Washington, DC – One ad says: “Kamala Harris stands with Israel. »
The other proclaims that the “two-faced” vice president and Democratic candidate is “campaigning for Palestine and trying to get away with it.”
These mixed messages were broadcast in the weeks leading up to a close presidential election in the United States.
And both were produced and financed by the same group: a mysterious Republican-linked political action committee (PAC) funded by an organization that hosted events with Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.
But the ads targeted two distinct groups of voters. The first, touting Harris’s pro-Israel bona fides, traveled to areas of Michigan where the Arab-American presence is significant, according to Google data.
The second, warning of its alleged pro-Palestinian leaning, targeted towns with large Jewish communities in Pennsylvania.
Experts say the messaging campaign aims to stoke divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon – and play on ethnic and religious tensions.
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute think tank, called the ads “extraordinary.”
“What we’re looking at here is the targeting of specific communities — Arab Americans in Michigan, Jewish Americans in Pennsylvania — with disinformation that is also, I would argue, both anti-Semitic and anti-Arab,” said Berry to Tel Aviv Tribune.
She and other experts warn that the sophistication of the ads highlights the power of “dark money” in the electoral system, as political groups use trickery to focus on specific communities to discourage them from supporting a candidate or to vote.
Future Coalition
The Israel-focused ads are run by a group called FC PAC, which was founded in July as Future Coalition PAC but changed its name earlier this month.
There is little public information about the political action committee other than the names of its treasurer and its designated agent, Ray Zaborney and Cabell Hobbs, respectively – two Republican operatives.
But its results were targeted to sway two key battleground states in the Nov. 5 election.
Running on platforms like YouTube, Google ads emphasizing Harris’ support for Israel ran in several Michigan ZIP codes, including Dearborn, a Detroit suburb of 100,000 known as the “capital of Arab America.
Arab Americans have opposed continued U.S. support for the Israeli offensive, which U.N. experts have called a genocide.
Meanwhile, the ads questioning the vice president’s support for Israel aired in places with high concentrations of Jewish voters, including suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Thousands of Arab-Americans in Michigan also received flyers in the mail and text messages from the FC PAC.
Some ads grouped Harris with Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who represents a Michigan district in the House of Representatives.
“When protesters attacked Israel, Harris and Slotkin did not back down,” one text message said. “Harris & Slotkin are the pro-Israel team we can trust!” »
The ads are made to look like they come from a pro-Harris group, or even the candidate’s campaign itself.
Focus on Doug Emhoff
Many of the FC PAC’s ads, including video ads, emphasized the Jewish identity of Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff.
A flyer sponsored by FC and sent to homes in Dearborn showed Harris and Emhoff kissing, with an Israeli flag in the background.
He said Harris “leans on her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff to advise her on high-level pro-Israel policies.”
Advocates warn that the ad campaign attempts to exploit stereotypes about the beliefs of Arab and Jewish voters while exploiting heightened tensions and anger in both communities amid Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed nearly 43,000 Palestinians.
Berry called the post “disturbing” and racist against Arab and Jewish Americans.
“This is a flattening of both communities in such a way that it suggests we are so sectarian that this is what would work,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Arab American voters have overwhelmingly supported Jewish candidates in the past, including Sen. Bernie Sanders when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020.
Berry nevertheless noted that the sophisticated design of the ad campaign could mislead voters into believing the message came from the Harris campaign.
“I’ve never seen anything like this happen here,” she said. “When the average person receives a text that looks like a campaign text, the reaction is: ‘Why? ‘Why would you talk like that?’
The FC appears to have taken advantage of lax regulations to take electoral tricks to the next level.
But previous campaigns have used similar methods. For example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is partly funded by right-wing donors, spends millions of dollars on Democratic primaries to defeat progressive critics of Israel.
The advocacy group’s electoral arm is called the United Democracy Project, and it runs ads that have nothing to do with Israel, helping to obscure its true agenda.
Another example occurred in 2022, when Democratic-linked groups ran ads promoting far-right candidates in Republican primaries in swing districts, viewing them as easier opponents in the general election.
But Berry said FC’s efforts are particularly dangerous in the way they target Arab and Jewish American voters.
“This is yet another example of our broken campaign finance system that requires deep review and reform,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
FC recently took down its website, which featured the adverts it was running.
Who is behind the campaign?
According to Federal Election Commission records, FC received a one-time $3 million donation from a Republican-linked group called Building America’s Future (BAF), which co-hosted events with Trump’s re-election campaign .
As a so-called dark money group, BAF is not required to reveal its donors, said Anna Massoglia, editorial and investigations manager at Open Secrets, a website that tracks U.S. political spending.
BAF is officially a social welfare organization, designated as a 501(c)(4) group under the tax code.
“These are not supposed to be political groups. They exist for social welfare purposes, but because of the way the rules are structured, they can spend unlimited amounts of money on US elections as long as that is not their main objective,” Massoglia told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Even though dark money groups cannot explicitly encourage people to vote for a given candidate, they can spend to support or oppose any politician or policy.
On the other hand, super PACs dedicated to electoral campaigns are required to reveal the sources of their financing to electoral authorities. But there is a flaw.
“Super PACs, even though they have to disclose their donors to the Election Commission, they may just disclose a dark money pool, which hides the ultimate source of funding in some cases,” Massoglia said.
BAF did not respond to Tel Aviv Tribune’s request for comment at the time of publication.
“There are many gray areas in federal campaign finance law that have allowed these groups to operate largely unchecked – in particular, in areas such as online media and in funneling money through 501(c)(4)s to super PACs,” Massoglia told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“These are much newer tactics that the Federal Election Commission has not yet mastered.”
Will it work?
Massoglia raised concerns about the effects of misleading campaigns on American democracy.
“It’s really important that voters are informed, that they can know who is behind the messages that they are consuming, especially when it comes to misleading messages,” she said.
Berry echoed that assessment, emphasizing that it should be up to voters to make their own decisions about the election without outside manipulation.
But in Michigan and across the country, Arab American voters are already growing angry over Democrats’ support for Israel.
Harris pledged to continue arming Israel despite ongoing and well-documented abuses in Lebanon and Gaza.
And Slotkin, the Senate candidate targeted by the FC campaign, is one of the strongest supporters of Israel among largely pro-Israel Democrats.
In recent months, Slotkin voted with the Republican majority in the House of Representatives on a bill that would impose sanctions on International Criminal Court officials who investigate Israeli atrocities. She also supported a measure that would prohibit the U.S. State Department from citing the death toll recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza.
Berry pointed out that Slotkin and Harris largely ignored the demands and opinions of voters concerned about the war in Gaza and Lebanon.
“You’re looking at a dystopian reality where the presidential election and even this statewide race are playing out in such a way that these individual candidates have been so incredibly tone deaf to the needs of their voters that even this horrible ad is exploiting something. it’s potentially credible,” she said.
Hussein Dabajeh, a Lebanese-American political consultant in the Detroit area, also said some voters believe the FC fliers and text messages came from the Harris campaign, based on the vice president’s own record on the issue.
Harris maintained unwavering support for Israel and pledged to continue arming the US ally.
Dabajeh stressed that Democrats have only themselves to blame if they lose Michigan after alienating the swing state’s large Arab-American community.
“That’s what ads do: they highlight a record that’s actually true,” Dabajeh told Tel Aviv Tribune.