MoveOn, the progressive advocacy movement, in its first official endorsements for the 2020 election cycle said it will back Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib for re-election.
The organization said in a statement that it has over 16,000 members in Minnesota’s 5th District, and that Omar, a Democrat, was backed for re-election with a vote of 77 percent of those members.
She was endorsed “overwhelmingly” by MoveOn members in 2018, the organization said.
“Despite a consistent barrage of anti-Muslim, racist, and other attacks from Donald Trump, the right wing, and even some of her Democratic colleagues, Rep. Omar hasn’t been afraid to use her position to fiercely advocate for the people of her district,” the statement said.
Omar has come under fire in the Jewish community for controversial statements and tweets in which she has employed what appear to be anti-Semitic tropes about Jews and money, and accusations of dual loyalty. She had also faced criticism for previous tweets that suggested that U.S. Mideast policy was exclusively influenced by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and that Israel had “hypnotized” the world into taking its side.
MoveOn’s more than 7,000 members in Michigan’s 13th congressional district decided with 88 percent of its vote to support the re-election of Tlaib, also a Democrat.
Tlaib, a Palestinian American, has said she will lead a freshman lawmaker trip to the West Bank as an alternative to the traditional Israel mission for first-term lawmakers sponsored by the education arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which includes touring and meetings with leading Israeli figures in business, government and the military. She said she would take lawmakers to the northern West Bank village of Beit Ur al-Foqa, where her grandmother lives.
Last month, MoveOn called on the presidential candidates not to attend the AIPAC annual policy conference, posting a poll on Twitter of its members, showing that 74 percent of them wanted the candidates to skip the annual meeting.