The emerging 2028 field and America’s continued support for genocide

Twenty-Three Names, Two Exceptions

The emerging 2028 field and America’s continued support for genocide

Political analysis and position note · campaign finance, Gaza, genocide, U.S. foreign policy, democracy, oligarchy, and media power

Andraž Đurič

Version 1 · 17 August 2026

Abstract

Track AIPAC’s early list of potential 2028 presidential candidates contains 23 names: 16 Democrats and seven Republicans. Within that list, 21 are presented as pro-Israel or materially aligned with the pro-Israel lobby. Only two, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna, are presented as rejecting AIPAC and its allies. Fourteen entries display numerical lobby totals. Added together, those displayed figures equal $14,140,376. Nine entries have no comparable federal total.

This is not evidence of a coming choice between two substantially different foreign policies. It is evidence of a political field being assembled around the continuation of an existing one. The relevant money is not politically inert because it is routed through PAC contributions, earmarked contributions, advertising, or nominally independent expenditures. It finances electoral capacity. It rewards alignment, protects incumbents, elevates selected candidates, attacks dissidents, and makes deviation more costly. When financial support converges with voting records, policy platforms, and repeated public statements, heightened skepticism is the rational response.

That alignment matters because the United States is not a distant observer of Gaza. It supplies Israel with billions of dollars in annual military assistance, weapons, maintenance, and diplomatic protection. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The conclusion rests not on casualty figures alone, but on the combined pattern of mass killing, severe bodily and mental harm, destruction of the conditions required for life, obstruction of food and water, devastation of medicine and sanitation, forced displacement, confinement, and statements of eliminationist intent.

The emerging 2028 field therefore offers a glimpse of political catastrophe already being normalized: another presidential election in which Americans may be permitted to choose the manager of U.S. support for genocide, but scarcely permitted to vote for ending it.

Epistemic key

Claim type	Standing in this article
Tracker-reported	Candidate names, classifications, PAC affiliations, and displayed dollar figures come from Track AIPAC’s 17 August 2026 page and stated methodology.
Recomputed	The 23-name count, party split, two-exception count, 14 numerical entries, nine missing totals, and $14,140,376 sum were independently recomputed from that page.
Empirical	Mortality, U.S. military aid, billionaire spending, media ownership, and political influence claims are tied to peer-reviewed research, official records, or identified research reports.
Legal and analytical conclusion	The genocide conclusion is argued here and is also the conclusion of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem. A final ICJ judgment remains pending.
Rate-equivalent	The 31–42-year and approximately 76-year figures translate observed death rates into one prewar population-equivalent. They are diagnostics of scale, not demographic forecasts.

1. The early field

The Track AIPAC page is not a ballot and does not claim to be one. It is an early list of plausible contenders. That limitation does not make the pattern uninformative. Presidential fields do not appear fully formed on filing day. They are assembled years in advance through donor networks, media attention, party institutions, endorsements, staffing, polling, and the prior distribution of political legitimacy.

As of 17 August 2026, the list contains 23 people. On the Democratic side it names Andy Beshear, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Rahm Emanuel, Ruben Gallego, Kamala Harris, Mark Kelly, Ro Khanna, Wes Moore, Gavin Newsom, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jon Ossoff, JB Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, Elissa Slotkin, and Gretchen Whitmer. On the Republican side it names Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio, JD Vance, and Glenn Youngkin.

Only Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna are presented as rejecting AIPAC and its allies. Khanna is identified as a signer of the PEACE Pledge. Ocasio-Cortez is assigned a lobby total of zero. Every other name is presented in the pro-Israel or lobby-aligned field, whether through an explicit warning, a red scorecard, a financing record, or a documented institutional connection.

Twenty-three possible candidates. Twenty-one aligned with Israel. Two exceptions.

The catastrophe is not merely that many politicians support Israel in some abstract or qualified sense. It is that, after Gaza, support for the state carrying out this destruction remains close to a bipartisan entrance requirement for the presidency.

Metric	Value	Standing
Potential contenders listed	23	16 Democrats; 7 Republicans
Presented as pro-Israel or lobby-aligned	21	Track AIPAC classification and scorecards
Presented as rejecting AIPAC and allies	2	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Ro Khanna
Entries with numerical totals	14	Includes Ocasio-Cortez at $0
Democratic displayed subtotal	$11,955,852	9 entries with numerical totals
Republican displayed subtotal	$2,184,524	5 entries with numerical totals
Sum of displayed numerical totals	$14,140,376	Arithmetic recomputed from the page
Entries without comparable federal totals	9	Absence of a total is not evidence of absence of influence

2. What the money shows

Track AIPAC describes its figures as federal-career totals drawn from Federal Election Commission data. Its FAQ distinguishes direct and earmarked PAC contributions from independent expenditures such as advertising. Its methodology statement says a financial record alone is not sufficient for its red scorecard. It also evaluates voting records, published policy positions, public statements, and credible reporting about candidates seeking lobby support.

That last point matters. It is false to treat the page as a pile of dollar figures and then dismiss it because dollars alone do not reconstruct a private conversation. The financial and political evidence point in the same direction. These candidates have generally not hidden their support for Israel. In many cases they have repeated it, voted for it, incorporated it into policy, or accepted organized electoral assistance from groups dedicated to preserving it.

Influence need not convert an opponent. It can select, finance, elevate, and protect an ally.

The cartoon model of corruption imagines a hostile politician receiving a bag of cash and immediately reversing a vote. Real political influence is usually more structural. Money pays for staff, data, advertising, opposition research, canvassing, legal work, and access to audiences. It makes some candidacies viable and others impossible. It can overwhelm a primary opponent, deter future challengers, and demonstrate what happens to officeholders who defect.

No secret quid pro quo is required. A lobby can recruit candidates already aligned with it, fund them over competitors, preserve their careers, and punish deviation. The result is a selection environment in which the views of organized wealth become overrepresented before most voters encounter a ballot.

The displayed total of $14,140,376 should be read exactly at its evidentiary strength. It is the sum of the 14 numerical figures shown on the page, not a transaction-by-transaction reconstruction of the entire pro-Israel donor universe. The tracker is an advocacy project, and its methodology pages are not perfectly harmonized about the treatment of large individual donors after its April 2026 reversion to its earlier method. None of that makes the visible financing meaningless. It means the proper conclusion is narrower and stronger: the page documents substantial organized electoral support for a field whose public records overwhelmingly converge on continued support for Israel.

3. What American taxpayers finance

The political alignment has material consequences. Under the current ten-year U.S.-Israel memorandum, the United States committed $38 billion in military support for fiscal years 2019 through 2028: $3.3 billion per year in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million per year for missile-defense cooperation. The structure is documented by the U.S. State Department and the Congressional Research Service.

The baseline understates the post-7 October commitment. A 2025 report co-published by the Quincy Institute and Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimated that the United States provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel between 7 October 2023 and September 2025, while committing tens of billions more through arms agreements for later delivery or payment.

The subsidy is direct. The causal attribution of one tax dollar to one bomb, one destroyed home, or one dead child may be administratively indirect, but the military relationship is not. U.S. money finances weapons, munitions, aircraft, missile defense, maintenance, spare parts, stock replenishment, domestic Israeli procurement, and the military capacity within which the assault is conducted.

American voters are therefore not being asked to form an opinion about a remote conflict over which their government has no control. Their government supplies the state conducting it. Their representatives authorize the money. Their presidential candidates compete to preserve the relationship.

4. The word is genocide

The Genocide Convention does not require the killing of every member of a protected group. It covers specified acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Those acts include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children.

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The basis is cumulative:

• Palestinians have been killed en masse, including an enormous number of civilians and children.
• Israeli attacks and siege conditions have caused severe bodily and mental harm on a population-wide scale.
• Homes, hospitals, water systems, sanitation, food production, schools, and other conditions required for collective life have been destroyed or disabled.
• Food, water, fuel, medicine, and humanitarian relief have been blocked, restricted, or made radically inadequate.
• Most of the population has been repeatedly displaced within a sealed territory in which meaningful flight has been denied.
• Senior Israeli political and military figures have made repeated statements that supply evidence of eliminationist intent.
• Independent foreign reporters have been barred from free access to Gaza, while the Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded extraordinary killing of Palestinian journalists inside it.

This conclusion is not an eccentric use of the word. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and forces had committed four of the five genocidal acts defined in the Convention and that genocidal intent was established from the pattern of conduct and statements by Israeli authorities. Amnesty International reached the genocide conclusion in December 2024. B’Tselem, an Israeli human-rights organization, reached it in July 2025.

Israel denies the charge, states that it targets Hamas rather than Palestinians as a group, and argues that civilian harm results from warfare against an organization embedded in civilian areas. The International Court of Justice case remains pending; an order of 21 May 2026 set further deadlines for written pleadings rather than issuing a final merits judgment.

Those facts identify the procedural state of the case and the defense being offered. They do not suspend ordinary reasoning until the last judicial document appears. A court’s timetable does not erase bodies, restore hospitals, open borders, supply water, or neutralize evidence of intent.

If mass killing, the destruction of civilian life-support systems, forced displacement inside a sealed territory, obstruction of food and water, the devastation of medical care, and public eliminationist rhetoric do not justify the word genocide, then what work is the word supposed to perform?

A concept becomes meaningless not only when applied too freely, but also when withheld from the very pattern it was created to name.

5. The arithmetic of erasure

My earlier report, Casualty Analysis: Direct and Indirect Death Tolls in Gaza vs. Ukraine, reported more than 72,300 named and recorded direct deaths by mid-April 2026. Against a prewar population of roughly 2.2 million, that is about 3.3 percent of the population killed directly in approximately two and a half years.

If the recorded absolute rate were held mechanically constant, with births, migration, changing military intensity, and every other demographic process ignored, one prewar Gaza population-equivalent would be killed in roughly:

2,200,000 ÷ (72,300 ÷ 2.5) ≈ 76 years.

That is the conservative, confirmed-record translation: less than a century.

A stronger mortality study supports the shorter range without relying on speculative multipliers. A 2026 peer-reviewed, population-representative field survey in The Lancet Global Health estimated 75,200 violent deaths between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 63,600 to 86,800. The central estimate was approximately 3.4 percent of Gaza’s pre-conflict population killed violently in about 15 months. It also estimated 16,300 non-violent deaths, including 8,540 deaths above the pre-conflict projection.

Translating only the violent-death proportion into a fixed-rate population-equivalent gives:

3.4% in 15 months → about 2.72% per year → about 36.8 years per prewar population-equivalent.

Using the rounded 3 to 4 percent survey range yields approximately 31 to 42 years. This is the three-to-four-decade figure. It is not a guess. It is a transparent transformation of a peer-reviewed mortality estimate produced through a population-representative field survey.

These calculations are deliberately called rate-equivalents, not forecasts. They do not predict that the rate will remain fixed, that no Palestinians will be born, that no one will flee, or that history proceeds linearly. Nor does genocide require killing everyone. The calculation performs a simpler moral and epistemic function: it converts percentages that can be psychologically minimized into a timescale commensurate with the destruction already measured.

Under the conservative named-record rate, the answer is under 100 years. Under the peer-reviewed survey rate, it is roughly three to four decades. A political system preparing to continue material support for that process is not confronting an ambiguous abstraction. It is choosing what rate of Palestinian erasure it is willing to finance.

6. Idiocracy inside oligarchy

American electoral failure cannot be explained by voter ignorance alone, but voter ignorance cannot be omitted. A democracy without a scientifically literate, historically literate, epistemologically literate population trained in critical thinking is vulnerable to propaganda, tribal identity, motivated reasoning, fabricated certainty, and the repetition of catastrophic choices. In that sense, the repeated idiocy of American electoral behavior can be called an idiocracy.

But it is also an oligarchy. The population does not select from an unfiltered field, deliberate within a neutral information environment, or possess equal power to make its preferences politically real. Wealth decides which candidates can become visible, which messages can be repeated at scale, which institutions survive, and which deviations become professionally dangerous.

The numbers are not subtle. Americans for Tax Fairness calculated that just 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion in the 2024 federal elections, about one dollar in six of total candidate, party, and committee spending. Seventy percent of their money supported Republican candidates and conservative causes; 23 percent supported Democrats and progressive causes. More than 80 percent flowed through super PACs and hybrid PACs. A Roosevelt Institute synthesis reports that nearly three-quarters of billionaire spending in the presidential race supported Donald Trump. The Brennan Center documents how megadonor-funded outside groups assumed core campaign functions and placed a tiny group of wealthy donors at the center of the 2024 election.

Peer-reviewed political science points in the same structural direction. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed 1,779 policy issues and found that economic elites and business-oriented organized groups had substantial independent effects on U.S. policy, while average citizens and mass-based groups had little or no independent influence after the other actors’ preferences were taken into account. Their dataset covers 1981 through 2002 and is not the last word on every institution or era. It is nevertheless direct evidence against the comforting myth that American policy is simply the unmediated will of an equal citizenry.

The information environment is also concentrated. Free Press describes a small cartel of billionaires, private-equity firms, and conglomerates controlling much of what Americans see, read, and hear. A 2026 FAIR ownership analysis counted 45.6 billion visits to the 50 largest U.S. news websites from December 2024 through November 2025; nearly 25.5 billion, more than half, went to sites controlled by only seven families or corporate entities.

Billionaires disproportionately finance the far right. Billionaires and conglomerates also own large parts of the media through which the public perceives candidates, war, protest, legitimacy, and the boundaries of allegedly serious opinion. The same class can therefore influence both the menu and the story told about the menu.

Idiocracy describes a recurring electoral output. Oligarchy describes the structure that filters the candidates, finances the viable choices, and concentrates the machinery of public perception.

The two systems are not opposites. They reinforce each other. Low public epistemic capacity makes oligarchic manipulation easier. Oligarchic control of politics and media makes the cultivation of genuine public epistemic capacity less likely. Formal voting then supplies democratic authorization to outcomes that concentrated wealth did disproportionate work to construct.

7. What 2028 threatens to reproduce

It is too early to know which of the 23 people on this page will run, survive a primary, or reach the general election. It is not too early to recognize the boundary being drawn around acceptable power. If 21 of 23 plausible candidates are already aligned in some form with continued support for Israel, then the nominal variety of names conceals a severe restriction in policy choice.

Historians will presumably see this period more clearly than we can while living through it. But I am certain they will look back in horror at a country that proclaimed itself the greatest in the world, posed for generations as the world’s protector, and then revealed itself as its most powerful bully.

They will also study it as a demonstration that idiocracy and oligarchy can coexist and reinforce one another. American voters repeatedly elevate catastrophic leaders, but they do not choose from an unfiltered field or within a neutral information environment. Billionaires finance politicians and super PACs, disproportionately fund the far right, and, together with a small number of conglomerates and private-equity firms, control much of the media through which the population perceives reality.

A democracy without a scientifically, historically, and epistemologically literate population trained in critical thinking cannot reliably resist this capture. It can instead become the mechanism through which oligarchic power manufactures public consent and acquires democratic authorization, with consequences catastrophic far beyond the country’s borders.

The prospective 2028 field is one such consequence. The choice being prepared is not whether American money should continue sustaining the military capacity of a state committing genocide. The choice is increasingly who will administer that support, narrate it as virtue, and punish those who refuse the premise.

America is not merely failing to stop a genocide. It is financing the state committing it and preparing another presidential election in which ending that support may scarcely exist as an option.

Standing and limits

This is a political analysis and position note, not a prediction of the final 2028 ballot. The candidate list is a dated snapshot from an advocacy tracker. “Pro-Israel” covers different degrees and forms of alignment and does not establish that every listed person endorses every act of the Israeli government. Candidate positions can change.

The $14,140,376 total is reproducible arithmetic from displayed page figures. It is not represented as a complete audit of every relevant FEC transaction or as proof of a private bargain. The inference is structural: organized finance materially supports candidates; public records overwhelmingly indicate aligned positions; and money can exert influence by selection, amplification, protection, and punishment without purchasing a sudden reversal.

The genocide conclusion is stated without euphemism. A final ICJ merits judgment is pending, but legal procedure is not the only permissible form of justified belief. The conclusion is supported by the documented conduct, the Genocide Convention’s elements, and convergent findings by independent international and Israeli organizations.

The erasure figures are rate-equivalents. They answer what timescale follows if a measured rate is translated into one prewar population-equivalent. They do not claim a stable future rate or literal demographic extinction on a scheduled date. Their purpose is to make the magnitude of existing mortality harder to hide behind innumeracy.

References

1. Track AIPAC, “2028 Presidential Candidates”, accessed 17 August 2026.
2. Track AIPAC, “Track AIPAC Adapting Data Methodology to Identify the Israel Lobby’s Hidden Donor Movements”, 27 March 2026, updated 28 April 2026.
3. Track AIPAC, “Frequently Asked Questions”, accessed 17 August 2026.
4. U.S. Department of State, “Ten-Year Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and Israel”, 14 September 2016.
5. Jeremy M. Sharp, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023, Congressional Research Service Report RL33222, updated 28 May 2025.
6. William D. Hartung, “U.S. Military Aid and Arms Transfers to Israel, October 2023–September 2025”, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Brown University Costs of War Project, 7 October 2025.
7. United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December 1948, especially Article II.
8. UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, A/HRC/60/CRP.3, 16 September 2025; see also the official findings summary.
9. Amnesty International, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, MDE 15/8668/2024, 5 December 2024.
10. B’Tselem, Our Genocide, July 2025.
11. State of Israel, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “MFA Statement Following the ICJ Decision on Provisional Measures”, 26 January 2024.
12. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Case 192; Order of 21 May 2026 fixing time-limits for Reply and Rejoinder.
13. Michael Spagat, Jon Pedersen, Khalil Shikaki, Michael Robbins, Eran Bendavid, Håvard Hegre, and Debarati Guha-Sapir, “Violent and Non-Violent Death Tolls for the Gaza Conflict: New Primary Evidence from a Population-Representative Field Survey”, The Lancet Global Health 14, no. 4 (2026), e552–e559; PubMed record.
14. Andraž Đurič, “Casualty Analysis: Direct and Indirect Death Tolls in Gaza vs. Ukraine (April 2026)”, Epistemic Forge, 17 April 2026.
15. Americans for Tax Fairness, “Billionaires Buying Elections: They’ve Come to Collect”, 2 April 2025.
16. Rachel Funk Fordham, Citizens United and the Decline of US Democracy: Assessing the Decision’s Impact 15 Years Later, Roosevelt Institute, 2 October 2025.
17. Marina Pino and Julia Fishman, “Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election”, Brennan Center for Justice, 14 January 2025.
18. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014), 564–581.
19. Free Press, “Who Owns the Media”, Media Capitulation Index, accessed 17 August 2026.
20. Caitlin Scialla, “The Digital Media Oligarchy: Who Owns Online News?”, FAIR, 3 February 2026.
21. Committee to Protect Journalists, “CPJ, Partners File Emergency Motion to Israeli Supreme Court Seeking Independent Media Access to Gaza”, 15 April 2026.
22. Committee to Protect Journalists, “Record 129 Press Members Killed in 2025; Israel Responsible for 2 of 3 of Deaths”, 25 February 2026.

Reference audit: sources and their use in this article were rechecked on 17 August 2026. Primary legal texts, official government records, peer-reviewed research, and first-party methodology statements were preferred. Advocacy sources are identified as such and used for their documented datasets or declared classifications, not treated as institutionally neutral. Track AIPAC’s $14,140,376 figure was independently recomputed from its displayed candidate totals, but the underlying FEC transactions were not independently reconstructed. The mortality rate-equivalents were recalculated from the stated source values. “Rechecked” means attribution, arithmetic, scope, and relevance were inspected; it does not mean every empirical result was independently replicated.

Internal lineage

This article extends the mortality analysis developed in Casualty Analysis: Direct and Indirect Death Tolls in Gaza vs. Ukraine (April 2026). That report separated recorded deaths from mortality estimates and established the scale of Gaza’s human destruction. The present article asks what the prospective 2028 presidential field reveals about the American political machinery sustaining it.

The extension has three parts: translating Gaza mortality into explicit population-equivalent timescales; connecting continued U.S. military support to the emerging presidential field; and locating the field inside the mutually reinforcing structure of mass epistemic failure, concentrated campaign finance, elite policy influence, and concentrated media ownership.

Version history. Version 1, 17 August 2026: initial publication. Candidate classifications and displayed totals audited against Track AIPAC; arithmetic independently recomputed; genocide findings, mortality research, U.S. aid, campaign finance, elite influence, and media-ownership sources checked; rate-equivalent calculations made explicit; scope and standing added.

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Author: Andraž Đurič, Slovenia.

Developed through the Epistemic Forge corpus and dialogue with ChatGPT (OpenAI), including adversarial review of claims, arithmetic, source standing, and inferential scope. The author retains responsibility for the argument, framing, judgments, and final text. Contributions are assessed by content rather than origin.

License: CC BY 4.0.