The lesson of the 2026 Democratic primaries is unavoidable for anyone who cares about Israel. Candidates hostile to the Jewish state keep winning, and the standard response, raise money and run ads, keeps losing. Zohran Mamdani took New York’s mayoral primary last year on affordability and Gaza against roughly $25 million in outside spending. Money was not the missing ingredient.

The winning side says so openly. After socialists swept three New York congressional primaries in June, Sen. Bernie Sanders credited working people who organize, saying that is how you “defeat establishment politicians and enormous amounts of money.” His candidates won by making phone calls and knocking on doors despite tens of millions in super-PAC spending against them.

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New York shows the cost of skipping that work. Anti-Israel candidates won in districts each home to tens of thousands of Jews, many of whom stayed home. One race turned on fewer than 3,000 votes out of 65,000 cast. That district’s Orthodox community alone, including the main campus of Yeshiva University, is several times the winning margin.

And the machine is not finished. It is moving toward a community that should be its hardest target. A DSA-backed challenger is running against a pro-Israel incumbent in a South Florida district with one of the largest Jewish electorates in the country, anchored by Boca Raton’s established Orthodox community. He campaigns openly on cutting off all military aid to Israel, and in the single week after the New York upsets his campaign said it raised $115,000. National DSA has named the seat its next target. A year ago a bid like this was unthinkable. So were the seats that fell last month.

Here is the part worth sitting with: the Jewish community is built for exactly the organizing Sanders describes, and barely does it. The question is no longer whether it can. It is how.

In two communities where this model ran this year, Jewish primary turnout roughly doubled the surrounding metro rate. Inside participating institutions, more than half the eligible members voted, thousands who otherwise would not have.

Campaigns spend fortunes building what Jewish communities already have: buildings where the same people gather every week, leaders they trust, volunteer networks and membership lists. None of this requires an institution to endorse a candidate, which most cannot legally do anyway. It requires the unglamorous work of civic life: registering members, telling them when ballots are due and following up until they vote. Most Jewish institutions could begin tomorrow without changing a word of their politics.

The machine that turns those assets into votes does not need a war chest. It needs volunteer captains inside each synagogue, day school and young professionals group. And it needs the piece most efforts skip: a coordinating desk that holds the master list, assigns each captain their people and tracks who has voted. That control tower is what turns goodwill into counted votes.

The list is the foundation. Cross-reference community membership against public voter rolls, so leaders know who is registered and who turned out last time. Then ask captains to reach people they already know, friends, neighbors, the family two rows over, rather than cold-calling strangers. A friend’s ask beats a stranger’s every time.

Timing decides the rest. The window before a primary is barely a month, and in a closed primary an unaffiliated or Republican voter must often switch parties weeks ahead to take part. That work must begin in the quiet stretches between elections, not the frantic weeks before one.

The ad campaigns that lost multiple primaries this year cost seven and eight figures. A turnout operation can cost as little as one modest media buy. But unlike an ad, the payoff does not vanish. The lists improve. The captains get better. The institutions learn the rhythm. Even when the community’s preferred candidate loses, the winner notices and starts calling its leaders the next cycle.

And the congregation is only the floor. Once the machine runs, it reaches the religiously unaffiliated: the non-Jewish teacher at the day school, the neighbor who cares about Israel but has never been asked to vote on it and the business owner who would help if just approached.

None of this is glamorous. That is why it works. It is updated lists, phone calls, texts, trusted messengers and the discipline to start early. It is the same work the other side has done for decades, while ours has kept mistaking airtime for a plan.

Conviction has never turned out a single vote on its own. Organizing does, and no community in America is better built to do it than ours.

Ben Ehrenkranz is the president of Glory Partners, a consultancy focused on voter turnout within faith communities.