Nina Turner announced that she will run for the House of Representatives to represent Cleveland after her campaign against Rep. Shontel (D-Ohio), fell flat in last year’s primaries.
Turner was a former Ohio state senator and campaign co-chair for Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). will likely go up against Brown again. Brown defeated Turner in a Democratic primaries and easily won the general elections to fill the seat that was vacated last year by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge.
“Families are struggling…. While corporations make record profits,” Turner said in a videoAnnouncement of her campaign. “Greater Cleveland needs a change maker, not someone who will just go along to get along. We can put an agenda through Congress that puts working families first.”
During last year’s run, Turner ran on a progressive platformThis included support for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. In her Wednesday campaign announcement, she mentioned these priorities, stating that she would place emphasis on climate, economic and racial justice while in office.
“The people of Greater Cleveland overwhelmingly support Medicare for All. So do I,” she wrote on Twitter. “Healthcare has been denied to millions of Americans for too long. I will fight for Medicare for All, and I won’t take a dime from the health insurance industry.”
Turner was endorsed by people like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York)And SandersAlong with the support from progressive groups such as the Working Families Party.
Turner was defeated by Brown in August by about six points. Corporate media outlets framed the defeat as a public rejection of progressive ideology and as proof that President Joe Biden didn’t need to capitulate to the left. But progressives say that the takeaways from the election weren’t that simple.
Turner noted that Brown had the support and endorsement of the enormously powerful Democratic establishment at the time of Brown’s loss. Received a flood of money from PACs, corporate funders and even GOP donors during the campaign; Turner called these donations “evil money” in her concession speech.
One of Brown’s major financial backers was a pro-Israel PAC called the Democratic Majority for Israel that spent over $2 millionSupporting Brown and running attack ads against Turner; and other right-leaning centrist and right-leaning organisations Tried to smear Turner by claiming that she isn’t a “real Democrat,” a common refrain of establishment Democrats targeting the left.
After the primary, some political commentators noted that the election didn’t indicate a widespread rejection of progressivism. This is what many news outlets failed to notice at the time. The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, was that special elections are often not indicative of voters’ preferences more generally.
While a Turner win would have been a victory for the left, “Brown’s win indicates that the establishment was successful here, and that their late-in-the-game devotion of resources and manpower worked,” Godfrey wrote. “[T]hose are about the only reasonable extrapolations.”
“There was an anybody-but-Nina campaign ran in 2021,” Turner told NBC recently. “Some of those forces may still decide to get into this race, but what they will not be able to do is totally concentrate [on the Ohio 11th District] because this will not be the only race.”
Brown’s campaign last year touted her closeness with establishment Democrats. Her first TV ad bragged that she would “work with Joe Biden.”
As Cleveland.com’s Brent Larkin noted in May of last year, “Brown will be a well-financed candidate with deep-pocketed supporters who aren’t afraid to play rough. That’s because Turner can’t be beaten unless opponents plant seeds of doubt about her fitness, convincing voters her harsh criticisms of President Joe Biden would make it impossible for her to get things done for her community.” Larkin then pointed out that Biden chose Kamala Harris as his vice president despite her harsh criticisms of Biden during the primary.
Turner has said that it is important for progressive lawmakers to support Biden’s agenda while still demanding more from the party. “There is a need for people to both lift the president’s agenda when they agree with that agenda but also in that same motion push for more,” she told NBC. “I don’t see those things as mutually exclusive – even though people want to make it mutually exclusive.”
