Outside money has poured into Minnesota’s Second Congressional District primary, and Kaela Berg is at the center of it. More than $1 million in support has moved toward Berg through three outside groups ahead of the vote tomorrow, making her the biggest beneficiary in a race that will decide who replaces Angie Craig in the open seat.
The numbers are striking. Berg is getting more than $550,000 from Women Vote, $415,000 from Pro-Choice Majority Action and $100,000 from Elect Democratic Women. Those sums add up to more than $1.06 million, and they come as outside spending has become a defining feature of the Minnesota Primary 2026 contest in Minnesota’s Second Congressional District.
That money does not sit in a vacuum. Women Vote received $650,000 from Democratic Majority for Israel this cycle, while Elect Democratic Women took in $1.35 million from United Democracy Project this year and another $137,000 from Democratic Majority for Israel. The pattern is simple and unusually consequential: super PAC money is moving through other PACs that are then running independent expenditures in primaries, so support can arrive with a neutral label even when the funding chain traces back to groups tied to Israel and Gaza politics.
For Berg, that matters because her campaign is trying to hold two positions at once. On her website, she says she supports an end to weapons sales to Israel, calls the war in Gaza a genocide, backs ending Israeli settlements in the West Bank, wants immediate humanitarian aid to Gaza and ultimately favors a two-state solution. Her campaign also points to her statement that the Trump Administration’s continued support for and active participation in these wars have undermined American values, caused untold death and destruction, and threatened the global economy.
The support from those outside groups may not map neatly onto those positions, but it is the kind of alignment that can shape how primary voters read the race at the last minute. Matt Little, a progressive state senator backed by the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, had led in outside polling, including in Matt Klein’s internal poll, though there has not been much outside polling since late May. Klein, another state senator and co-founder of the Blue Dog caucus in the state legislature, is also in the contest.
Tomorrow’s primary will tell whether Berg’s surge in outside support translates into votes or whether the spending simply sharpens the contrast in a race that is already crowded with competing Democratic lanes. What is clear now is that the money trail has become part of the campaign itself, and the candidate benefiting most from it is Berg.
