Mixed Results for Antizionist and Extreme Candidates in 2026 Midterms

The 2026 midterm elections delivered significant wins for antizionist candidates and causes. Several candidates with records of downplaying violence against Jews and Israelis, and associating with antisemitic figures, won seats in Congress and state legislatures, many with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). 

The explicitly antizionist organization found success with its members and endorsed candidates in dozens of federal, state and local races nationwide.

DSA endorsed 165 candidates and 59 ballot items in national and local races in this election cycle, and the vast majority of those candidates won their races. As of November 6, 106 DSA-endorsed candidates won, 37 lost and one is headed to a runoff.

While the growing number of DSA-endorsed officials and those who align with their ideology is a serious concern, they remain a small fraction of most governing coalitions at the federal, state and local levels. Only eight candidates officially endorsed by DSA rode the blue wave into a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and none were elected to the U.S. Senate.

Voters in multiple municipalities across two states also approved ballot measures related to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) efforts.

On the far right, at least three candidates with current or past extremist ties won state legislative seats, though other high-profile contenders running for elected office lost their races.

Antizionist Candidate Victories

In one of the most closely watched midterm contests, Abdul El-Sayed won the Senate race in Michigan. El-Sayed is an outspoken critic of Israel who has a history of downplaying concerns about antisemitism and associating with figures known to promote antisemitism. In his victory speech in the early morning hours on Wednesday, he doubled down on his previous anti-Israel positions, mocking the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), condemning “special interests who’ve rigged the system,” and blaming U.S. spending on “dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids” for rising domestic costs.

DSA member Melat Kiros won the election in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. Kiros has a history of downplaying, on multiple occasions, the fatal June 2025 antisemitic firebombing attack in Boulder and Hamas’s October 7 antisemitic terror attack. These statements included a May 2026 interview with DSA-aligned Twitch streamer and antizionist influencer Hasan Piker, in which Kiros characterized the massacre of over 1,200 people on October 7 as the “inevitable consequence of apartheid” and “decades of occupation.”

Chris Rabb, a DSA-endorsed Pennsylvania state representative who supports BDS efforts, won the state’s 3rd Congressional District after making criticism of Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign. He has repeatedly campaigned with Piker and appeared on the election-night livestream that Piker hosted in affiliation with DSA, which drew more than 240,000 viewers at its peak. “I want to thank you because you were able to connect me with my own future constituents who I might not have been able to reach in the ways you reach them,” he told Piker on the livestream.

In New York, all 17 candidates endorsed by DSA prevailed: three won seats in the U.S. Congress, 13 in the state legislature, and one in the municipal legislature. Among these successful candidates was DSA member Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the seat for New York’s 13th Congressional District. A longtime antizionist activist, Chevalier has expressed support for terror and been closely associated with groups that are known to organize events at which Jewish individuals have been harassed.

As an undergraduate student at Columbia University in the mid-2010s, she was involved with the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and helped launch the antizionist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). In 2014, she posted on social media in support of Rasmea Odeh, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist convicted for her role in a 1969 supermarket bombing in Jerusalem that killed two Israeli students and injured nine others.

Hours after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, on October 8, Chevalier attended a protest in New York City where speakers openly praised Hamas’s attack; she later defended her participation in the rally, claiming that she was advocating for “human rights.” In 2024, Chevalier helped organize the Columbia University encampment as an alumna. The encampment was defined by its extreme, and at times violent, nature, with participants and supporters accosting Jewish students, glorifying Hamas and October 7, and forcibly taking over a campus building and injuring facilities workers in the process.

Elsewhere in New York, fellow DSA member Claire Valdez, a former New York State Assembly member, won her election in New York’s 7th Congressional District. At the state level, former Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) intern and DSA-endorsed candidate Aber Kawas was elected to represent New York State Senate District 12. Like Chevalier, Valdez and Kawas both have a history of associating with antizionist groups and participating in antizionist activities.

Kawas has expressed solidarity with or support for convicted terrorists and terror attack plotters, including Ahmed Ferhani (who pleaded guilty in 2012 to charges related to plotting to blow up a synagogue in Manhattan) and Syed Fahad Hashmi (who in 2010 was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide material support or resources to Al Qaeda).

Adam Hamawy, a Democratic candidate with a history of engaging with convicted terrorists, won election to New Jersey's 12th Congressional District. In 1995, Hamawy was a defense witness during Islamist Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman’s trial on charges that grew out of an investigation into Rahman’s involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Also in the 1990s, Hamawy was involved in the delivery and distribution of medical supplies for the Bosnia office of the Benevolence International Foundation, an organization that in 2002 was designated by the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a financier of the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

Antizionist Victories Extend to BDS Ballot Measures

Beyond victorious candidates, antizionist organizers also found success via local ballot measures, with the passage of BDS-related initiatives in multiple cities. BDS campaigns are often used in ways that stigmatize, exclude or target Jews and Jewish organizations. Many of the founding goals of the BDS movement are antisemitic because they reject or ignore the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in its ancestral homeland and call for the dismantling of the state of Israel.

Voters passed a contentious BDS ballot measure in Providence, Rhode Island, that orders the city to divest from foreign countries that are "conducting severe violation[s] of human rights." Proposed through a citizen petition by the Providence for Palestine coalition — comprised of the Rhode Island chapters of DSA and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the AFT Local 6516 labor union at Brown University, and the group Reclaim RI — won with approximately 75% of the vote.

The ordinance will require the city to "refrain, to the best of its ability," from investing in countries and entities that are deemed “complicit” in “ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide." Providence’s newly elected mayor, David Morales, expressed support for the measure during his campaign and in an election night statement, praising the voters for “taking a stand against genocide” and describing JVP as “instrumental” in both passing the ballot measure and getting him elected.

In another landslide BDS ballot measure victory, Bloomington, Illinois, residents passed a nonbinding advisory question that asked if the federal government should “ban the transfer of weapons to any country that is a dictatorship, apartheid state, or major violator of human rights.” Over 88% of the nearly 28,000 ballots cast on this question voted in favor of the advisory.

Additionally, voters in eight other Illinois communities approved advisory referendums that call on the state to repeal anti-BDS laws that ban state investment in businesses that boycott Israel. Residents in Champaign, Cunningham, DuPage, Kickapoo, Medina, Normal, Oak Park, and Peoria approved the measures, with vote percentages in favor of the referenda ranging from 60% to 75% in the different localities.

Far-Right Candidates See Mixed Results

Marshall Rawson — who marched in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as part of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate white supremacist group — was elected to the Florida House of Representatives to represent the state’s 10th District. As recently as 2021, Rawson spoke at the League of the South’s “Florida Freedom Conference.”

Despite his claims to have renounced his ties, he has continued to receive support from white supremacists such as League of the South President Michael Hill, used white supremacist dog whistles, and pledged to “stand up to the radical left and protect our heritage and values.” In response to his victory, white supremacists, including white supremacist television and radio host Lana Lokteff, cheered the results.

Incumbent Republican Mark Finchem won the election in Arizona State Senate District 1. Finchem is a self-identified Oath Keeper who has a lengthy history of posting content linked to QAnon and antisemitic conspiracy theories. He attended the January 6, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the Capitol riot and has engaged in 2020 election denial.

Incumbent Republican Matt Marshall, who previously founded and led a local chapter of the Three Percenter anti-government militia movement group in Washington, won reelection in District 2 in the Washington House of Representatives. Marshall resigned his position in the local Three Percenter chapter's leadership ahead of his successful 2024 campaign, though he continued to share Three Percenter content on social media.

Other candidates with histories of promoting far-right views and conspiracy theories or ties to far-right groups and figures did not fare as well.

U.S. Rep. Mike Collins lost his bid to unseat incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia. Collins has a history of amplifying antisemitic content on social media and ties to white nationalism. Collins’s chief of staff was reportedly in a group chat with white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes.

CNN reported in July 2026 that Collins’s son-in-law, who lives on his property, is a social media influencer who promotes white nationalist ideology and antisemitic conspiracy theories. A former Collins intern and PAC contractor reportedly shared images on X of a swastika in July 2026 and of himself in what appeared to be KKK robes a month before that. He was not working for the Collins campaign at the time, and Collins said he does not share those views.

Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, lost to Democrat Jon Rosenthal after a campaign dominated by anti-Muslim rhetoric and social media posts condemned as racist and offensive. In June 2025, French posted a since-deleted poll on X asking whether Jews or Muslims posed a bigger threat to the U.S., igniting an online backlash. During an appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he said the GOP should deport 100 million people and claimed that Islam was a “problem.”

Texas congressional candidate Brandon Herrera also lost his race for the state’s 23rd Congressional District on November 3, following a campaign that was shadowed by years of Nazi-themed content. Herrerra boasted on a podcast in 2024 that he owns a 1939 English-language edition of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.“

In Arizona, Rep. Andy Biggs, the former House Freedom Caucus chair, lost his bid to unseat Gov. Katie Hobbs. Biggs has drawn criticism for encouraging and appearing on the show of Stew Peters, a far-right conspiracy theorist and prolific antisemite who has labeled Judaism a "death cult built on the blood of murdered babies" and called for a “final solution” involving the deportation of American Jews. In 2024, Biggs attended a rally co-sponsored by the Proud Boys.