We Can't Beat the Machine by Becoming It

Editor's note: This essay has been updated to correct an characterization of the AIPAC funding claims made against Ala Stanford. An earlier version called those claims a smear. Reporting by Ryan Grim at Drop Site News, published April 23rd, documented a money trail routing AIPAC funds through shell organizations into 314 Action Fund, which spent over $2.6 million supporting Stanford. AIPAC's public denial came after that reporting was published. The picture is more complicated than my initial framing suggested, and I've updated the relevant section to reflect that.

Last night, Philadelphia made history. Chris Rabb will be the next congressman from PA-03, the most Democratic district in the country, and the progressive movement that put him there is celebrating. I understand why. On policy, Rabb represents something real: Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, ending U.S. aid to a government committing genocide. Those aren’t small things. Those are the fights that matter.

But I’ve been watching this race closely. Not as a pundit or as an outsider, but as someone who ran in this district, knocked on these doors, and learned firsthand how the progressive infrastructure in Philadelphia decides who it’s building for.

And I have some questions this morning that a 15-point margin doesn’t answer.

Let’s start with what actually happened in this race because the victory lap is moving faster than the accounting.

There’s the AIPAC story. I want to be clear here because I am pro-Palestine and anti-AIPAC, and I still think what happened was wrong. Rabb spent the final weeks of this campaign insisting that Ala Stanford was an AIPAC plant, that her funding was secretly routed through pro-Israel groups, that her candidacy was a proxy war designed to silence Palestinian solidarity in Congress. AIPAC took the extraordinary step of publicly denying any involvement in the race. 314 Action Fund, the group that supported Stanford, denied taking AIPAC money this cycle. The picture that emerged was genuinely complicated. Stanford and 314 Action denied the AIPAC connection, and AIPAC publicly denied involvement, but that denial came after reporting by Ryan Grim at Drop Site News documented a real money trail: funds moving through shell organizations including the Kimbark Foundation and EDW Action Fund into 314 Action Fund, which spent over $2.6 million supporting Stanford. Whether that constitutes AIPAC “funding” Stanford depends on how you define the term. What it doesn’t constitute is a clean denial.

I believe in following the money. I believe AIPAC’s influence in Democratic primaries is a serious and urgent problem. But there is a difference between raising a documented financial accountability argument and deploying it as a blanket character attack, and in the final weeks of this campaign, the line between those two things got blurry in ways that deserve examination regardless of where the money ultimately came from.

And then there’s the independent expenditure operation that ran on Rabb’s behalf. In progressive politics, IEs and dark money are supposed to be the enemy. They’re what we rail against. They’re what AIPAC uses. The whole moral architecture of the grassroots progressive movement is built on the idea that we don’t play that game. Except, apparently, when we’re winning.

The organizations that flew into Philadelphia, knocked thousands of doors, and delivered this victory, the ones that will tell you dark money is corrupting our democracy, went quiet when the dark money was working for their guy. That’s not a small inconsistency. That’s the movement making a choice about what it’s willing to become in order to win.

And then there’s the part that never makes it into the public record. The races that matter most are often decided before a single vote is cast — in conversations that don’t get reported, in endorsement meetings that aren’t public, in the quiet pressure applied to candidates who might complicate a preferred outcome. I know this because I lived it. The machine doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it just makes sure certain people never feel welcome enough to stay in the room.

I know this district. I know how this infrastructure was built. I was one of the candidates it was supposedly being built for.

When I ran in 2022, I was 28 years old with two master’s degrees, a public health framework, a grassroots campaign that generated national press, and a genuine belief that PA-03 deserved a progressive who actually lived the stakes. I knocked on doors. I raised real money. I built something from nothing because nothing was what I started with.

I had the endorsement of one of the most celebrated feminists in America. A woman whose entire life’s work has been about the dignity and autonomy of women. She withdrew it when she learned how I had paid my tuition. I can’t tell you her name. She sent me a cease and desist.

The progressive infrastructure never came. Not because my values were wrong. Not because my policy positions were insufficient. Because my biography made the institutions uncomfortable.

They would buy a lap dance from me, but not publicly endorse me for Congress. And knowing that, sitting with that brutal truth, hurt more than losing did.

I’m not telling you this to re-litigate 2022. The progressive movement has very specific ideas about which messes it will stand behind and those ideas have less to do with values than with respectability. Less to do with courage than with comfort.

Rabb, to his credit, is genuinely courageous. He has cast lone votes on principle when the rest of the chamber lined up against him. He has introduced boundary-pushing legislation for years in a statehouse that wasn’t ready for it. That’s real. That’s exactly the kind of thing this movement claims to value.

But the same movement that rewarded his courage couldn’t extend basic good faith to a candidate whose entire biography was an act of courage. That’s not a contradiction you can vote away with a 15-point margin.

The progressive movement in Philadelphia is now the most powerful political infrastructure in the most Democratic district in the country. It has the endorsements, the ground game, the celebrity surrogates, the donor networks, and, as last night proved, the votes. The question is what it does with that.

Because there are two versions of what happened last night. In one version, the movement won. In the other, a movement that was built to challenge how power operates in Democratic politics used the tools of the machine it was built to replace — smear campaigns, outside money, and the quiet exclusion of candidates whose biographies didn’t fit the brand — and called it a progressive victory.

Both versions are true. That’s the problem.

The progressive movement cannot build a more just politics by deciding that the ends justify the means. It cannot demand accountability from AIPAC while running independent expenditures for its own candidates. It cannot claim to center the marginalized while making careful decisions about which marginalized people are acceptable enough to platform. It cannot call itself the alternative to machine politics while becoming the machine.

I still believe in what this movement is supposed to be. I believe in the policy. I believe in the vision. I believe Philadelphia deserves representation that actually fights for the people both parties have abandoned for decades.

But I also believe that how you win matters. That the infrastructure you build reflects the movement you’re actually creating, not just the one you claim to be creating. That a progressive politics worth fighting for has to hold itself to the standard it demands of everyone else even when, especially when, it’s inconvenient.

Last night the movement won the seat. The harder question is whether it kept its soul.

That answer isn’t in the vote totals. It’s in what the movement does next — who it builds for, who it excludes, and whether it’s willing to look honestly at the difference.

I’m still here. I still believe we can get this right. But we cannot beat the machine by becoming it.