Special Election megathread (4/30: NY-26)

[brucejoel99]

Nina Turner is antisemitic

What in the absolute f**k is "[j]ust like South Carolina, corporate Dems turned out white voters to win" even supposed to mean!? Aside from the fact that Biden won the 2020 SC primary's Black vote (which represented 56% of that primary's voting population) in more of an absolute landslide than he won the white vote thereof (which represented just 40% of the SC primary's turn-out), the implication that the votes of "white affluent shaker heights" voters - a.k.a. Jews, because we just so happen to always be the easiest scapegoats to blame for literally anything, don't we? - or even just "white voters" should somehow count for less than other voters' votes is seriously f**ked up beyond any measure of f**ked-up'd-ness.

[Pyro]

(tweet)

Interactive here: https://rrhelections.com/index.php/2021/08/03/august-3-2021-oh-11-oh-15-primary-and-mayoral-races-liveblog

It's commendable that despite older voters turning out in higher numbers than younger voters, Turner kept a 5pt~ margin.

I think that says more about the growing appeal of progressive ideas than anything else.

May just need a slightly stronger GOTV operation.

[Meatball Ron]

I'm guessing your views had something to do with single-payer healthcare, which is often used as a litmus test by the left. Maybe that makes sense in the American context, but transposing the healthcare issue to other countries is the height of bad American analysis. It makes as much sense as using birthright citizenship as a global litmus test, then implying that America is more liberal than Sweden which uses "the rule of blood", or implying Canada is more conservative than the States because of voter ID laws and point-based immigration.

Healthcare and probably the broader social safety net, which I obviously now understand isn't a great proxy either (of course people will pay higher taxes / the government will fund more social services in a country that's 95%+ white and there's no risk of those funds going to "the other")

In any case it's just funny to reflect on this because I now react very viscerally to those ridiculous memes that show the "perceived" spectrum versus the "actual" spectrum where every US politician is just on the right

[AGA]

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

[Meatball Ron]

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Because she didn't bow down to King Bernie

[MT Treasurer]

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

1. Only the most delusional, contrarian, out-of-touch crazies on the political (and largely online) fringe actually consider Brown a "moderate."

2. Everyone and their mother (in either party) can get away with portraying themselves as a "moderate", "centrist", "bipartisan," etc. these days even when they’re anything but. (Note that I’m not saying that Brown ever pretended to be moderate, I’m just pointing out that the term has lost all meaning.)

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

Nina Turner is antisemitic

What in the absolute f**k is "[j]ust like South Carolina, corporate Dems turned out white voters to win" even supposed to mean!? Aside from the fact that Biden won the 2020 SC primary's Black vote (which represented 56% of that primary's voting population) in more of an absolute landslide than he won the white vote thereof (which represented just 40% of the SC primary's turn-out), the implication that the votes of "white affluent shaker heights" voters - a.k.a. Jews, because we just so happen to always be the easiest scapegoats to blame for literally anything, don't we? - or even just "white voters" should somehow count for less than other voters' votes is seriously f**ked up beyond any measure of f**ked-up'd-ness.

I guess black voters in South Carolina, who are mostly pretty poor by national standards, are actually rich white people

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Seriously, that f**king primary is going to become the American center-left's equivalent of THIGMOO factional drama from the 70s and 80s, isn't it? We're never going to be free of attempts to relitigate it.

It is certainly starting to look that way, yes.

[Landslide Lyndon]

Nina Turner is antisemitic

What in the absolute f**k is "[j]ust like South Carolina, corporate Dems turned out white voters to win" even supposed to mean!? Aside from the fact that Biden won the 2020 SC primary's Black vote (which represented 56% of that primary's voting population) in more of an absolute landslide than he won the white vote thereof (which represented just 40% of the SC primary's turn-out), the implication that the votes of "white affluent shaker heights" voters - a.k.a. Jews, because we just so happen to always be the easiest scapegoats to blame for literally anything, don't we? - or even just "white voters" should somehow count for less than other voters' votes is seriously f**ked up beyond any measure of f**ked-up'd-ness.

It's always a safe bet that Brie Brie will say the stupidest, most boneheaded thing possible.

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

I'm guessing your views had something to do with single-payer healthcare, which is often used as a litmus test by the left. Maybe that makes sense in the American context, but transposing the healthcare issue to other countries is the height of bad American analysis. It makes as much sense as using birthright citizenship as a global litmus test, then implying that America is more liberal than Sweden which uses "the rule of blood", or implying Canada is more conservative than the States because of voter ID laws and point-based immigration.

Healthcare and probably the broader social safety net, which I obviously now understand isn't a great proxy either (of course people will pay higher taxes / the government will fund more social services in a country that's 95%+ white and there's no risk of those funds going to "the other")

In any case it's just funny to reflect on this because I now react very viscerally to those ridiculous memes that show the "perceived" spectrum versus the "actual" spectrum where every US politician is just on the right

I think it's also a status quo thing. Here in Canada, supporting universal healthcare isn't seen as a left wing position, because we already have it and have had it nationally for over 50 years. It's true that Canadian Conservatives support universal healthcare, but that means they support the status quo of healthcare policy - the US equivalent is supporting the American status quo of private healthcare with some public intervention like Medicare, Medicaid, and now the ACA. In that sense, Canadian Conservatives are the equivalent of Susan Collins type Republicans.

If we look at something neither country has, like wealth tax, then that's a more fair comparison. The NDP supports wealth taxes in Canada, like how Berniecrats do in the US. The Liberals support more progressive taxes broadly but don't want a wealth tax, like moderate Democrats. And the Conservatives oppose both the wealth tax and tax increases in general, like the Republicans. This is a more honest way of comparing political parties across borders.

As for the political compass memes, good lord those make my blood boil. The political compass is ridiculously tilted to "Libertarian left", but they place every politician in "Authoritarian right".

Put it this way: Ben Shapiro scored 6.75 economically right-wing. Okay, makes sense. Let's see where they place Joe Biden.

7.5

The political compass thinks Joe Biden's views are more right-wing than Ben Shapiro's, and we're supposed to pretend it's a good tool for ideological placement.

[The Mikado]

2. Everyone and their mother (in either party) can get away with portraying themselves as a "moderate", "centrist", "bipartisan," etc. these days even when they’re anything but. (Note that I’m not saying that Brown ever pretended to be moderate, I’m just pointing out that the term has lost all meaning.)

I think you're onto something, but I'd phrase it more as:

Moderate is a stance/public appearance, not an ideology. (Centrist, otoh, IS an ideology). A moderate has more to do with your public persona than your actual stance on issues. Rob Portman and Josh Hawley have basically identical voting records. Portman is a "moderate" because he speaks softly and doesn't insult people and acts with restraint, Hawley is a "hardliner" because he's a raving attack dog. The two's difference is almost entirely temperamental, not ideological.

("But Hawley's a populist!" How does that show up in his voting record vs Portman's, ever, in the nearly three years they've been in the Senate together? They're functionally the same as votes, it's all just stuff for the camera.)

Not to pick on Republicans here (well, yes to pick on Republicans...yes always to that) because the same is true with the Democrats. You're not going to find many votes over the last 5 years where Tim Kaine and Elizabeth Warren are voting on different sides, but Kaine's a "moderate" and Warren's a "progressive" for basically stylistic reasons.

[EJ24]

I came.

[Calthrina950]

Nina Turner is antisemitic

What in the absolute f**k is "[j]ust like South Carolina, corporate Dems turned out white voters to win" even supposed to mean!? Aside from the fact that Biden won the 2020 SC primary's Black vote (which represented 56% of that primary's voting population) in more of an absolute landslide than he won the white vote thereof (which represented just 40% of the SC primary's turn-out), the implication that the votes of "white affluent shaker heights" voters - a.k.a. Jews, because we just so happen to always be the easiest scapegoats to blame for literally anything, don't we? - or even just "white voters" should somehow count for less than other voters' votes is seriously f**ked up beyond any measure of f**ked-up'd-ness.

This is to say nothing of the fact that black voters appear to have been evenly divided between Brown and Turner. That discredits the thesis that white voters were the ones that deprived her of victory.

[Progressive Pessimist]

I've been pretty neutral in this race so I don't really have any strong feelings about it. But I will say that the media narrative of this being a "progressive versus moderate" contest will probably grate on me. It's not like Brown is Joe Manchin, or something. More aptly this race was probably one of attitude: team player versus rogue.

Well, the moderate won, so this race means nothing and we'll get the new progressive-vs-moderate battle for the soul of the party here in a couple months.

Sure, it's a media obsession that is never going to end. It's a self-replicating headline even though the truth is far more nuanced. Ostensibly the "moderates" (though usually I prefer the term "mainstream" in some cases) won the day in the New York elections this year, but concentrating on Adams' primary win alone ignores all the progressives who won other positions in the city. I think the fact that the reality is so much more complicated is a testament to the Democratic Party maintaining its big tent status, especially in the wake of an ideologically bankrupt GOP.

[Xing]

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Some want to air their grievances against the “corporate neoliberal Dem establishment”, and others want to dunk on progressives.

[bagelman]

I saw this coming. Turner was a kook and it was always going to be hard for someone like her to win. Shontel and the DMFI had rock solid attacks against her, and people paid attention to that. I'm willing to bet many poorly educated people who received this mail thought Nina Turner supported Trump when she moaned about voting Biden.

I'm very pessimistic that Brown will be anything but a shill out to line her own pockets. But the signs of this (fake applause, fake endorsements from various local pols, DMFI being creepy) are only really apparent for those who dive deep. Not for the man on the broken down streets of a black Cleveland suburb.

People in eastern Cleveland aren't really that liberal. There's little population influx, quite the opposite, and those that remain are those that voted against gay marriage in 2004 and their children. If they were white, they would probably have swung really strongly R for 16 and/or 20.

I'm not sad at all that Turner lost, she's a damned lunatic, but I'm not optimistic about yet another establishment robot.

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Is there evidence she supports either? People say things all the time.

[DrScholl]

Brown probably won't be much different than Stokes, Tubbs Jones and Fudge. The race came down to style more so than ideology and Brown probably managed to fit the style the district is used to being served by.

With that being said, the Cleveland portion of the district knows who Nina Turner is from her time on the Cleveland Council and in the Senate. I am not familiar with Turner's personality before the presidential primaries, but I suspect that her persona was different. Lots of voters don't trust candidates who switch up their personalities too much.

[walleye26]

Do you guys think Russo will win the Franklin county portion in November? Stivers won it by 1.5 in 2018, and by 5 last year, but this will be a lower turnout race.

[AGA]

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Is there evidence she supports either? People say things all the time.

Her campaign site.

[bagelman]

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Is there evidence she supports either? People say things all the time.

Her campaign site.

Not good enough for my book. We'll see.

[Woody]

Source: https://www.axios.com/jim-clyburn-ohio-progressives-b2f2ec04-a5be-49bd-9227-b746cd46df48.html

Ohio special election win cements Jim Clyburn’s kingmaker status

What they're saying: "Jim Clyburn is really good at politics and he really understands, especially, where African-American and older African-American voters are," said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group that spent roughly $500,000 on digital attack ads against Turner.

Clyburn told Axios: "I had no plans to go to Cleveland or to get physically involved in the campaign until the Turner campaign invited me in."

Turner in June appeared onstage with Killer Mike at an economic justice town hall hosted by liberal group The Young Turks and agreed when he called Clyburn "incredibly stupid" for backing Biden. "That's the kind of BS that sent me to Cleveland," Clyburn said.

He campaigned for Brown in Cleveland the week before the election. Clyburn also took issue with Killer Mike and Turner saying all the Democrat has gotten from President Biden is Juneteenth being a federal holiday.
By the numbers: Clyburn said Juneteenth isn't the point. He highlighted $65 billion for rural broadband to be included in the infrastructure package, the adoption of his "10-20-30" anti-poverty formula, and advancements for community health centers:

[Pyro]

This was brought up and discussed already in the OH-11 thread.

Again, y'all: Clyburn doesn't pick winners. He sides with them. Of course he gets petty about whomever doesn't heap praise on him but if it's a truly unwinnable outcome, he isn't going to endorse. That's why it took a month or more after the race narrowed & Democratic establishment infrastructure pouring in for him to jump into OH-11 ... He picks the winning team or keeps his mouth shut, pure and simple. Doubtful even 20% of Democratic voters outside of SC even would recognize his name when prompted. let alone care about what he has to say in out-of-state races (same goes for progressives wading into similar contests).

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

The Sandercrats have a fundamental misunderstanding.

They think they are like the Tea Party and the more they sh*t on their own party, the better chance they have of getting elected.

That is not how it works.

I've noticed that a decent amount (not all) of the "squad" has learned this. You'll notice some criticisms yes but it's usually directed towards the most moderate members, not the "establishment". AOC for example has a lot less foot-in-mouth moments than she did before.

Nina Turner didn't learn that lesson and it cost her.

Once again I didn't even like her so I don't really care that she lost.

It definitely feels like there is a contingent within the Progressive movement who think burning it all down to build on top is more important than achieving any progressive goals presently. Bernie kinda cultivated this faction in the latter days of the 2016 campaign, which brought them to the forefront. However, as noted, the elected progressives mostly have shunned these commentators - so much so that people like Shawn King and Brianna Joy Grey now seem to be on the outside looking in at the Progressive discussion rather than the other way around. And that is a good thing.

Indeed. That's the whole thing in my sig.

We need more Khanna and Porter type progressives, not Nina Turner bomb throwers.

[Pyro]

Why are people acting like Brown is moderate? She supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Is there evidence she supports either? People say things all the time.

It is true Brown lists her support for both objectives on her website and in earlier statements, emphasizing a public option over M4A and ethereally supporting the "principles" of the GND, but the issue I have is the influence of fossil fuel-adjacent doners and beneficiaries on the Brown Campaign. The DMFI maintains an oil executive as its biggest doner, the CBC Pac has former coal and gas lobbyists on its board, and endorsers like Rep. Weasy remain favorites of the oil industry. Of course, this doesn't necessary mean Brown will oppose climate change legislation in the vein of the GND, but to me it's a major red flag and something to watch for going forward.

[free my dawg]

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.