Special Election megathread (6/11: OH-6, 6/25: CO-4)

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

The fact that a post that blatantly lies about the poll's intent has 5 recommendations shows how detached from reality The Centrists are. We've reached almost Trumpian levels of denial here.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

https://twitter.com/NickTagliaferro/status/1416104160202743814

https://twitter.com/MK_McMaster/status/1415361890683924481

Glad to see the DNC has their answer to Jim Jordan.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Dude.

He had sex with children.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

We're all for second chances. We just don't think people who molest first graders deserve one.

You know, like normal people.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Anyway, this isn't the Individual Politics board.  I just think it's pretty desperate and disgusting to try and attack Shontel because she let this guy get involved in community event organizing 15 years after he completed his sentence.

Well, yes, but more to the point — this probably cannot be used as a cudgel against the Brown campaign because his LinkedIn also lists him as "Lead Campaign Volunteer, Nina Turner for Ohio Secretary of State."

...That would certainly do it.

Really wish there was another viable candidate here.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

There’s a difference between giving people a second chance - which I do believe everyone is entitled to to some extent, even this man - and giving them a position in the local party.

He volunteered for the Cuyahoga Democratic Party, just like how he volunteered for Nina Turner’s 2014 campaign. Neither organization hired him.

If Turner had done her due diligence and found out that one of her senior volunteers were a registered sex offender, he could’ve been iced out much sooner. But instead, he used his experience on Turner’s campaign to land more volunteer positions on Democratic campaigns in the area.

Per the CCDP's by-laws, the Executive Committee consists partially of appointed members and of elected members. If you look at the CCDP Executive Commitee roster itself, you'll see that the pedophile was an appointed nominee.... by Brown herself!

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding of the term "lead volunteer" is probably on the level of a local office or operation. I doubt Nina Turner would have personally vetted him for such a small position, especially in a statewide campaign in a state as large as Ohio.

It's not something that the general public will distinguish and is ineffective, but it's a clear false equivalency. There is hard proof that Shontel Brown elevated him to the Executive Committee. If proof comes out implicating Nina or exonerating Shontel, I'll be glad to admit I'm wrong. If we want to have a debate on whether or not pedophiles should have a second chance in society that's fine too. But coming from my experience working on a campaign, it doesn't seem comparable.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

https://twitter.com/bzdug/status/1419494239554125829?s=19

Oh no no no nooooooo

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

It really was Turner that nationalized this race by bringing in outside help from the start and I think the recent barrage of attacks against Brown shows that this race is not as safe for Turner as previously thought. They even brought out borderline racist attacks.

https://twitter.com/ArrogantNBlack/status/1417647388299300864

The whole "girrllll" line was completely unnecessary.

The only difference is that the groups supporting Brown (namely DMFI's mailers) are flooding the district with blatant lies.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

It really was Turner that nationalized this race by bringing in outside help from the start and I think the recent barrage of attacks against Brown shows that this race is not as safe for Turner as previously thought. They even brought out borderline racist attacks.

https://twitter.com/ArrogantNBlack/status/1417647388299300864
The whole "girrllll" line was completely unnecessary.

The only difference is that the groups supporting Brown (namely DMFI's mailers) are flooding the district with blatant lies.

Many of the groups supporting Turner have also been flooding the district with blatant lies

So do you have a citation for any of Turner's outside groups lying or are you just resorting to whataboutery because you know DMFI lied in their mailers?

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

The major ads that the black clergy members you were talking about invoked was the attack ad about Shontel Brown's contract votes. Which she failed to recuse herself from despite promising to do so when she was elected.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Shirley Smith, one of the other candidates in the OH-11 race, is spreading the Newsweek article-

https://twitter.com/SenSASMITH/status/1420031158025428995

LOL THE ARTICLE IS BY WALKER BRAGMAN

It's also by Andrew Perez, who works at Jacobin and co-writes articles with David Sirota.

Guys, this is a classic Sanders campaign tactic and you're falling for it like a bunch of dunces.  It's just a Nina Turner attack ad thinly laundered through "journalists" who are all but on the campaign's payroll, then spread around as though it's a legitimate investigative article.

Sirota was actually being paid directly by the Sanders campaign to do this, and would have pushed out dozens of these articles over the course of the primaries if Edward Isaac-Dovere hadn't exposed him.

I mean in 2019 you had Sirota masquerading as an independent journalist to publish Sanders campaign oppo research on Beto in The Guardian, and now I'm 2021 you have Sirota's two proteges (he's also co-written dozens of articles with Bragman) publishing Turner campaign oppo research on Brown in Newsweek.  Like how are people still falling for this.

Take a look at their previous work to see what you're buying into here: https://muckrack.com/walker-bragman/articles

The article I posted, which corroborated the claims about Brown's broken promises/contracts is an article from The Nation, written by noted Bernie Bro Joan Walsh.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

IDK why this piece is being dismissed out of hand. I mean, we know Brown voted to award millions in contracts to Perk while dating Mark Perkins and that Perk then turned around and financed a bunch of her campaigns, right? Is it really that unbelievable that she'd face an ethics investigation over that? I don't know, maybe MacArthur is privy to some information that I am not, but it just seems a bit like ideologically motivated reasoning to me.

Yes, but have you considered Ohio's Attorney General is a Trump supporter and the Turner campaign is working with him to bring Democrats down?

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

I think I'm more annoyed by the constant "I hate both the candidates~~~!!!!!!" people in here. False equivalency is just the worst. Stop it.

I agree. Comparing a candidate who wasn't enthusiastic enough to vote for Joe Biden to a corrupt pedodefender backed by special interests and the GOP is a false equivalency.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

https://twitter.com/ninaturner/status/1421278357178748931

Glorious news! May the teachers lead us to victory.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Brown is still pretty progressive.

To be fair, this is true. I'm about 99% sure Brown isn't going to vote to defund schools that let trans kids play sports like Manchin did, and I don't think her voting record is going to be marginally different from Turner's.

OH-11 is a battle for the soul of the party, but on a stylistic level. I think I've made it pretty clear that I'm backing Nina to rebuke the forces backing Brown.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party told me to leave.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

I'd love to stay as a Democrat, but when people are yelling at you to GTFO for so long there's only so much you can take.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Writing something up after I do some gaming. Suffice to say it's clear that certain factions of the Democratic establishment didn't get Biden/Schumer's memo and still believe we're Public Enemy #1B.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Yes, it's totally not like Turner in particular had said and done things to hurt the party electorally in general elections in the past and needlessly burned bridges with the establishment in ways other progressive candidates haven't or anything...

Turner brought this on herself. If she hadn't made the sh** sandwich comment last year this race would have been called for her five minutes after polls closed.

I actually disagree with this take and think it'd be competitive regardless of Turner sniping at Biden. I think Brown was stronger than the polls estimated and that the CBC would have intervened regardless to push their protege over the top. DMFI still intervenes over her Palestine views too.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Glad Turner lost. She is an absolute clown. That “concession” speech is pathetic.

I don't know what she was talking about when she mentioned "evil money".

That's a ing yikes.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

Writing something up after I do some gaming. Suffice to say it's clear that certain factions of the Democratic establishment didn't get Biden/Schumer's memo and still believe we're Public Enemy #1B.

If Turner would have endorsed/voted for Hillary and Biden, like nearly every other elected Berniecrat did she would have won tonight.

I actually disagree with this take and think it'd be competitive regardless of Turner sniping at Biden. I think Brown was stronger than the polls estimated and that the CBC would have intervened regardless to push their protege over the top. DMFI still intervenes over her Palestine views too.

Brown had a coalition of the Jewish community (who would still overwhelmingly back Brown) and the machine (which is generally very Offline). Maybe it'd be by slimmer margins than expected but I think a race between Brown and a less hostile progressive is a toss-up.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

So here are my thoughts, a day after the election and after the fallout:

It turns out my initial gut feeling about this race was right. Brown did win. Who would have thought that criticizing the most popular Democrat in the country hurts you? I was originally going to post about how this is hostility to the left and how I've forsaken the Democratic Party because the establishment didn't keep that same energy with themselves, but let's be real. I left the Democratic Party when my Senators decided to vote against a $15 minimum wage to simp for GOP donorbux.

I think we all know I wasn't supporting Turner on policy. I think Brown is progressive enough to be tolerable – maybe not on foreign policy, but that's an issue I'm more moderate on anyways. Even if she is personally a transphobe, she's obviously not going to vote like one like Manchin does. I also don't think Turner's eventual turn towards the establishment would have been catastrophic. Even before endorsing Sanders she was a solid progressive.

Basically, I wasn't attached to Turner and was largely supporting her because I wanted to dunk on the centrists. I'm not attached to personalities by any means of the imagination. Thanks to the revelations about James Clyburn's intentions and Nina Turner's concession speech having anti-Semitic overtones, I'm feeling a lot less angry over this whole primary. It's a situation where really everyone involved sucks.

These things can all be true simultaneously:
* Turner was incredibly combative instead of collaborative, and lost because of that.
* One single PAC nearly being the biggest spender in the final weeks off the campaign is disturbing and shows how broken our system is.

The Democratic Party is much more personality-based than the pre-Trump Republican establishment. Few people were excited for Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan like OSR was, and the Tea Party never really unified, leaving a bunch of has-beens to pick up the scraps. They didn't have anyone that could match Bush's affability or ignite the Tea Party.

In contrast, the Democrats have always been strongly reliant on individual personalities. The party rallied around Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's messages of hope. Biden was seen more as a moderate, but was the Democratic Party's security blanket. He was a living reminder of the good old days, when people were civil, we treated major crises seriously, and didn't have a leader that made an ass of us to our allies. And even then, he had a personality that struck a balance between warmth and telling it like it was.

No matter what the context is, attacking that unifying personality is bad optics. Poking the de facto leader of the CBC is bad optics. Dodging the question of who you supported in the general is bad optics. Referring to a pro-Israel PAC that backed your opponent as “evil money” is bad optics, to say the very least. I don't believe Nina Turner's missteps were as campaign-killing as the media makes it out to be, but they were clearly a factor.

But let's get into the elephant in the room. One PAC outspending nearly everyone else in the race shows how unhealthy our current campaign finance system is. I've been a firm, consistent believer that politics should play out on a local level with as little interference from the national apparatus. I almost saw dark money groups like VoteVets and EMILY's List, who have never been to my Congressional district, throw away a slam-dunk win and try to buy a seat there for an unelectable candidate. Obviously it's absurd to compare OH-11's primary to the swingiest district in America, but it helps explain my distaste for national PACs' interventions in primaries.

Comparing the pro-Brown PACs' operations with a bunch of Bernie people flooding Nina's donations or some no-name progressive PAC's operation is a false equivalence. Third Way spent more on anti-Nina advertising than the largest pro-Nina PAC did combined. And that's not even getting into DMFI, which nearly matched Turner's campaign spending on its own in the home-stretch and outspent Brown's. Outside help matters in primaries, and Shontel got a hell of a lot more of it than Nina did.

[Anti Democrat Democrat Club]

https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1424067468750954499?s=21

Really irresponsible tweet from Bernie

I disagree. These things can be true at the same time:

* Nina Turner was a sh*t candidate with sh*t responses to legitimate issues they brought up.

* Super PACs rushing into a district, spending millions of dollars, and doing as much heavy lifting as their affiliated campaign shows how broken our campaign finance system is and is not something Democrats should be happy about. Especially when some of those PACs outright traffick in disinformation.