Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, arriving a day late on account of the holiday. I’m Abby Livingston, taking over for Peter Hamby, who will be back in the anchor chair next Monday.

Tonight, what I’m hearing around the Hill about how the Democratic Party’s generational divide over Israel is quietly exploding inside of House offices, where young congressional staffers are protesting their bosses and raising new alarms about Biden’s weakening polling.

But first…

• Whale Watching on Oahu: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s New Year’s resolution is apparently a big fundraising expedition across the country, according to invites I’ve seen. These “Private Receptions with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” unofficially began on New Year’s Day, with a private reception in Aspen, notably co-hosted by Anthony Kennedy Shriver, one of the few Camelot family members to support his bid. They will continue on Jan. 6 in Lake Oswego, Oregon; then Glendale, California, on Jan. 8; Raleigh on Jan. 12; Atlanta on Jan. 14; and then two spectacular sounding fundraising events in Hawaii.

  On January 16 on Oahu, attendees are invited to wear “aloha attire” for a reception with Kennedy and Cheryl Hines over “heavy pupus and cocktail hour at sunset for maximum donors.” Then, on Jan. 18, you can go whale watching with R.F.K. Jr. “on a beautiful catamaran.” On Jan. 26, he’s fundraising in Charlottesville; on the 28th he’s in Isle of Palms in South Carolina; on Feb. 3 he’ll be in Hayward, California; and on Feb. 10 he will be in Detroit. Of course, Kennedy needs to raise serious money to make the ballot in as many states as he can. —Teddy Schleifer

• AIPAC vs The Squad: As primary season begins on Capitol Hill, there is an obvious and intensifying fight between pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and members of the Squad, some of whom have cloaked themselves in river-to-the-sea rhetoric. AIPAC has so far declined to say where they intend to spend money this primary season, but it’s worth noting that when they engage, they come to play.

  Pro-Israel groups’ most obvious targets at this point are Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee. Tlaib and Omar reported healthy cash-on-hand totals in their October finance reports, but Bowman, Bush, and Lee will have to substantially ramp up their fundraising if AIPAC or other organizations back their primary opponents.

  On the flip side, challenges to incumbents for supporting Israel are not rising to the level of consequential threats yet. But there is at least one House Democrat who’s not taking her district’s nomination for granted: Houston’s Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. Democratic rival Pervez Agwan launched his challenge months prior to the Hamas attack, but even then he campaigned against her AIPAC-endorsed stances.

  Due to Agwan’s campaign staff dysfunction and Fletcher’s fearsome war chest (she has $1.7 million in cash on hand) it’s unlikely he poses a serious threat in the primary election, scheduled for March. Even so, both Houston Democrats and Fletcher’s colleagues say she is taking the race seriously. And so, it seems, is Nancy Pelosi, who kicked in $10,000 to Fletcher’s campaign on November 20.

  Beyond Democratic House primaries, this issue could determine control of both chambers and the presidency next November. In the House, that means examining New York, where district lines are still T.B.D., and Democrats are on offense from the Hudson Valley to Westchester to Long Island. In these districts, the Jewish vote tends to be a general election swing bloc rooted in support for Israel, and the canary in that coal mine will be February’s 3rd district special election to replace the ousted George Santos.

  Meanwhile, Michigan is the greatest worry on every Democratic mind I have encountered in the last few months. National Democrats worry that the Arab American community—the largest of any state—will stay home rather than vote for Joe Biden, which could not only cost the Democrats the state’s 15 electoral votes, but threaten retiring Democrat Debbie Stabenow’s Senate seat. Prior to the Hamas attack, Democrats were increasingly bullish on their prospects there, thanks to confidence in likely nominee Elissa Slotkin. But candidate quality may not be the only determinant in this race. —Abby Livingston

There are few privacy violations more terrifying for a member of Congress than having their personal coordinates shared with anyone, let alone hundreds—if not thousands—of people, particularly zealous activists. In fact, despite the reality that many of these Democratic members were enjoying their holidays in their home districts, obtrusive lobbying tactics caused such an uproar about their personal safety that the Sergeant at Arms, who oversees Capitol Hill law enforcement, had one of the busiest phone lines in D.C. over the past week.

Throughout the fall, a crush of young Democratic House staffers have been in semi-open rebellion against their bosses. Many of these protests are being handled quietly. But in conversations with Hill staffers, I’m told that there’s been more than a handful of resignations in Democratic offices. (The House offices most frequently dealing with dissent tend to represent districts featuring liberal colleges from which many of their youngest staffers only recently graduated.)

Some of this defiance has played out in public, with the publication of anonymous open letters and masked protests, including one in November that drew more than 100 staffers to the steps of the Capitol. Privately, however, these flaring tensions between the new and old guard are raising alarms in senior Democratic circles, as pollsters and operatives debate whether the generational backlash to Biden’s policies will blow over before November, if Donald Trump is on the ballot, or whether the party is on the precipice of another 1968.

Not surprisingly, the anonymously signed protest letter and November’s masked protest at the Capitol were greeted as completely absurd among senior staffers and members. At times, pro-Palestinian arguments have neglected the complete depravity of the Hamas attack, and other times (perhaps unwittingly) they’ve made their points while also deploying antisemitic language. Both rhetorical lines have only served to further enrage pro-Israel Democrats.

If the staffer’s disagreement is severe enough, the typical modus operandi is to quietly leave their member’s office for one that’s a better ideological fit. The notion of signing a letter in protest—even anonymously, which is a new tactic in intramural Capitol Hill lobbying—would have been anathema only six or seven years ago. But in conversation after conversation with Democrats over the last few weeks and months, I’ve heard stories of visceral pushback that borders on rebellion within workplaces across the progressive spectrum, including resignations in protest.

There are very clear religious and racial fault lines in this debate. But the one most commonly mentioned among Democratic strategists, especially with regard to young people who’d never expressed interest in the Israel-Palestine issue prior to Oct. 7, is technological. “TikTok is a problem,” a former Democratic chief told me.

Besides the obvious corollaries that harken back to Russiagate and election misinformation in 2016, Democrats are further alarmed by the rampant historical and factual inaccuracies that are blossoming on the Chinese-owned platform. It’s been repeatedly explained to me that older Democrats at the highest levels of the party simply have no idea what political ideas are circulating on TikTok. Consequently, the left’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas war has left them completely blindsided. Consultants who worry about general election races say the party has 11 months to explain Biden’s policies to young Democrats, or risk these door-knockers and voters staying home on Election Day.

Amid this contention, older Democrats—who lived through the 2000 Florida recount and election night 2016—want to shake the shoulders of their young counterparts and alert them to the damage done to the national party, and its constituencies, when everyone isn’t rowing in the same direction on Election Day. “Their vote in 2024, they’re going to have to live with the consequences longer than anybody,” Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh told me. “The real threat here in our democracy—the choice between living in a democracy and a dictatorship—is up to them.”