This is a smart recap of why Nina Turner lost from someone who was actually on the ground in Ohio. A quick recap:
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Establishment Democrats absolutely flooded Cleveland with anti-Turner content in the month leading up to the election. You couldn't look around without seeing a billboard quoting Turner saying "voting Biden is like eating half a bowl of shit." That was an effective attack because most Democratic primary voters like Biden and the Democratic Party (sadly). It wasn't impossible to overcome (Turner almost won!), but it was effective. TV and billboard ads are extremely powerful tools in electoral politics because the average voter is 55 years old and watches 5 hours of TV a day (this is not an exaggeration).
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Nina Turner ran a positive campaign, Shontel Brown saw she was down big and went negative first. Negative campaigning works. When Turner saw her internal polls collapsing she went negative, but it was too little too late.
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Turner's ground game was not very strong. They sent in the cavalry and flooded Cleveland with volunteers once the race tightened, but she needed to be doing that for months, not weeks.
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Yes, dark money sucks. But there's no invisible referee coming to save us from dark money. Part of fighting a huge, corrupt establishment is understanding that they're going to throw every dirty trick they have at you. And remember, even with the dark money, Turner had more total money than Brown.
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Jim Clyburn had nothing to do with this race. Most people in OH-11 don't know who he is. He's a power broker in South Carolina, not nationally.
Goodbye, somebody!
Edit: this person also gives credit to Cori Bush for getting the eviction moratorium extended. I’m not sure I trust their judgment.
While the credit should of course go to the activists on the ground, we can also admit that if they didn't have someone in power like Cori Bush advocating for them the people in power would not have listened.
Most actions taken by the unhoused get met by police, not an eviction ban. Having people on both the inside and outside was the difference.
I follow the logic, I just don’t share it. I think it’s giving too much credit to Cori Bush for what is ultimately a very minor concession.
Like they were obligated to do something, and the thing they did was just a winnowing down of existing eviction protections. I can’t get excited about that, nor can I give people credit for scraping out a worse deal than we already had.
Not really, tho.
Agree to disagree. Although the ruling class hates us, letting millions of us get evicted all at once is a bridge too far, even for them imo.
I feel like they know a mass wave of evictions could be a flash point. So instead, they just slowly evict people in waves.
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It just strikes me as naive. Like, it has all the optics of helping, but it doesn’t actually help. If a person didn’t know anything about how power works, this would be their theory of change.
Edit: did the eviction moratorium even get extended yet? Aren’t they planning to extend it in such a way that it only helps 90% of the people it was helping previously, after allowing a lapse that will let people get kicked out of their homes?
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This is correct.