About Last Night: Nina Turner, OH-11, and The Still Applicable Lesson of 2020
Nina Turner for Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
There was some voting going on in Ohio last night, and as is habit the next day “WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN????” fresh take commentary and narrative Jenga pulling of Nina Turner’s loss has commenced. Let us partake:
The Democratic establishment scored a major victory over the party’s progressive wing on Tuesday when Shontel Brown defeated Nina Turner in a primary election in Ohio.
Conceding defeat, Turner told supporters: “Tonight my friends, we have looked across the promised land, but for this campaign, on this night, we will not cross the river.”
The contest was seen as a bellwether for the party six months into Joe Biden’s presidency and 15 months ahead of the midterm elections for Congress.
Brown was endorsed by Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and presidential nominee, and James Clyburn, the highest ranking African American in the House of Representatives.
Turner had the backing of senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who twice ran for president, and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading member of “the squad” of progressives.
The campaign in Ohio’s 11th congressional district, triggered by the resignation of Marcia Fudge to become housing secretary, had turned increasingly nasty in recent weeks with money pouring in from outside groups and both candidates under attack from negative TV ads.
But 46-year-old Brown’s victory in the safe Democratic district will be interpreted by moderates as proof that the party should hold the centre ground and not shift to the left.
For her part, Nina Turner has an alternate theory of the case:
#OH11 Nina Turner in concession speech: “I am going to work hard to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen to another progressive candidate again. We didn’t lose this race, evil money manipulated and maligned this election.”
— Kirk A. Bado (@kirk_bado) August 4, 2021
Turner reported an impressive $4.5 million in contributions for her race, to Brown’s $2.1 million total, so which money manipulated what and the level of “evil” it clocks in at may vary for you. Shontel Brown won with a convincing 50% to 44%. Congratulations to her.
Anywhoo…
Making national narratives out of individual congressional primaries is always a suspect thing, but when said congressional primary replaces the favorite horserace narrative of the 2020 presidential primary, well…who doesn’t like being able to cut and paste old writing into new writing? If someone was to do that, they could point out that much more progressive Turner was seen as the favorite, that more moderate Brown came on late from behind to win, and that style of campaign and endorsements probably mattered. The parallel folks want to draw there is Sen Bernie Sanders, who campaigned for Nina Turner here, and Sen James Clyburn, who went to bat for Brown. Then those someones would point out that it was Clyburn’s endorsement of the Biden 2020 campaign that was seen as a critical turning point in Joe going from also ran in the first two primaries, to winning South Carolina, to wrapping up the nomination in a stunning few week stretch that left the Sander’s campaign — including Nina Turner — crying foul about the “Democratic establishment” while others blames the Sanders campaign and, specifically, Nina Turner.
Long story short, the more progressive wing was stunned when the traditional base of the party such as the southern African American vote ran not walked to the polls in record numbers for Joe Biden. Finally, those someones would tie a bow on that story by going “see, it happened again, thus…” and try to foreshadow the next thing coming, like the 2022 midterms or 2024 presidential elections.
Which is all fine and good, useful even. But not all of the story.
While I do love me a good “Dems in disarray!” story from time to time this isn’t really that. This story is a continuation of a lesson that was taught in 2020 but hasn’t been learned by our very loud, very online, but nationally electorally limited friends on the further parts of the progressive left: Biden is as far left as you are going to get right now on the national level.
Which is no small achievement. Lost in the caterwauling by the progressive left about Sanders, “the Squad”, and the spotty endorsement and election results of those folks the last few years is the fact Joe Biden is a significant shift to the left in the real world of American politics. He ran and was elected with policies well to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and vastly more progressive than what Barak Obama and himself touted for both of their campaigns and much of their administration in office. For that matter, Joe Biden of 2021 is vastly more progressive than Joe Biden of 1973-2016. Just because that move was incremental, does not mean it did not happen. You’d think they’d take the win and build on it, but apparently that doesn’t thrill as much as the always just-over-the-horizon full-blown revolution of someday.
If the midterms go badly for Team Blue, as historically they usually do and that’s before you factor in redistricting, expect those losses to also be the blame of “establishment Democrats” and dark money and whatever else that is keeping the full-bore progressive revolution from finally winning big on the national level. And remember that we’ve heard it all before, and will hear it again.
So, what did we learn from the OH-11 election last night? That primaries with high profile national surrogates tend to have plenty of personal issues built into them under the campaign of the moment. That Ohio is still Ohio. That endorsements do matter. That a Democratic primary in the Cleveland area is not the rest of the country. That writers and commentators still like the easy way out in analyzing such things, myself included, because I get to write about this again and again and again. That we as a body politic learn slowly and see shortly.
Like many off-year elections that get a national narrative applied to them, Nina Turner, Shontel Brown, and OH-11 mean everything to the national political narrative. Or nothing at all. Choose your own adventure. Everyone else commentating on it is.
Turner’s money was the good, progressive kind of money!Report
The kind that gets wasted on unsuccessful bids?Report
Yep, had she won, the opposition would be sure to point out all the evil money Turner had raised.Report
You don’t get progressive results from trying (and generally failing) to elect the most progressive candidate. As FDR told a bunch of progressives who wanted something he generally sympathized with but didn’t think he could get: “Make me do it.” But there is a school of thought that you slag the insufficiently progressive candidate, or President, rather than push him. It doesn’t work.Report
It is weird to see people who ostensibly value collective action and consensus building coalitions yearn for a Strong Woman on Horseback to come in and make things right.Report
It is undeniably true that the left gets excited about, and pushes really hard (often with massive canvassing, e.g.) behind left candidates, for a variety of reasons: if you go to a left group meeting, you’ll hear a handful of justifications for this, ranging from making sure that ideas are in the political discourse to noting that Bernie/AOC/etc. have been great for getting people to join left groups, though some of it is, of course, purely psychological: high profile people whom people feel represent them, or with whom they identify, will tend to inspire excitement and loyalty in those people. However, while you’re at that left group meeting, or happy hour, or even a canvas meetup for a particular candidate, most of what you’ll hear won’t be about electoral politics or individual candidates. You’ll hear about what those groups are doing in the community on various issues, and you’ll hear about ideas. For example, here in Austin, you’d likely hear about police, housing, homelessness, reproductive justice, prisons, and (particularly rural) health care on the local and state level, and student debt, climate change, and universal health care on the national level, along with “political education”: probably not reading Marx (though maybe), but lectures, reading groups, etc. on leftist ideas that are relevant to today.
The only place most people see the left at all, because they’re still relatively marginal within the political discourse (despite what the right would have you believe), is in media coverage of politicians and candidates who are associated with the left (though this is why such politicians are great for membership numbers). Don’t let that fool you into believing that’s all the left cares about or does.Report
“Evil money.”
(I prefer “filthy lucre”.)Report
If there’s any shot at the Democratic Party bucking the dismal trend of the in party losing the succeeding mid-terms I think this is it. Good on the voters. How gratifying.Report
1. The Democratic Party, as you note, has moved in a substantially more liberal and partisan direction. This is not the DLC 1990s anymore. It is not even 2009 with Schumer explicitly stating that the Democratic Party was not bold enough in 2009.
2. The Democrats are not in disarray but this narrative trope is deeply embedded in our discourse especially for pundits whose salaries far outpace their originality.
3. Brown is probably plenty liberal. What she is not is a fire-eater rhetorician. The word moderate is often void for vagueness in political speech.
4. A good contingent of the very online Bernie or Bro groups have proved themselves to be more anti-Democratic Party than anything else and it often seems to be because they are very upset that no one made them the vanguard of the revolution and no one listens to them when they proclaim themselves to be leadership. The worst of them like Tracey have proven themselves to be fascist-friendly by constantly appearing on Tucker Carlson’s White Power Hour to blast the Democrats.
5. African-Americans and/or middle-aged moms are the core blocks of the Democratic Party and they like Biden.Report
One of the more disappointing things to me about the political discourse among liberals over the last 5 years is the extent to which aggressive anti-left messaging and the unfortunate highlighting of a few people as the most visible leftists who can at least be twisted into confirming that messaging (at least among liberals) have resulted in liberals being even more ignorant of the left than they were 6 years ago, when they barely knew the left existed at all.
Back when I was a regular around here, I mostly kept my specific political orientation out of view, except that I continually distanced myself from liberals and Democrats, which meant that progressive liberals assumed I was either a centrist or a conservative, because most liberals, especially those who considered themselves progressives, simply had no idea that there were people to their left. I dunno that liberals now recognizing that there are people to their left, but believing them to all be Chapo-listening Bernie cultists who “are very upset that no one made them the vanguard of the revolution and no one listens to them when they proclaim themselves to be leadership” is better except that it says that the left is impossible to ignore now.Report
Some of this is an issue of language. My politics is well left of the Democratic Party (which has been a classic centerist organization for about 3 decades). Yet I still identify as a liberal because its a label that I believe applies. Were I to write a political platform for myself it would read as progressive social democratic.
All of which is to say our political language is not yet up to the task.Report
Yeah, and to be fair, there’s still a sizeable contingent of left liberals/Democrats/social Democrats in DSA, at least. In fact, they were once pretty much all of DSA (pre-2016), but they’re now a sizeable minority, with the majority ranging from actual democratic socialists to communists and social anarchists.
A funny story: the first ever DSA event I went to, many, many years ago, was at the house of a (now internet infamous) local co-chair, and that house was (I assume still is) absolutely filled with pictures, ranging in size from small to poster sized, of famous Democrats: the Clintons, the Obamas, Gore, etc., etc. Hell, I think there might have been a Mondale in there. I distinctly remember someone asking me why I wasn’t a member of DSA, and I just pointed to a picture of Bill Clinton in response. Today, pretty much everyone who was at that event has left DSA because it’s moved too far left for them, though there are a couple stragglers. I doubt many currently in the local chapter have a picture of any Democrat not named Bernie Sanders anywhere.Report
I’d love to have a functional DSA chapter down here . . . pictures or no pictures. I do find it oddly funny that the modern day DSA is too liberal for liberals.Report
Too left for liberals. There’s a difference.
Dunno where you are, but I could probably point you to some good organizers in your area wherever you are.Report
coastal Mississippi.Report
Ah, that’s tough. There were attempts at MS Gulf Coast and Hattiesburg chapters of DSA, but they stalled out. I’m sure there are some groups organizing down there, though. I’ll ask around.Report
there was a “left Leaners Luncheon” up in Jackson before COVID, but now its an online thing, like so much else. they are decent folks, but I’m the farthest south in that bunch by an hour or more.Report
I was a Warren supporter and voted for her in the primary in California even though it was clear Biden would get the nomination at that point. However, as great as I think she is, she still is the candidate for a specific kind of voter that is important in the Democratic coalition but a minority. Mainly people with graduate degrees. She has a bit of the professor about her and that just is a turn off for a lot of people.
I’m a proud Democratic voter and while my politics might not be as left as yours, I think they are unquestionably on the left-end of the spectrum more often than not. But there is at least a very loud faction of the younger left that seems more into promoting their own brands than anything else. FWIW, I don’t mean AOC who I like and who understands the importance of party politics.
The El Chapo contingent strike me as more nihilistic than anything else.Report
I mean, the average Bernie voter is closer to this girl – https://twitter.com/jgee/status/1318201898177073152
Not somebody who thinks the Democratic Party is terrible and must be destroyed.
So yes, people who want the Democratic Party to move toward a social democratic direction, and work in a coalition with the rest of the left-leaning coalition in America (which yes, includes somebody like Joe Manchin, who recently came out for Biden’s eviction moratorium) to go that way are impossible to ignore now, but nihilists who think the Democratic Party needs to be destroyed in order for any positive change to happen can continue to be ignored.
The myth there is this secret socialist majority, even only the terrible bought ‘n’ sold Democratic centrists could be removed, is just that, a myth.Report
The average Bernie voter is a Democrat, true, and he remains one of the most popular politicians in the country as a result.
Socialists (broadly) are still a fairly small minority in this country, but a growing one.Report
I don’t think that is the average Bernie voter. Chris is correct that the average Bernie voter is a Democrat and Bernie or bust was much more silent in 2020 than 2016 for a variety of reasons, good and bad.
That being said, the very online can be a thorn in the side of liberal/left goals in general.Report
on point 5: To this DAY, the 2020 primary from SC onwards was like a repeated lesson that a lot of the loudest progressives are young and very inexperienced, and have no interest in studying even the most recent history.
The possibility of a Biden blowout in SC was predicted before the first primary, because it was the first state in which AA’s got a real say in the outcome — and he polled incredibly well with them. And yet the reactions by some progressives were like it was so shocking that it had to be perfidy, not….really predictable. (Hell, you could have just looked at the polls!).
Then there was people dropping out and endorsing. I suppose if your ENTIRE Presidential primary experience was 2016, this seemed surprising. To everyone else, that’s literally how primaries work. People run out of money or out of hope and endorse the person that’s closest to their views (or who they think will help them most accomplish their own goals).. Again, this was apparently some sort of insane, corrupt backroom dealing conspiracy — as opposed to literally how primaries have always worked. (At times, I wonder if some people actually think the notion of negotiation and compromise are somehow dirty…)
Of course, to my mind, the absolute nuttiest thing was for two elections in a row SOMEONE on the Sanders team thought going after Clinton and Biden on the 1994 Crime Bill was somehow going to win over black voters.
You know, the bill that the CBC endorsed and that was incredibly popular with black voters at the time.
I don’t know why, but someone (hell, possibly Nina Turner for all I know) really thought telling black voters “Hey, you know that bill you supported yourself? Supporting it is racist” would work, and not in any way backfire or insult those very voters.
The people that was most likely to appeal to were young voters with absolutely no context for the 90s — you know, the people Sanders already HAD.Report
A lot of white online liberals believe that the entire African-American and Hispanic-American communities share activist class beliefs because they mainly only talk to and hang out with young activist class African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. They do a lot better with Asian-Americans because they are more likely to know a diverse group of Asian-Americans than African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans.
It’s why you get a lot of white people that use terms like Latin-x even though real actual Hispanics ate the term. Part of this pathology is a belief that all the righteous must be in everything all together and there can be no acknowledgment that there are a lot of divisions on our side. A sort of Vulgar Intersectionality that sees everything as good people of color and other oppressed groups versus evil white people.
The real result is that you get “but how could have Nixon won, nobody we knew voted for him” but just among Democratic voters.Report
The thing you need to understand about “Latinx” is that it’s a word created to serve feminists, not a word created to serve Hispanic activists. The fact that normal Latinos don’t use it is beside the point: It’s not for them.
The whole point of the term is to colonize Latino culture with fourth-wave feminist ideology. The fact that Latinos don’t use it is exactly why gringxs continue to push it.Report
From a google search, Latin-X actually did originate among the Hispanic trans-community in the early 2000s. Wikipedia states in first appeared in 2004 in a Puerto Rican academic journal. So does seem to be a term that non-binary Hispanics created for themselves rather than something with an external origin.Report
Oh. For some reason, I thought it was forged by activists to create a pan-Latin identity for urban American politics so you did not have to go out and target various national origins.Report
No, Latin-X was coined because in Spanish men would be Latino and females would be Latina. From a trans-standpoint this is really unforgiving in a way that English isn’t.
What I can’t tell is how do these academic terms get put into general use. It took a relatively long time but eventually Latin-X became the to go term for Hispanics among certain groups. The transmission path from academia to online to real life use is very unclear though.Report
“A lot of white online liberals believe that the entire African-American and Hispanic-American communities share activist class beliefs because they mainly only talk to and hang out with young activist class African-Americans and Hispanic-American”
That was always a serious flaw in Sander’s campaign. Americans in general do not think of themselves in class terms.
So talking to them in terms of class is simply going to lead to confusion and dismissal. You’re not speaking their language. You’re telling them solutions that absolutely might work — but which they’re going to dismiss because it sounds like you’re talking about things they don’t care about and don’t see how it effects them.
As a simple example, when you hear the media talk about the “working class” — what gets envisioned is white men in factories. Not black women working in nursing homes.
So if you talk about “the working class” your average American thinks “white middle-class male”. That’s their instant translation. Which is okay if you’re trying to sway white, middle class men.
If you’re talking to someone else, most of them will think you’re not talking about them. And even if they make the leap and translate your words into what they’re familiar with, that effort of mental switching will cloud your words. You very much aren’t speaking their language, which makes you seem distant and out of touch.
I’m sympathetic to the notion that class-based approaches could solve a number of problems, but if you want to implement them you have to sell them — which you can’t do using class-based language! Not here, not now.
You might as well hand a town hall audience a few white papers. They may be brilliant white papers, but that’s not the best way to get your ideas across to them.Report
I’m not really sure that this is responsive to what I wrote. I was mainly talking about the very online left, intersectional/social justice left. These groups tended to be very skeptical of Sanders and supported Clinton and Warren.
Activist class just means the type of people that tend to work at NPOs and activists for a living. A lot of white liberals are much more likely to know activist minorities rather than more typical representatives of their communities. This can mess up their ideas about what African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans really support politically. White liberals have a firmer grasp on Asian-American politics because they know more Asian-Americans.Report
I see where you are going with this, and can’t completely disagree, but JS is right – even using the term “activist class” isn’t good framing because most white Americans don’t know what that is. I suspect a good many non-white Americans don’t know what that is. Activist community is probably a better approach.Report
There are seemingly a lot of points where activists have won over white liberals but not actually the community for whom they are allegedly activist for. An example I heard is that the term Latinix (which is apparently pronounced Latin X) is very unpopular with many Hispanics but progressive activists in the Hispanic communities found it useful for city politics and convinced white liberals to use it.Report
It’s pronounced La Tinks. It’s Spanish.Report
Latin-X is popular among white liberals because the entire idea among the activist class, including a lot of white online liberals, is that EVERYBODY must be included at all times. The fact that Spanish is a very gendered language just seems to exclude the LGBT community, so Latino and Latina have to go and LatinX even though most Hispanics can’t stand the term.Report
It’s pretty interesting from a sociolinguistic POV. My daughter is neck-deep in this — she’s a social worker in NYC, and her current role is doing outreach to the LatinX population for the program she’s involved in. She says that in individual private conversation, basically no one likes this term, but everyone feels duty-bound to use it — otherwise you mark yourself as being either ignorant or a rule-breaker.
BTW she pronounces it Latin-Ex in English, Latin-Equis in Spanish.Report
There is a lot of peer pressure in certain liberal and progressive communities. When you try to push back a little and point out that a lot of ordinary people really don’t have that many issues with things like AD&D having a Samurai class and don’t see it as cultural appropriation you get a lot of anger displayed at you. It is almost like a liberal/progressive version of the closed circle on the American Right.Report
AAPI is the current “smoosh everybody together for Justice” thing going on. Apparently we needed a term that covered Pakistanis as well as Native Hawaiians in one easy-to-say acronym.Report
AAPI was created by the US Census. for data purposes.Report
It has leaked out into college campuses.Report
What else are they going to do? I’d assume that the political interests of South Asians and East Asians are similar these days, both groups being on the whole more recent immigrants and likely to be discriminated against in the university system. And as a practical matter, should the Asians exclude the Japanese, Filipinos, et cetera? I’d love it if we didn’t think in terms of ethnicity so often, but seriously, what would you think if the NAACP threw out all the Madagascarans?Report
I guess I’m one of the racists who puts Pakistanis and Native Hawaiians in different buckets.
So my thought is “put them in different buckets”.Report
“Faroe Islanders Against Eurocentrism”Report
“She says that in individual private conversation, basically no one likes this term, but everyone feels duty-bound to use it — otherwise you mark yourself as being either ignorant or a rule-breaker.”
It is endlessly vexing to me that reactionaries have managed to successfully brand themselves as rebels and rule-breakers, while so many young, left-leaning, activist types have branded themselves as hall monitors. However, I do believe that this is not a stable equilibrium.
There is a lot of good that gets corralled into the space labelled “woke.” But there is also a lot of obvious nonsense. More importantly, a lot of people know it is nonsense and are effectively waiting for permission to admit it. This is starting to happen. There is an article from The Atlantic right now making the rounds that talks about the extent to which much of contemporary anti-racism is a white morality play.
It is good that much of the nonsense will blow over. But it’s bad that so many people feel that they need to wait for permission before speaking the plain truth. That is not a good development.Report
The Guardian is just incredibly bad at reporting on American politics. Nina Turner only represents the “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party to them because of the squint hard enough they see Sanders as Corbyn. They are projecting their own political beliefs on Americans.Report
They are projecting their own political beliefs on Americans.
This doesn’t strike me as “incredibly bad” as much as “incredibly average”.Report
If it makes you feel better, their coverage of Canadian politics is plagued by similar problems.
I’d say the bigger issue isn’t so much with the Brits they have on staff’s view of the world per se, but that they only engage with and listen to their North American friends who pretty much are only from the leftward 15% of political opinions and this gives them a particularly warped view of the NA centre-left.Report
I mean, what happened is pretty simple – don’t say bad things about somebody w/ 90% support of the people you want votes from.
The ironic things is, Turner was actually doing pretty well, running as a normie progressive Democrat, until HIllary endorsed Brown, and instead of basically ignoring it, the Turner campaign badly chose to go full the ‘Establishment is coming after me.’
For all the talk of the Establishment wanting to crush The Left, if Bernie’s campaign manager ran in an open deep blue seat like this, he’d likely get no pushback from the evil Establishment, despite having basically the same policy positions as Turner.Report
What’s votes, got to to, got to do with it?Report