https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/costly-signals
28 May 2026 Politics

On the face of it, Kentucky’s 4th congressional district was an unlikely setting for the costliest primary campaign in American history. A safe GOP seat in the state’s north, the constituency runs along the Ohio River from the Cincinnati suburbs to the hill country edging Appalachia, a corridor of bourbon warehouses, evangelical churches, horse pastures and logistics depots. The 55-year-old incumbent, Thomas Massie, was never a conventional Republican. Raised in the poor, sparsely settled uplands of Lewis County, the son of a brewery driver, Massie trained as an engineer at MIT and founded a digital-interface company, SensAble devices, in the early 1990s. He entered Congress in 2012 on the libertarian wing of the Tea Party insurgency. Ron Paul lent his endorsement; Rand Paul, junior senator from Kentucky, stumped for him on the campaign trail. On Capitol Hill, Massie proved himself to be a sui generis small-government constitutionalist. Leaning right on issues like birthright citizenship and abortion, his antiwar convictions and hostility to state surveillance situated him closer to positions traditionally associated with the left. Over seven terms in office, he repeatedly bucked the whip over defence authorizations, Patriot Act renewal, foreign aid packages, NSA data gathering and debt-ceiling hikes. In so doing he acquired a rare command of House procedure, using quorum calls and Rules Committee leverage to defy the party leadership.

Personal idiosyncrasies – Massie sports a homemade debt-clock lapel badge and designed a solar-powered robotic henhouse, the ‘Clucks Capacitor’, at his hand-built off-grid farmstead in the Garrison hollers – further set him apart from a drab GOP cohort. An unbiddable temperament did nothing to dent his popularity in Kentucky, where he helped to deregulate the burgeoning hemp industry and obtained USDA permission to supply Williamstown’s Ark Encounter – a 500-ft replica of the Biblical vessel – with live camels, among other achievements. His signature PRIME Act, currently awaiting Senate approval, would loosen federal meat-processing rules to let small farmers sell locally slaughtered beef, pork and lamb directly to consumers, a godsend for the region’s rural producers.

Massie, who endorsed Paul Jr for president in 2016, had an unstable relationship with Trump from the start. Sympathetic to MAGA’s anti-establishment energy, he parted ways with the Administration on deficit spending and legislative oversight. The first major public rupture came in March 2020, when Massie tried to force a recorded vote on the $2.2 trillion CARES Act rather than allow it to pass by acclamation. Trump lambasted him as a ‘disaster for America’ and called on Republicans to ‘throw Massie out of the Republican Party’. Undaunted, the congressman handily dispatched a primary challenger on 81 per cent of the vote that June, coasting to re-election in November.

Six years later, the reckoning arrived. In June 2025, after Massie voted against the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ and attempted to invoke congressional authority to block American entry into Israel’s Twelve-Day-War, veteran Trump operatives Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio launched a Super PAC to ‘spend whatever it takes’ to unseat Massie. Plans had been germinating for some time. Long a dissenting voice from the pro-Israel consensus in Congress – the only House member to vote against the 2014 US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act and 2016 bill extending sanctions on Iran, the sole Republican to oppose the 2019 censure of BDS and Iron Dome funding in 2021 – Massie’s refusal in October and November 2023 to back successive resolutions equating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism brought him squarely into the gunsights of the Israel lobby. AIPAC underwrote a modest advertising offensive against him the following year (‘Everybody who cares about the Holy Land needs to know, Tom Massie is hostile to Israel’), on the heels of an effective multi-million dollar drive to oust Indiana Rep. John Hostettler, another holdout against aid to the Jewish state. But this was a shot across the bow.

At the start of last summer, LaCivita and Fabrizio’s MAGA KY began amassing its war chest. The two largest donors were Miriam Adelson, the Tel Aviv-born Netanyahu confidante and inheritor of her late husband’s casino empire, and hedge-fund magnate Paul Singer, after Adelson perhaps the most influential figure in the conservative pro-Israel fundraising nexus, pillar of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Tikvah Fund. At the end of June, the Super PAC announced its first $1 million broadcast push, blitzing TV viewers in the Cincinnati and Louisville markets with a thirty-second clip that featured a composite image of Massie alongside Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and the Ayatollah Khamenei, overlaid with the caption ‘MASSIE SIDED WITH THEM’.

Eleven months out from a race that was still uncontested, the timing was odd. But a challenger soon emerged in the form of Ed Gallrein, a tongue-tied retired naval officer who has referred to civilians as ‘sheep’ and hopes to reinstate conscription. Trump, whom Gallrein credits with playing ‘nine-dimensional chess’, explained that he was looking for ‘somebody with a warm body to beat Massie’. Gallrein refused to debate his opponent or give unscripted interviews to the press, leaving it to a growing phalanx of outside PACs to take up the cudgels. Early in the new year AIPAC entered heavily. Jewish Insider reported that the United Democracy Project’s initial ad buy was $790,000; its spokesman Patrick Dorton labelled Massie ‘the most anti-Israel Republican in Congress’ and said that the group would make sure ‘every single one of his constituents knows about it’. Christians United for Israel added a six-figure hoarding barrage, claiming to have locked up ‘every available billboard’ in the district. The RJC Victory Fund alone poured more than $4 million into a sextet of advertisements targeting Massie for opposing the US-Israeli assault on Iran, the largest such expenditure in the organization’s history.

Outspent and outgunned, Massie went down fighting, forcing Trump’s hand on the Epstein files, joining with Democrats to sponsor War Powers resolutions on Venezuela and Iran, and denouncing outside influence that he claimed had turned his primary race ‘into a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress’. Days before voters went to the polls, he tabled the Americans Insist on Political Agent Clarity Act, which would require organizations lobbying on behalf of other states to register as foreign agents. The President, for his part, took to social media to inveigh against Massie (‘moron’, ‘bum’, ‘major sleazebag’), travelled to the Bluegrass State to rally support for Gallrein and dispatched the Secretary of War to an election-eve hustings. Taking a breather from directing CENTCOM operations in the Gulf, Hegseth strode onstage to the synth riff of Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ and offered vapid praise for the ex-SEAL’s ‘war-fighter’ credentials.

Television spots further lowered the tone. One pro-Massie attack ad alleged that ‘the gay mafia will own woke Eddie’ and a bizarre AI-generated MAGA KY production, introduced with the voiceover ‘Thomas Massie caught in a throuple!’, depicted the congressman checking into a hotel with Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar: ‘This is worse than adultery’, the narrator concludes, ‘it’s a complete and total betrayal of President Trump’. Given the sums involved it is surprising how little real scandal could be unearthed. The final stretch of the campaign saw an ex-girlfriend accuse Massie of offering her ‘cow money’ – income from the sale of livestock, undisclosed to tax authorities – in exchange for dropping an unfair dismissal claim against one of his allies in the state legislature.

Whatever the effect of such bombshells, Massie lost by 10 points last Tuesday, a margin of 10,283 votes on a turnout of 105,361. Pre-election polling indicated a deep generational divide – more than two-thirds of Republicans aged 26 to 35 plumped for the incumbent, as did a majority of 36- to 45-year-olds, with the numerically larger 66-and-over cohort breaking emphatically for Gallrein. When the dust settled, upwards of $33 million had been spent on advertising alone, more than $300 per vote. Massie’s campaign operation outperformed Gallrein’s fundraising, but Super PAC money tipped the balance, with $16.4 million splashed out on behalf of the challenger, almost all of it (an estimated 15.8 million) from AIPAC and its paymasters. Once late filings are factored in the final tally will be greater still. The largest contributor to a Massie-friendly Super PAC, curiously, appears to have been billionaire libertarian TikTok investor Jeff Yass, himself a discreet benefactor of Zionist war-hawkery. Neither side much profited from Kentuckyian largesse. The Lexington Herald Leader noted that the various PACs were ‘funded exclusively by donors from other states’.

Press coverage converged on a single conclusion. ‘Trump picks off Massie in Kentucky’, the Politico headline announced. Massie’s defeat, for Reuters, ‘underscores the risks for lawmakers who defy Trump’. The AP cast the result as ‘another test of Donald Trump’s power over his party’. ‘Supporters of Israel have long opposed Massie’, CNN’s Jake Tapper observed, ‘but he lost tonight because President Trump wanted him defeated’. ‘Gallrein was boosted by significant spending from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups’, PBS NewsHour allowed, ‘however, there’s no question Trump was the key factor’.

There can be little doubt that Trump’s intervention weakened Massie. The President’s success rate in Republican primary endorsements is formidable, even in competitive contests. Earlier this month, five GOP state senators in Indiana were routed after they opposed congressional redistricting promoted by the White House; Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy failed to reach a runoff five years after his support for Trump’s second impeachment; and this week’s ballotage in Texas saw senator John Cornyn toppled in another staggeringly expensive drive coordinated by LaCivita and Fabrizio. Yet Massie previously demonstrated a striking capacity to withstand Trump’s hostility, surviving past Presidential fatwas and seeing off pretenders with ease. The decisive variable in 2026 was the magnitude of outside spending, which transformed a difficult but winnable duel into a record-breaking display of organized wealth.

If mainstream media in the US tiptoed around the question, others were less guarded. The race was ‘a test of whether a staunch critic of Israel can survive in today’s GOP’, The Times of Israel observed hours before the results came in, and a Massie victory ‘would be a sign that anti-Israel voices are emboldened in both parties’. ‘Contrary to the narrative about a plucky independent defying Trump’, noted Jewish News Syndicate editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin,

the significance of the contest lies elsewhere. Other Republicans, including senators like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins, have stood up to Trump and lived to tell the tale. What would be different about Massie is that no other Republican has done so by running against Israel – delegitimizing not only the US-Israel alliance, but the right of Jewish citizens and other supporters of the Jewish state to make their voices heard in American politics.

A Massie loss, Tobin anticipated, would ‘guarantee a new flood of antisemitic commentary about Israel and the Jews “buying” congressional seats’, despite the fact that ‘AIPAC is a relatively small lobby outspent by a large margin by most other such entities’. AIPAC itself did not hesitate to claim a scalp. ‘Our community was proud to support Gallrein and help ensure Massie’s defeat’, the organization’s press release read. Commentary’s John Podhoretz, in an ebullient mood, explained that the ‘antisemite’ Massie’s undoing should send a message to those tempted to emulate him: ‘Jews are going to use the power that we have to openly go after you.’ ‘I’m going to put it bluntly’, Podhoretz explained. ‘That is Jewish money’. Jewish Americans ‘make up 2 per cent of the population’, he continued, while ‘according to some studies Jews make up 20 per cent of charitable contributions made in the US annually – and in politics it’s pretty close’.

The Kentucky showdown occurred at a febrile moment for Israel’s supporters in the United States. Since the beginning of its Vernichtungskrieg in Gaza, a chorus of reports have warned of splits in the MAGA coalition over the US-Israeli special relationship. Much of the fiercest criticism of Trump’s policies in the Middle East has come out of the alternative mediasphere that helped bring him to power. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens, among other impresarios of the post-Fox rightwing commentariat, have decried the President for abandoning his anti-interventionist instincts. Carlson, who invited Massie on his show in the approach to the primary, has described the war on Iran as ‘absolutely disgusting and evil’, said that he felt ‘betrayed’ by Trump and apologized to viewers for having helped get him elected. After resigning from Congress in January under the threat of a Trump-endorsed claimant, Massie’s friend the Georgia firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene hit the interview circuit to decry the taxpayer-funded ‘genocide, humanitarian crisis and starvation happening in Gaza’ and ‘a complete bait and switch on the MAGA agenda’ over Iran.

Renegades and podcasters aside, the GOP base is still inclined to side with Israel, particularly voters most closely aligned with Trump. Polling shows that almost half of self-identified MAGA Republicans approved of the current Israeli government. For the time being Republican support for the Iran war remains intact, at around 65 per cent. But signs of erosion are visible, especially among the young. The latest NYT/Siena survey found that a majority of Republicans aged 18 to 44 disapproved of Trump’s handling of the conflict, and 70 per cent wanted the party’s next presidential nominee to take a different line on Israel. More broadly, the national mood is turning: nearly two-thirds of the country object to the misadventure in Iran and Americans now express greater sympathy for Palestinians than Israelis.

Changes in public opinion have compelled AIPAC to revise its strategy. Where John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, writing in 2007, scrutinized an apparatus whose power rested on the smooth manufacture of bipartisan consensus, today the lobby operates in comparatively embattled circumstances, obliged on occasion to substitute financial firepower for consent it can no longer reliably command. Across the four theatres of influence that Mearsheimer and Walt identified – the executive, Congress, public debate and electioneering – the balance sheet is uneven. White House Middle East policy has stayed in pro-Israel hands across administrations of both parties, from McGurk and Hochstein to Huckabee and Witkoff, ensuring uninterrupted arms transfers and diplomatic cover. Dissidents are either sacked (Malley) or resign (Kent). In Congress, despite a middling uptick in combativity floor outcomes remain overwhelmingly blue-and-white. If the press has shown hints of ambivalence since the destruction of Gaza began, naked asymmetries persist in coverage of Palestinians and Israeli Jews; elsewhere, the institutional cost of defiance has risen steeply through restrictions on speech, anti-boycott statutes, campus witch-hunts and deportations. Campaign finance post-Citizens United offers a stark picture. AIPAC’s revenues grew fivefold between 2000 and 2022, when it first established its own political action committee. Donations more than tripled in the months after 7 October 2023, as did direct political spending. In 2024, its Super PAC disbursed record sums to defeat Jamaal Bowman ($14.9 million) and Cori Bush ($8.59 million), both Democratic critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, in what were then the most expensive House primaries to date.

The massive expenditure on Bowman’s NY race caused some of Israel’s partisans to fret about potentially counterproductive financial ‘overkill’. Jeremy Ben-Ami, of the liberal Zionist J Street, observed that up to 2021 AIPAC preferred the ‘velvet glove’; its ‘heavy hand’, he worried, risked ‘playing into the worst of the tropes and stereotypes they are trying to fight’. Analogous misgivings have been voiced since Massie’s defeat. ‘Pro-Israel spending may have achieved its primary goal on Tuesday’, Haaretz’s Washington correspondent opined, ‘but AIPAC may very well be sacrificing its long-term standing for short-term victories’. Whatever the case, the scale of the effort cuts against any premature forecast of decline.

Beyond a certain threshold, cash infusions yield sharply diminishing electoral returns. But influence is not reducible to vote-buying or ‘access’. Exorbitant outlays can signal resolve, intimidate adversaries and deter defections. Such costly signalling is especially valuable when an interest group’s preferences diverge from those of a wider constituency. Ten years ago, the Arab American Institute’s James Zogby noted that the ‘myth’ of the lobby’s punitive force was enough to shape reality. It must now more often, and expensively, be made real.