If you are a Facebook user interested in Jewish studies, you could easily forget Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin was even running for Michigan’s open Senate seat in one of the more important races in the cycle.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Slotkin’s campaign team targeted a dozen of her Facebook ads to appear only for users who don’t have “Jewish studies” listed as an interest. The same number of ads—though it is unclear if they were same ones, or if the numbers are just a coincidence—were targeted to those interested in “Islamic studies,” “Middle-Eastern studies,” and “Al Jazeera.” The last of those is the Qatar-based propaganda channel that has been caught accrediting members of Hamas to “cover” the war that Hamas started by massacring over a thousand innocents and taking over 200 hostages, subjecting some victims to sexual torture.

So, if you’re interested that in kind of stuff, you’re also hearing a lot about Rep. Slotkin.

The congresswoman and Senate-hopeful has spent her current term terrified that anti-Semites might not vote for her, and she’s acting accordingly. The situation has quickly turned a once-solid Jewish politician into political mush.

Slotkin worked for the CIA in Iraq, then came home and joined the National Security Council and spent several years at the Pentagon as an assistant secretary of defense. After a brief stint in the private sector, she ran for Congress and won. She is running for the seat being vacated by Sen. Debbie Stabenow in a close race against Republican nominee and former congressman Mike Rogers.

Targeting social-media ads is nothing new, but Slotkin’s choices are telling and the whole affair is merely the latest in a line of moves revealing that the congresswoman is deprioritizing the current wave of anti-Semitism at a time when a Jewish Democrat with national-security credentials could have been a crucial voice for a sane politics and the safety of her constituents.

She started by distancing herself from President Biden’s Israel policy at a time when the administration was playing an important role in defending the morality of the Jewish state’s extensive counteroffensive in Gaza as it became increasingly unpopular among a segment of the party’s progressive activist base. She voted against censuring Rashida Tlaib, her fellow Michigander, when the latter boosted calls for the destruction of Israel. (Though she did criticize Tlaib on social media.)

Slotkin joined a congressional letter to Biden that portrayed the conflict as Benjamin Netanyahu’s war more than Israel’s war and legitimized Hamas’s false statistics about civilian casualties. She used Iran’s killing of three American servicemembers in Jordan as an opportunity to push for a “pause” in Israel’s pursuit of victory over Hamas.

It is in this context that Slotkin’s Facebook ad strategy is notable. Her campaign, according to the Free Beacon, is pouring over $1 million into such ads in a 90-day period. She’s also targeting users interested in “State of Palestine” and “Gaza Strip.” But again, it’s not so much who she’s targeting the ads to but who she doesn’t want to see them. Slotkin is confident that voters with an interest in the “state of Palestine” and in Hamas-allied propaganda channels will find the campaign’s portrayal of the candidate a good fit. She is not so comfortable with Jewish-interested voters meeting this particular version of “Elissa Slotkin.”

Democrats are fretting over their slight lead in Michigan in both the presidential race and down the ballot. But the numbers have never given them good reason to think they must cater to Hamas’s supporters in that state or elsewhere. In the presidential primary, a movement to get Democrats to cast a protest vote for “Uncommitted” instead of Biden received slightly more than Uncommitted garnered against Barack Obama in his reelection campaign—and even that slight improvement, coming after a concerted organizing effort, could have been the result of the same problems that were dragging Biden’s polls down nationally. There was nothing in the numbers to even suggest the Arab vote would cost Biden the state, which he won narrowly in 2020.

It is even less likely that Harris faces a threat from so-called Uncommitted voters, since she has improved on Biden’s numbers. But to compensate for its lack of raw numbers, Uncommitted has simply gotten louder. The closely watched Democratic National Convention saw Uncommitted make demands that were covered extensively by the press, while other stories detailed the way Harris’s campaign was trying to tamp down any public conflict with Uncommitted that week because of the way it could derail the campaign’s momentum and the narrative of a unified Democratic Party. Tim Walz was nominated as Harris’s ticket mate at that convention in large part because anti-Israel elements of the party threatened to revolt if Harris picked Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had criticized pro-Hamas mobs in Philadelphia and frequently referred to his Jewish observance and upbringing.

The fact that Harris backed down in that important fight means her campaign still clings to the unfounded fear that Arab voters in Michigan can cost her the state by single-issue voting in the general election and withholding their support from the Democrats over Gaza. And despite the paucity of evidence for it, belief can be a hard thing to shake. Just ask Elissa Slotkin.

Or perhaps these candidates simply agree with the Gaza protesters they are catering to.