There’s a new battleground in the ongoing internal Democratic Party conflict between the progressive left and the party’s pro-Israel mainstream. Justice Democrats, the PAC that helped elect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and other members of the “Squad,” has picked a new target. This time it’s Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a fourth-term Democrat who represents a deep blue, majority-Latino district in Los Angeles.
Justice Democrats announced on Thursday that they would support Angela Gonzales-Torres, a 30-year-old community activist, in next year’s Democratic primary in California’s 34th congressional district, which mostly consists of working-class neighborhoods east of downtown L.A. (Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing for a fast-track redistricting process to gain more seats for Democrats, but the 34th is likely to remain unchanged.)
Both Gomez and Gonzales-Torres are the children of working-class Latino immigrants, and in some respects Gomez is an unlikely target for a primary challenge from the left. He’s on record as supporting the Green New Deal and universal health insurance, and spoke alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders when the progressive icon’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour came to Southern California. Gomez has successfully defeated progressive challengers in the last three electoral cycles, although Justice Democrats were not involved.
But Gonzales-Torres told Salon that she believed Gomez had lost touch with the needs and desires of working-class residents in the district, and that his decisions in Congress have been compromised by his relationships with special interest groups, including the Israel lobby and the crypto industry.
“I don’t think Jimmy Gomez can say, with a straight face, that his decisions in office aren’t overwhelmingly shaped by the corporate lobbies that fund him,” Gonzales-Torres said. “He’s someone who has taken millions from AIPAC’s super PAC and the crypto lobby, and did exactly what they want. He has refused to sign on to the only [Gaza] ceasefire bill in Congress and the Block the Bombs Act because AIPAC has bought his silence in the face of genocide. He voted to enable Trump’s crypto corruption, enriching the president and his family.”
Gonzales-Torres herself grew up in east L.A. Her mother worked as a waitress but her father, a mechanic, was an undocumented immigrant who was deported to Mexico when she was 15, a highly salient issue under the second Trump administration. She told the Los Angeles Times they had briefly been homeless, and she sometimes did her “homework on the dashboard of a car.”
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Justice Democrats lost a couple of tough primary battles in 2024, when AIPAC-supported candidates ousted former Reps. Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri, but the group hopes to rebound this cycle. Leaders say they are actively seeking to recruit candidates of color from working-class backgrounds to challenge incumbents they perceive as compromised and potentially vulnerable.
Gonzales-Torres is the second congressional candidate endorsed by Justice Democrats in the 2026 midterms. The group previously endorsed state Rep. Donavan McKinney in Michigan’s 13th district, where he will run against incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar, a Democrat who has also accepted campaign funds from the pro-Israel lobby.
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Gonzales-Torres told Salon she felt inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City, saying that his primary win “should be a sign to the party broadly that voters are looking for Democrats unafraid to stand up to their own party and the corporate interests that overrun it, to fight for their communities’ needs.”
If she’s elected to Congress, Gonzales-Torres said her first priority would be to go after corporations that are “raising prices for everyday people” and their lobbyists who distort the political process in Washington.
“Every day I see our communities struggling to make ends meet, working two and three jobs like my mother did, and like I did to support myself through college, while establishment Democrats look the other way to please their corporate donors,” she said.
