minor, the director of the Project for Middle East Integration at the Atlantic Council, testified that the Trump administration’s approach to containing the Iran-backed terror group had not sufficiently weakened or deterred it.

Rahm Emanuel, the veteran Democratic operative and former mayor of Chicago who is now mulling a presidential bid in 2028, said he would go on Hasan Piker’s Twitch show to give the antisemitic streamer “a lesson in what he is perpetuating and the advocacy and the rhetoric of what he’s doing.”

“I can give him a two-by-four upside his head because of what he said,” Emanuel said in a CNN interview on Monday, referring to recent comments in which Piker had claimed that Jews who support Israel are inviting violence against themselves.

LAS VEGAS — Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual conference in Las Vegas, Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) warned of a “red-green alliance” between the far left and Islamists that has fueled antipathy against the Jewish people and America.

“These two forces should be natural enemies. One denies God; the other claims exclusive possession of Him. One worships the collective; the other commands submission to a caliphate,” Sheehy said. “Yet they have formed a red-green alliance of convenience, united by one thing: shared hatred of the West, of capitalism and of the Jewish people, who stand as living proof that a people can thrive anywhere despite any oppressor.”