(CNN) — Last month, Rep. Wesley Bell and former Rep. Cori Bush sparred in a joint radio appearance over who had done the most to help St. Louis residents after a pair of devastating natural disasters ripped through the community.
Bell described how, after a tornado hit the district in May 2025, he reached out to every member of the state’s mostly Republican delegation to get millions in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Bush said that after the district was hit with flooding in 2022, she took a different approach to draw resources: hitting TV, radio and the internet.
“I’ve been criticized for wanting to be on TV a lot, but when I’m on TV I’m talking about St. Louis, because that’s how people know,” she said. “The more you speak about it, the more the urgency is there, and the awareness.”
The back-and-forth highlighted a key debate between the two Missouri Democrats ahead of their Tuesday rematch, one of several races this election cycle testing what kind of fighter the party wants to see in office. In Michigan, where Democrats are hoping to hold onto a key US Senate seat, Rep. Haley Stevens has framed herself as a “workhorse” to progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s celebrity in another Tuesday primary, while her opponent has criticized the millions in outside funding helping her campaign.
But the Missouri 1st Congressional District primary is one of the rare examples in which voters can directly compare the records of lawmakers — a progressive who relies on the bully pulpit and a more moderate Democrat who runs as a pragmatist.
Bush, who beat 20-year incumbent Rep. Lacy Clay in 2020, made waves in her first months in office when she slept on the steps of the US Capitol to protest an expiration of a federal eviction moratorium. She also angered some Democrats and union members when she was among six progressive lawmakers who voted against a bipartisan infrastructure bill in a bid to pass President Joe Biden’s social spending legislation.
Bell, a former St. Louis County prosecutor, defeated Bush in the 2024 primary, in which he pointed to the infrastructure vote and was boosted by $8.5 million from United Democracy Project, a super PAC allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The group has spent more than $3 million backing Bell’s reelection bid, according to campaign finance records.
Bush’s reemergence comes as a growing number of far-left Democrats backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats, which supports challenges to Democrats who accept corporate PAC money, have won upset victories in primaries across the country. Several races, including the one between Bush and Bell, have pitted staunch allies of Israel against critics of the country’s actions in the war in Gaza.
“Cori Bush was the model for what it looks like to be a fighter for your community as a member of Congress,” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, said of Bush, the group’s first recruit.
Bush and other progressives such as Melat Kiros, who defeated Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado and campaigned with Bush on Sunday, have argued that establishment Democrats are failing to do everything they can to defeat President Donald Trump’s agenda.
It’s a stark turnaround from two years ago, when Bush and former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a progressive Democrat from New York, lost to United Democracy Project-backed candidates.
“We may have lost the seats, but we didn’t lose, because the movement grew quickly,” Bush said. “One of the things that was very tough when I was in Congress last time was that there just was not enough of us … but now we have a new team.”
The activist and the legislator
Both Bush’s and Bell’s political rises date to the anti-police-brutality protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in August 2014.
Bell was elected to the Ferguson City Council in 2015. Three years later, he defeated the incumbent St. Louis County prosecutor, who declined to file charges against the police officer who killed Brown.
Bush lost to Clay in the 2018 primary, before going on to become the first Black Lives Matter organizer elected to Congress after winning in 2020. In Congress, she quickly made her mark as an activist with her anti-evictions protest.
Soon after, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new order temporarily halting evictions in counties with high rates of Covid-19 transmission.
“Thank you to everyone who kept a spotlight on this—particularly @CoriBush who understands what it’s like to lose your home and turned passion into action,” then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X, alongside a video of him hugging Bush.
In Bush’s efforts to oppose abortion bans, she shared her own story of having an abortion after being sexually assaulted as a teenager and led a bus tour through the state ahead of the 2022 midterms.
Supporters argue her two terms in office exemplified what Democrats mean when they say they want a lawmaker to do more than pass legislation. But her opponents argue that she at times went too far to buck the party.
“When Cori went up there and decided that she was going to vote against the president’s infrastructure bill because she wanted to let the perfect be the enemy of good, she showed that she’s not a legislator, she’s an activist,” said Sean Fauss, the chair of the St. Louis City Democratic Party and the Greater St. Louis AFL-CIO legislative committee.
Ella Jones, the former mayor of Ferguson, said she got to know Bell when they served together on the City Council and she finds him to be more accessible than Bush was in office. The two lawmakers’ opposing views on Israel don’t play into her decision.
“I stay away from that politics, simply because my politics is local,” she said, adding, “I can’t get that far out when there’s so much around me that needs to be taken care of.”
A contentious rematch
This cycle, Bell and his allies — including the United Democracy Project — have sought to portray Bush as an ineffective leader plagued by scandals. Bell has emphasized that she missed nearly 250 House votes during her four years in Congress, accused her of being inaccessible to voters and businesses in the district, and criticized her campaign spending, including payments to her husband for security services that were the subject of a Justice Department investigation.
“The bottom line is, elections are local, and folks here on the ground know that when she was in office, not only did she not do the job, she didn’t show up for the job,” Bell told CNN.
Members of Congress are allowed to use campaign funds to pay family members for providing services to the campaign if the payments don’t exceed fair market value. Bush has said she entrusted her husband with her security after facing multiple threats and has denied any wrongdoing. She said “nothing came of” the Justice Department investigation and that the Office of Congressional Conduct dismissed its investigation of her campaign spending. The Justice Department has not given a public update on its investigation into the matter. Bush said she missed several votes in Congress because of two bouts of Covid-19 and a funeral.
Bush has argued that Bell is the one who doesn’t have a record to run on. She pointed to her work on eviction protections, as well as her work with Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, on getting funding for Missouri residents under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
Some in the district have criticized Bell for not doing enough to get more funding in the wake of last year’s tornado.
“Cori Bush would be sleeping on the steps of the White House if she needed to, to make sure that Washington, DC, understood that we had a tornado here,” said Megan Green, the president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen. “I think because he doesn’t have that organizer background or that activist background, he’s just not willing to use the bully pulpit in the way that it needs to be used to get resources home.”
Like other primary battles between different strains of Democrats, the Missouri rematch has at times become personal. Bush has said she felt betrayed by Bell when he decided to run against her two years ago, saying that she considered him a friend. He told CNN that was “a childish narrative that’s been put out there to gain sympathy” and that they were “colleagues at best.”
“As I wake up every day thinking about this region, Cori wakes up every day thinking about Cori,” he said.
Bush pushed back.
“I think he wakes up every day thinking about Cori,” Bush said. “’Cori did this. Cori did that,’ because he thinks about Cori when he wakes up, which is OK though, because I’m his constituent.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.