Last night’s debate made clear, Jeet Heer wrote, that President Joe Biden is not up to the job of fending off the disaster of a Trump presidency. Trump lied as usual, but Biden seemed lost. Things are looking bad for the Democrats, but Heer explored a Plan B: “The only plausible scenario is for the party’s ranking members of Congress and party elders…to converge on the White House to tell Biden to withdraw his nomination for the good of the party.”

This week was also marked by George Latimer’s defeat of incumbent Representative, Jamaal Bowman, in the New York primary. The race between Latimer and Working Families Party-endorsed Bowman was the most expensive primary race in US House history. AIPAC poured some $15 million into Latimer’s campaign. As John Nichols wrote earlier this week, the two candidates obviously held distinctly different views about the war on Gaza, but they also disagreed on taxing billionaires and multinational corporations. Latimer, Nichols wrote, rejects “a core component of Biden’s economic policy” in favor of the ultra wealthy. As Bowman himself put it, the race was one that pitted “the many versus the money.”

The Saturday before the election, Bowman held a campaign rally in the Bronx, where he was supported by Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders, and New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. The triple-digit temperature didn’t deter our editor D.D. Guttenplan from reporting from the scene, and with dozens of empty seats, he could tell that Bowman’s chances didn’t look good. Guttenplan wrote that a friend told him afterward, “‘The many versus the money’ is such a good slogan. They should save it for a candidate who is going to win.”

But as Waleed Shahid wrote on Wednesday, it’s not time to drop Palestinian freedom as an issue. He wrote, “The stance a politician takes on Palestine often indicates their willingness to challenge entrenched power and stand up for genuine justice and equality.” There are three things the left should take away from the Bowman loss: 1. AIPAC is a threat to democracy. 2. Ads are effective. And 3. In every election, candidates make mistakes that voters find unappealing. The left should not give up, but recognize the urgent “necessity for a robust and multifaceted strategy to invest in deepening and growing our organizing infrastructure.”

—Alana Pockros

Engagement Editor, The Nation