The sour grapes on the far left are producing a wafting stench today. The bottom line is that Nina Turner lost a competitive Democratic primary on Tuesday against a worthy opponent named Shontel Brown. Everyone seems to want to attach great meaning to this, and to assign responsibility to anyone but the voters of Ohio’s 11th congressional district.
Let’s begin with the reason anyone cares. It’s all about decisions Turner has made since 2016 when she abandoned Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency and became one of the most uncompromising and ubiquitous voices arguing in favor of Bernie Sanders. She gained admirers and she made enemies. Lots of them.
There are people who just dislike her personality or hold grudges about things she’s said. There are also people who support her solely because she’s been such a staunch Sanders supporter, and don’t care about her record as a state senator or any particular policy differences she may have had with her opponent.
This wasn’t really a proxy battle between the establishment and progressive insurgents, but that’s how it’s being treated. Since Turner lost, this is supposedly a big win for centrist Democrats. Since a pro-Israel PAC supported Brown, this is supposedly a big defeat for Palestinian interests. Since Turner has been critical of President Biden, the results show that opposing him is a loser’s game.
It’s all badly overblown.
The election was fairly close. Turner started out with a big name recognition advantage, but it wasn’t enough to put her over the top. If anything, Turner tried to de-emphasize her credentials on the progressive left during the campaign, probably because she realized that the district was looking for a more mainstream representative. But Brown and her supporters wisely made that pivot difficult by highlighting some of her more uncivil moments–like comparing a vote for Biden against Trump to eating a half a bowl of shit.
Some pretty high profile people came out against Turner, including Hillary Clinton, Jim Clyburn, and many members of the Congressional Black Caucus. That probably hurt her chances. Money and messaging supplied by political action committees also hurt Turner. But her main problem was that the election was largely a referendum on her divisive personality. The voters were split and the verdict narrow, but Turner’s personality was rejected.
A different candidate running on the same issues with largely the same record, but with fewer and less impassioned enemies could have won.
As for Brown, she may have some establishment friends and she may be indebted to a pro-Israel PAC, but the idea that she’s some super moderate or centrist Democrat isn’t supported by her record or campaign. She’ll probably be a lot like the woman she’ll replace in Congress, current House and Urban Development secretary Marcia Fudge. I don’t recall people treating her as some Blue Dog Democrat.
If you endorsed Turner, you look a bit less influential today, but that doesn’t say much about why she lost. She didn’t lose because she was too progressive, nor because a bunch of centrists ganged up on her. She lost because the voters had a mild preference for someone a little less in your face.
If there’s a lesson here at all, it’s that maybe in this cycle the Democratic electorate is not in the mood for bomb throwing. That wouldn’t surprise me, because I think we’re all still recuperating from the non-stop drama of the Trump administration.
Great read and, based on my own reading of the race, it seems right. Ultimately, if you’ve spent the last few years operating as an anti-Democrat Democrat, feeding the segment of the (mostly online) left that has fevered dreams of destroying the party, a democratic primary featuring a massive chunk of Biden voters probably isn’t the best place to change your tune.
When Nina Turner was an Ohio State Senator, we hosted her many times at our monthly County Party Executive Committee meetings. She was once the keynote speaker at our annual fundraising dinner and she really was an electrifying personality, with a tremendous personal story. I greatly enjoyed getting to know her on a personal level, and she always drew very large crowds whenever she came to town. She was a passionate, progressive Democrat, who could really inspire and motivate people. She always lifted everyone up when she spoke. When she ended up over at MSNBC on a regular basis, she brought that same passion.
When 2016 rolled around and she became a surrogate and co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of some of the very visible changes in her attitude and her demeanor. I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary, but I wasn’t sure that the biting style she was adopting was really going to help Sanders. She still had the same passion, but her visible detest for anyone who was not firmly and passionately inside the Sanders orbit was kind of jarring to me. I get the nature of politics. I’ve seen all the internal sturm und drang that goes on in the Party. But this felt different, and in many ways seemed uncharacteristic of the person I had come to know. Turner hasn’t been back to our County since the 2016 cycle, and I’m not sure what kind of reception she would get at this point. Her “concession speech” the other night carried with it some of that same vitriol that has been laced throughout much of her public persona since 2016. I know she has a small cadre of people who have embraced her style, and are pleased with her tactics. I, for one, am still a bit puzzled with it all, but it appears that this is the new normal for her.
I think maybe there’s some whistling past the graveyard in this piece. This was a D+32 district and they rejected the progressive candidate and no, it was not close. NYC also rejected progressive candidates in favor of a moderate ex-cop, and the location of those votes is telling: wealthy white people in Manhattan voted for the progs, POC voted for the moderate. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party screwed itself with ‘defund’ which was in effect a white college kid appropriation of BLM. They also hurt themselves and the party with talk of socialism, and with the Anglo imperialism of ‘LatinX’ which, again, was college educated white people ignoring the voices of the people they imagined they were supporting. Toss in CRT which has had the net effect not of improving the teaching of history, but of generating backlash that has all-but outlawed the teaching of history in numerous systems.
Progressives are the faculty lounge wing of the party and of very little interest to anyone but themselves. They alienate Latino voters, they’re ignored by most Black voters, their core electoral argument that they would unite people behind a class-driven and race-driven message is clearly wrong-headed, and had we listened to progressives and backed Bernie Sanders we’d now be six months into Trump’s second term.
It’s time for progressives to dial down the smug and actually try doing what they are forever exhorting everyone else to do: listen. Listen to Latinos. Listen to Black people. Listen to suburbanites tired of Twitter’s cancel culture and bored with the progressive culture of humorless scolding.
That’s a solid argument, but it’s not necessarily bolstered by the results of the OH-11 race. In fact, I don’t think the Turner-Brown race had much to do with BLM or CRT or defund the cops or any of that. It had to do mainly with Turner, pro or con, and that was based on people’s feelings about her, not the issues.
Granted all that, what we are not seeing is progressives winning. Voters may not be into all the inside baseball stuff, but I think primary voters in an off-year are likely to be a pretty politically aware group and thus well aware of the prog/lib friction. And they went for the moderate. (Always granting that I don’t know OH-11 local issues or how they may have played.)
That’s fine as long as we realize that “moderate” is kind of meaningless in this case. Brown in mainly moderate in the sense that she’s not talking loud shit all day like Turner. But on the ideology spectrum of the nation or even the party, she’s surely on the left.
https://progresspond.com/2021/08/04/nina-turners-defeat-belongs-to-her-alone/#comment-2245471
Have to disagree somewhat with you on the “not seeing Progressives wining”. There aren’t just the four-member “squad” but also include newly elected progressive insurgents like Marie Newman, Cori Bush, Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman. Combined with Pramila Jayapal, the CPC’s current co-chair, and her deep bench of committed progressives like Ro Khanna and Lloyd Doggett. To give it a little more perspective, there seemed to be quite an age divide in the stats for black voters. In February 2020, under the age of 45, black voters were 46% for Bernie, 15% for Biden. Unfortunately for Bernie, in the current party, the Clyburn wing, especially the indefatigable black females over forty five who do the lion’s share of the heavy lifting, they get shit done, like nominating Biden.
I’m old enough to realize that when the shouting dies down it’s back to the unglamorous work of listening and compromising and doing what you can to move the ball down the field, grateful for whatever yardage you get. But, in the case of Nina, it’s also good to have somebody who, along the way, makes you feel like you’re fighting the good fight. And I thank her for that.
Have to disagree somewhat with you on the “not seeing Progressives wining”. There aren’t just the four-member “squad” but also include newly elected progressive insurgents like Marie Newman, Cori Bush, Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman. Combined with Pramila Jayapal, the CPC’s current co-chair, and her deep bench of committed progressives like Ro Khanna and Lloyd Doggett. To give it a little more perspective, there seemed to be quite an age divide in the stats for black voters. In February 2020, under the age of 45, black voters were 46% for Bernie, 15% for Biden. Unfortunately for Bernie, in the current party, the Clyburn wing, especially the indefatigable black females over forty five who do the lion’s share of the heavy lifting, they get shit done, like nominating Biden.
I’m old enough to realize that when the shouting dies down it’s back to the unglamorous work of listening and compromising and doing what you can to move the ball down the field, grateful for whatever yardage you get. But, in the case of Nina, it’s also good to have somebody who, along the way, makes you feel like you’re fighting the good fight. And I thank her for that.