It’s rare that an incumbent representative loses their seat without doing something pretty bad. In Missouri Democratic Rep. Cori Bush’s case, it was a few things.
On Tuesday, Bush became the second member of the so-called “squad” to lose her seat during the 2024 election cycle in a primary. With 99 percent of the vote counted as of roughly midnight Eastern Time, challenger Wesley Bell, a former St. Louis County prosecutor, had an insurmountable lead of 51.2 percent to 45.6 percent, with two other candidates receiving 3.2 percent of the vote, according to The Washington Post vote counts.
Over 120,000 ballots were cast in the race in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for the Democratic nomination.
On the Republican side, businessman Andrew Jones Jr. is in the lead. However, given that Bush managed to beat Jones in the 2022 general election by 72.9 percent to 24.3 percent and defeated another GOP competitor by 78.8 percent to 19.0 percent in 2020, it seems all but certain that the Democratic nomination is tantamount to election in the district.
She became the second “squad” member to lose a primary this year, with Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York losing big to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in June.
So, what went so wrong for Bush that she lost a primary — and one where well over a hundred thousand votes were cast, at that? What motivated those in her district to go out to the polls? Was it unpopular policy stances? Too far left for even her district? Scandal?
Yes, yes and yes, which is why her own Democratic constituents deserted her.
Perhaps most important was the issue of the Israeli-Hamas war; Bush, long one of Israel’s most venomous critics in Congress, has defended Hamas in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. The race became the target of pro-Israel groups, who pumped money into Bell’s campaign. The tit-for-tat in spending between progressives on Bush’s side and more moderate Democrats on Bell’s side made the race likely the most expensive House primary ever, according to the Post.
Bush and her “squad” cohorts tried to label it a smear campaign by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its allies, but she didn’t do herself any favors in this department: In an article published earlier this week in The New York Times, just before voters went to the polls, she declined to call Hamas a terrorist organization.
Are you happy that she lost?
“Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes. But do I know that? Absolutely not,” Bush said.
“I have no communication with them. All I know is that we were considered terrorists. We were considered black identity extremists, and all we were doing was trying to get peace. I’m not trying to compare us, but that taught me to be careful about labeling if I don’t know.”
“We were called terrorists during Ferguson,” she said, referencing the death of Michael Brown back in 2014 — one of the events that brought Bush to prominence as a left-wing activist.
“Have they hurt people? Absolutely. Has the Israeli military hurt people? Absolutely.”
Apparently, this whataboutism on Hamas was too much for even the Democratic Party to stomach, which is pretty impressive.
But that wasn’t all! Bush, who was one of the most ardent supporters of the “defund the police” movement, was very much about funding her own security in the form of private guards.
“I’m going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life, and I have too much work to do. There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that,” Bush said in 2021 after an inordinate amount of public spending on her protection was revealed.
“[S]o suck it up, and defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets because we are trying to save lives,” she continued. “My security is to keep me safe from those racist attempts made against my life.”
The people of her district in St. Louis — described by even the Times as a place where “crime is high and downtown is made up of mostly boarded-up storefronts” — probably didn’t look too fondly upon this. They looked even less fondly upon it when she ended up marrying Cortney Merritts, who had been part of her security detail for quite some time.
It wasn’t just that Bush was far from transparent, wedding Merritts in secret and not being forthcoming about when their relationship began. (He was with her security detail from at least her start in office, with social media posts showing him with her at President Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, just weeks after she had taken office herself.)
Merritts, it was reported last July, lacked a private security license in the the city of St. Louis, in St. Louis County or in Washington, D.C. As of January, the Department of Justice, the Federal Election Commission and the House Ethics Committee were all investigating Bush’s use of funds.
In short, this looked like a prime moment for the Democrats to ditch some dead weight heading into November — and ditch her they did.
Bell’s margin of victory over Bush almost exactly matched a survey released last week by the Mellman Group and the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC that showed him ahead 48 percent to 42 percent. The same group had a poll in June that found him only ahead slightly, 43 percent to Bush’s 42 percent, the U.K.’s Daily Mail noted.
Those could be dismissed among the far left as being opposition-run. The problem is that the election definitely wasn’t, and it was right on the money. Ouch.
