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.
I'm not sure that's actually true. I think that might not count outside spenders like Democratic Majority for Israel.
Original comment has a very good take, IMO.
While dark money is a problem that hurts the left, I really want more leftists to acknowledge the reality that the US is a super reactionary place and the biggest problem socialists have is that most people don't agree with us. It's our job to persuade the masses, not to delude ourselves into thinking the masses are already there.
I think the "most people are socialists, they just don't know it yet" line can sound persuasive because it was true of everybody here at some point, but the fact is most people are not socialists and express the fact that they are not socialists every election day.
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Hard to say what that outside spending looks like unless you are in that advertising region and watch 5 hours of TV a day though.
It is. Even if you count the DMFI money, Turner had more. Nina Turner is an extremely strong fundraiser and had access to Bernie’s email list, which is probably the most powerful fundraising tool in Democratic politics short of Bloomberg’s bank account number.
Yeah you're right. It looks like it was over $5 million for Turner and $2.5 million or something like that for Brown.