This is a smart recap of why Nina Turner lost from someone who was actually on the ground in Ohio. A quick recap:
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
I think what happened was the left made a token effort at securing a meaningless seat. Like a dog chasing cars, there was no actual plan for what was supposed to happen if she won. Since leftist don't vote as a block it was arguably impossible to make a plan. Without any tangible stakes there was nothing to offer the public who largely didn't bother voting at all.
Yeah people feel demoralized at the idea of sending one person to the squad every 4 years and the needle never moving at all