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When Sara Hernandez, a candidate in the 26th State Senate District race, was criticized by an opponent last month for taking donations from people with ties to AIPAC, she responded by disputing the idea that her campaign was funded by the influential pro-Israel group. She took to social media to say that those donations, which came from individuals and not AIPAC itself, don’t make her a “candidate who accepts AIPAC money.”
Hernandez’s distancing from AIPAC in her state campaign comes amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Back in 2018, Hernandez had been comfortable sharing details about her relationship to AIPAC, posting on her Facebook page that she was on a trip to Israel with AIPAC.
Post on Sara Hernandez’s Facebook page. (Screengrab)
That post came just after Hernandez’s earlier bid for the 34th District Congressional seat in 2017, during which she took donations from some of the same AIPAC-affiliated donors who gave to her current campaign. In 2016, she received a $2,700 donation from Michael Tuchin, at the time a board member of AIPAC, as part of that bid for Congress, according to federal filings. Tuchin later became president of the board of AIPAC in 2023.
Richard Pachulski, a close friend of Tuchin’s, also gave $2,700 to Hernandez in 2017 for that Congressional campaign. Pachulski, who has since given $11,800 to Hernandez’s latest state Senate campaign, told The LA Reporter in an interview last month that he is close friends with Tuchin and is an AIPAC donor. Pachulski said his latest donation “had nothing to do with AIPAC.”
The LA Reporter sought comment from Tuchin and Pachulski for this story, and neither responded. Tuchin hadn’t responded for the earlier story, while Pachulski did.
When The LA Reporter reached Hernandez by phone to seek comment about the donations to her 2017 Congressional campaign, she declined to discuss them. She referred The LA Reporter to the earlier statements she had made about the state Senate donations from Tuchin, Pachulski and others. Those donations were initially publicized last month by another state Senate race candidate, Maebe Pudlo, in a video posted to social media.
It was in response to Pudlo’s video that Hernandez had assured viewers that her campaign was not “AIPAC-funded,” given that she hadn’t received funding directly from AIPAC.
In both the Congressional and now the State Senate races, Hernandez sought and is seeking to represent some of the same communities. The 34th Congressional district that Hernandez ran for in 2017 is nested within the 26th State Senate District, which includes several east side Los Angeles city neighborhoods including Boyle Heights, Highland Park, Echo Park, Silver Lake, East Hollywood and Koreatown. The district also stretches to the city Vernon and unincorporated East Los Angeles. While ties to AIPAC may have been overlooked in earlier elections, running to represent those communities, while having any ties to AIPAC, could now be making candidates vulnerable.
The 34th Congressional district is represented by Jimmy Gomez, who has since being elected, faced some close challenges in recent elections from David Kim, who supported a weapons embargo on Israel, as a way to stop the genocide in Gaza — a stance that has had little support among sitting Congressmembers. During that election, IfNotNow and other groups, some supportive of Kim, called on Gomez to reject funding from AIPAC. In that 2024 election, AIPAC also made the unusual decision to spend large sums of money against Kim’s effort to unseat Gomez. Now, in the 2026 election for the 34th Congressional seat, a new challenger aiming to unseat Gomez, Angela Gonzales-Torres, has also gone after Gomez over his donations from AIPAC, saying Gomez took $2.3 million from the group in the previous election.
Now the presence of AIPAC is being called out in the state Senate race not only by Pudlo, but also Wendy Carrillo, another candidate.
It came after The LA Reporter had asked Carrillo about a $900 donation to her bid for LA City Council from Howard Welinsky, a founder of Democrats for Israel Los Angeles who was mentioned in Pudlo’s video as having donated to Hernandez. Carrillo said in a statement that because she was unable to reimburse that donation, she was opting to donate the same amount from her current state Senate campaign account to World Central Kitchen, which has been working to feed people in Gaza, where there is a famine brought on by Israel’s blockade.
Pointing to how “Senate District 26 is one of the most progressive in California,” Carrillo said she was joining Pudlo in calling on other candidates to return contributions from people tied to AIPAC.
“Anything less is a silent endorsement of AIPAC and of [Israel Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s corrupt right-wing government, and that is unacceptable,” Carrillo said in the statement.
Welinsky had told The LA Reporter last month that his donation to Hernandez was unrelated to his support of AIPAC, and that he had mostly discussed higher education policy with Hernandez.
Welinsky also said he disagreed with Hernandez’s statement to The LA Reporter in which she said she was “deeply disturbed by the scale of suffering in Gaza and condemns the actions of the Israeli government in restricting aid and its indiscriminate targeting of civilians.”
Welinsky said that statement needed to be “broader,” and he had told The LA Reporter that he planned to take it up with Hernandez directly.
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