Jewish Tacoma candidate opposed by PAC backing ‘interests of Jewish community’
With funding coming largely from outside Tacoma, a political action committee that backs candidates who “support the interests of the Jewish community” is spending thousands of dollars to oppose a candidate in Tacoma’s District 5 City Council race.
The PAC, called Washingtonians for a Brighter Future, spent $15,000 on mail and postage to send flyers opposing Zev Cook to voters of District 5, and another $1,000 on text messages with the same goal. The group, according to a substack article linked on its website, is endeavoring to “oppose hate in all forms” by elevating or opposing candidates at the local level who could move up to national positions.
It’s modeled after a California-based PAC called California Against Hate, which in 2022 worked to oppose a city council candidate in San Diego who was “anti-Israel,” according to the article.
“Many of the most dangerous people crop up in the small cities,” Jared Sclar, co-founder of the California-based PAC, said of the Washington PAC in the substack article.
“If there is someone problematic, we may not know. We may not know someone is going to sneak by and get on the city council, and then they’re the next Ilhan Omar,” Sclar wrote of Omar, a Democratic U.S. representative from Minnesota.
Cook said she wasn’t surprised to see such opposition to her campaign.
“I think these are the kind of hurdles that are very common when it comes to trying to win people-powered campaigns against corporate interests,” Cook told The News Tribune.
The mail campaign came around mid-July, ahead of the Aug. 5 primary election that will whittle the slate of three candidates for the District 5 race down to two. Cook has raised the most money in the race so far at $47,012.98. Incumbent Joe Bushnell raised $35,744.14, and candidate Brandon A. Vollmer raised $851.03.
The PAC as of July 24 raised $32,768.09 this year, only $1,000 of which came from a donor with a Tacoma address. The rest came from donors in Washington cities like Mercer Island, Seattle and Medina. At least one contributor listed an address in Naples, Florida.
According to the Washington Public Disclosure Commission, the PAC spent $18,076.61 by July 24, $16,000 of which paid for the campaign against Cook. The mailers that the PAC distributed depicted her standing in front of a building with broken windows with graffiti that reads “don’t burn” and “ppl live upstairs” overlaid with text that stated, “Zev Cook cooking up chaos for Tacoma.” It also implied that Cook supported defunding the police and stated that doing so would result in increased crime, gang violence and home invasions.
Cook, a community organizer and activist, has the backing of groups like the Tacoma and Pierce County Democratic Socialists of America, United Food & Commercial Workers Local 3000, and the Washington Education Association’s PAC.
Incumbent Joe Bushnell, who is running for re-election, has the endorsement of several state representatives, current and former council members, and the Tacoma Police Union, International Union of Police Associations Local 6. Bushnell also has Washingtonians for a Better Future’s endorsement.
“Council Member Bushnell is a friend of the Jewish community,” the PAC’s website reads.
Bushnell said he didn’t solicit an endorsement from the PAC but said he wasn’t surprised to see the group oppose Cook, given her support from the Democratic Socialists of America.
“The groups that are supporting my opponent have very public rhetoric that rubs a lot of folks the wrong way,” Bushnell told The News Tribune.
Cook, who is Jewish, said she feels the group is going after her because of her vocal support of Palestine.
“I’m the only candidate running for city council this year that’s made public comments in support of Palestine and against genocide, in alignment with my Jewish values of community repair and justice,” she told The News Tribune.
“I think this is very similar in some ways, but certainly at a smaller scale, to the attack ads that were run against Zohran [Mamdani] for being a pro-Palestine candidate that he is continuing to be,” she said of Mamdani, who recently won the Democratic primary in New York City’s mayoral race. “But like Zohran I’m intending to win by continuing to just focus on how we make life better for working people in our city.”
Nevet Basker, the PAC’s co-chair, told The News Tribune the group is seeking to combat antisemitism and said it was Cook’s “rhetoric against Zionism” that the PAC opposes.
“We believe that the rhetoric in some of these campaigns, including Zev Cook, creates a permission structure for antisemitism that results in issues in our own communities, in Tacoma, in this case, where the Jewish community feels unwelcome and sometimes unsafe,” Basker told The News Tribune.
Basker said the PAC’s concerns also go beyond those of the Jewish community, to what she described as Cook’s support for abolishing the police and prisons.
“She’s also a leader of an organization that advocates for abolishing prisons and all incarceration releasing, even violent criminals, murderers, rapists, back into our communities,” Basker said. “We believe that that is unsafe for everyone.”
Cook, according to her website, has served as an officer for the Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America. The group also endorsed her in the District 5 race. The Democratic Socialists of America’s political platform calls for the “abolition of the carceral state.”
“For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society,” the platform reads.
Cook told The News Tribune that she doesn’t think that defunding the police “is a very good framework for understanding public policy” and instead supports specific policies like increasing funding for Tacoma’s non-police crisis response team.
“Generally, I think that we as a community need to be focused more on not just addressing the symptoms, but addressing root causes when it comes to crime, which is why our platform is so focused on addressing income and housing inequality in our community,” Cook said.
She said she wasn’t surprised to see the PAC’s efforts to oppose her campaign and said the group wouldn’t have sent out the mailer if they didn’t think Cook had a real shot at winning. Some commenters on Reddit said that the anti-Cook flyer made them want to vote for her even more.
“Getting an attack ad like this just tells me that they’ve seen how effective our campaign has been at mobilizing the support of working class Tacomans,” she added. “It tells me that they’re scared that we might win this year.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
