Showing posts with label Nina Turner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nina Turner. Show all posts

Thursday, August 5, 2021

Dem Party War - Progressives under attack as Biden wing gloats, Do Prog join Nina Turner in a bowl of shit? Who won the black vote?

As the campaign wound down, Democratic heavy hitters flocked to the district, as the race, rightly or wrongly, was cast a re-litigation of their party’s 2016 presidential primary.... Brown ran better in most suburban communities, and held Turner to just a narrow edge in Cleveland proper -- Brown was especially strong in Beachwood, which has a high Jewish population. Though it doesn’t account for much of the district, Turner narrowly carried OH-11’s portion of Summit County.... Sabato's Crystal Ball

Thursday, August 5

I reported on the much talked about Nina Turner loss twice yesterday:

So yesterday I followed a lot to commentary on the outcome. The right center Dems on Morning Joe gloating and attacking the left, with Sharpton leading the way. Below I posted the NYT article and the Sabato report on the race. Speaking of which, did the black vote abandon Nina because she is too radical and anti-Biden with her comment about eating a bowl of shit when she voted for him? or how about the fact that she didn't support Hillary in 2016 and voted for Jill Stein (most likely, though she didn't say? These anti-Dem comments were used to great effect - plus the Israel thing. 

Plus the open primary may have brought in Republicans:

Progressives (including Nina Turner) pushed hard for open primaries and this analysis finds strong evidence of a significant number of people who typically vote Republican choosing a Dem ballot to oppose Turner over Israel dansdeals.com/more/dans-comm

The district has lots of whites and Jews -- so Nina lost those badly, which means that counter to early reporting, she actually didn't do badly with the black vote. Her biggest problem was turnout -- low. And the fact that her black base was younger and they just don't vote as much as older.

Ryan Grim on The Hill had an interview with Brianha Joy Taylor -- worth finding it if you can -- I can't seem to.

Some of the best stuff was Sam Seder's analysis (my daily watch from noon to 2:30 which often kills my day) on Majority Report where he took some shots at the progressives who engage in rhetorical flourishes that come back to bite them when they have to gather support beyond their base to win an election. Sam points out that the purpose of running is to win and the purpose of winning is to make changes. 

The Nina discussion starts around 1 hour and 12 minutes and goes on until 2:02 -- long but a lesson for the left from Sam, who is often attacked for not being left enough -- but I like reality based leftists.

https://youtu.be/3C66oYWDDjw


 

Sam strikes back at the Ultra left dum dums who criticize Cori Bush for "performative" politics. Sam and Emma take them to task for their attacks on those who actually run in the Dem Party to win and not search for the mythical left cannon unicorn of the Labor-Green-People Party where they can get ten votes or just enough to let Republican right wingers win. Ahhh purity. Sam points out  that if Cori Bush were some civilian instead of a formerly homeless Congresswoman, her sleep-in would have been laughed at.

  

https://youtu.be/EvTWGQNxykk

 Here is the NY Times article which features the despicable corp shill Hakeem Jeffries who I pray will be primaried and even if it's a losing battle I will be giving money to whomever.

Progressives are holding their own with moderates in fights over policy. But off-year elections suggest they need a new strategy for critiquing President Biden without seeming disloyal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/us/politics/biden-democrats.html

Nina Turner, the hard-punching Bernie Sanders ally who lost a special election for Congress in Ohio this week, had unique political flaws from the start. A far-left former state legislator, Ms. Turner declined to endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald J. Trump in 2016. Last year, she described voting for President Biden as a grossly unpalatable option.

There were obvious reasons Democratic voters might view her with distrust.

Yet Ms. Turner’s unexpectedly wide defeat on Tuesday marked more than the demise of a social-media flamethrower who had hurled one belittling insult too many. Instead, it was an exclamation mark in a season of electoral setbacks for the left and victories for traditional Democratic Party leaders.

In the most important elections of 2021, the center-left Democratic establishment has enjoyed an unbroken string of triumphs, besting the party’s activist wing from New York to New Orleans and from the Virginia coastline to the banks of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. It is a winning streak that has shown the institutional Democratic Party to be more united than at any other point since the end of the Obama administration — and bonded tightly with the bulk of its electoral base.

These more moderate Democrats have mobilized an increasingly confident alliance of senior Black and Hispanic politicians, moderate older voters, white centrists and labor unions, in many ways mirroring the coalition Mr. Biden assembled in 2020.

In Ohio, it was a coalition strong enough to fell Ms. Turner, who entered the race to succeed Marcia Fudge, the federal housing secretary, in Congress as a well-known, well-funded favorite with a huge lead in the polls. She drew ferocious opposition from local and national Democrats, including leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus who campaigned for her opponent, Shontel Brown, and a pro-Israel super PAC that ran advertisements reminding voters about Ms. Turner’s hostility toward Mr. Biden.

Ms. Brown, a Cuyahoga County official, surged to win by nearly six percentage points.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a top member of House leadership, said in an interview Wednesday that Democratic voters were clearly rejecting candidates from the party’s most strident and ideological flank.

Where some primary voters welcomed an angrier message during the Trump years, Mr. Jeffries said, there is less appetite now for revolutionary rhetoric casting the Democratic Party as a broken institution.

“The extreme left is obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter, when the majority of the electorate constitute mainstream Democrats at the polls,” Mr. Jeffries said. “In the post-Trump era, the anti-establishment line of attack is lame — when President Biden and Democratic legislators are delivering millions of good-paying jobs, the fastest-growing economy in 40 years and a massive child tax cut.”

Learn more about the Crystal Ball and find out how to contact us here.

Sign up to receive Crystal Ball e-mails like this one delivered straight to your inbox.

Use caution with Sabato's Crystal Ball, and remember: "He who lives by the Crystal Ball ends up eating ground glass!"

OH-11

Wins for Clinton and Trump? In two special elections last night, Ohio voters in two congressional districts went to the polls to cast ballots in primaries. Though there were four primaries overall, the results in the the two most watched contests were, to some degree or another, unexpected. In the Cleveland area’s OH-11, County Councilwoman Shontel Brown upset former state Sen. Nina Turner in the Democratic primary. Turner, who had superior name recognition, built a fundraising advantage and was seen as a clear, but not prohibitive, favorite for much of the campaign. Though Turner represented part of the area in the legislature from 2008 to 2014, she was most known for her work on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) presidential campaigns. Brown, who was initially elected to the Cuyahoga Council in 2014, positioned herself as a mainstream Democrat. As the campaign wound down, Democratic heavy hitters flocked to the district, as the race, rightly or wrongly, was cast a re-litigation of their party’s 2016 presidential primary. In the closing week, Sanders stumped for Turner while House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D, SC-6), a major figure in the Congressional Black Caucus, made a visit on Brown’s behalf -- Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown earlier on. Despite Turner’s apparent advantages, Brown prevailed by a 50%-45% margin (there were almost a dozen minor candidates who split up the balance). While Turner’s association with Sanders undoubtedly seemed to help raise her profile, her association with the Vermont senator may ultimately not have been much of an asset in OH-11: in the 2016 primary, it was Clinton’s best district in the state, giving her a nearly 40-point advantage over Sanders. Roughly 90% of OH-11’s votes come from Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, where Brown did slightly better than her districtwide showing, but there were some interesting local patterns. Brown ran better in most suburban communities, and held Turner to just a narrow edge in Cleveland proper -- Brown was especially strong in Beachwood, which has a high Jewish population. Though it doesn’t account for much of the district, Turner narrowly carried OH-11’s portion of Summit County. An interactive map from our friends at RRH Elections gives a detailed breakdown: Brown carried many of the white-majority areas while Turner ran better in the heavily Black precincts that make up Akron proper.

Given the working class nature of the Akron area, perhaps Brown’s relative moderation played better with white voters. A few months ago, a similar dynamic was at play in Louisiana’s 2nd District: in an April special election, now-Rep. Troy Carter (D, LA-2), who was tagged with the “establishment” label, beat out state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson in an intraparty runoff. Peterson’s posture as an “unapologetic progressive” sold well in gentrifying white neighborhoods in New Orleans, but Carter racked up healthy majorities in the district’s white -- and non-white -- working class pockets.

Both the LA-2 result and the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, where Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams was seen as a moderate choice, represent, to some degree or another, disappointments for progressives. Now, with a loss in Ohio, progressives find themselves looking for a high profile win.

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Nina Turner Loss, Cori Bush win on rent relief - Lessons for the left

I was so rooting for Nina Turner -Dem Party Goes After Nina Turner and Bernie Wing o... so it's a sad day. I wanted so bad to see her in Congress. But maybe in the real election next year. But then again Cori Bush activism was a winner.

Expect much gnashing of teeth from progressives over the Nina Turner loss but also much celebration over the Cori Bush win after her sleepout on the steps of the capitol forced the Bush admin to continue rent relief. The media won't connect the two and report mainly on the loss. MSNBC Morning Joe crew was positively glowing today while under reporting the Bush story.


Corporate media and Dems, following the celebration of the Eric Adams win in NYC, are overjoyed over the defeat of Nina Turner and the Bernie wing of the party in last night's primary.

NY Post: AOC-backed Sanders ally beaten in closely watched Ohio House primary

With 96.5 percent of precincts reporting, Brown led Turner by 4,380 votes out of more than 71,000 votes cast.

Yesterday began with a big celebration by the activist left over how Cori Bush and the Squad stood up Joe Biden and the Dem party central over it's disastrous handing of rent relief. Heather Cox Richardson reports:

...after pressure from progressive Democrats, especially Representative Cori Bush (D-MO), who led a sit-in at the Capitol to call for eviction relief, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that in counties experiencing high levels of community transmission of Covid-19, it is extending until October 3 the federal moratorium on evictions that ended this weekend. It is doing so as a public health measure, but it is also an economic one. It should help about 90% of renters—11 million adults—until the government helps to clear the backlog of payments missed during the pandemic by disbursing more of the $46 billion Congress allocated for that purpose.

One thing I've learned about many on the left -- celebrate and exaggerate the wins and blame the losses on corporate money - or the weather - or anything. Center/right/corp Dems push the idea that the majority of voters, particularly in the Black community, don't support the left. At least the older, more conservative church-going faction. But Cori Bush defeated one such black incumbent with a lot of support in the 2020 primary. But lessons learned by corp dems -- they didn't want yet another Cori Bush in Congress so they pulled out all the stops in Cleveland.

The Cleveland primary makes that point. There were many centrist black candidates and corp Dems used the Biden strategy against Bernie -- unite behind one. And it worked -- this time -- there is another election next year and Nina my be back and doing a lot of campaigning -- starting today. Turnout was terrible and that was what brought Nina down.

David Sirota faces facts in this tweet:

@NinaTurner ran a brave campaign. More Dem voters supported her corporate opponent not just because an overwhelming amount of super PAC money was spent to destroy Nina, but also because in general more Dem voters want a corporate government than something else. This is reality.
I follow left wing alt media, which is so anti-corp Dem. I was listening to live reports from The Young Turks - TYT - and there was more than a bit of hysteria over the Turner loss -- with a semi-attack on the voters -- the black voters - who chose corp Dems over Turner. When Bernie lost to Biden there was a lot ot crying on the left over how dare the corp dems unite -- Bernie could have won if they split the vote - as he did in early primaries with 30% -- but they ignore the reality that if you add up the non-Bernie vote it pretty much comes to about a third.

Some of this racial dynamic plays out in the UFT, where Unity Caucus attracts a significant portion of older Black UFTers. Younger Black teachers, if they are active, are also being recruited by Unity and if they are progressive, will go to MORE. Or do outside UFT activism if turned off by MORE/DSA left rhetoric. That will be an interesting dynamic.

I also follow corp media - Punchbowl covers Congress -- now watch how they report the Cori Bush story -- give her some credit but give Pelosi most of the credit -- as if she gave a shit until Bush embarrassed her.

[UPDATE NOTE 1- I complained about the coverage and received this from Jake Sherman - hi Norm -- We covered this extensively in our midday and PM editions. Only problem is those versions behind pay wall - so if a tree falls in a forest -- etc.

UPDATE NOTE 2: More from Puncbowl which did cover Cori Bush in its free morning update on Tuesday --Here is a follow-up with their full report - The Left wins one - Punchbowl - Rep. Cori Bush is winning]

]

Happy Wednesday. We wanted to bring you a little bit more on the backstory of how the White House completely reversed its position from “We can’t issue a new eviction moratorium” to “We’re going to issue a new eviction moratorium.”

There’s no doubt that Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Mondaire Jones’ (D-N.Y.) public pressure campaign -- which included Bush camping out on the Capitol steps for five days -- was key to creating the political environment for Biden’s decision. With so much anger from the left, inaction wasn’t an option.

Yet behind the scenes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi played a pivotal role. She helped convince the Biden administration to issue a revised moratorium that lasts until Oct. 3, despite possible legal challenges from landlords. The previous moratorium expired on July 31, leaving millions of  families facing possible eviction and causing an uproar among progressives.

Over several days, Pelosi engaged in a frantic round of phone calls and lobbying, pressing President Joe Biden and senior White House officials to respond. Pelosi spoke directly with Biden three times over the weekend and into Tuesday, making a case that the White House found compelling. Pelosi was adamant the president needed to move unilaterally and insisted the Delta variant presented a new public health emergency.

Pelosi argued the White House didn’t need to issue a national moratorium but should rather focus on halting evictions in areas where the CDC was recommending masking. That way, the two public health emergencies overlapped for the agency, according to people familiar with the arguments Pelosi made to Biden, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and Steve Ricchetti, a counselor to Biden.

During one conversation with Pelosi, Biden said his legal advisers were warning him that he couldn’t extend the moratorium due to a June 29 Supreme Court ruling. The high court had let the moratorium stand in a 5-4 decision, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the CDC had “exceeded its existing statutory authority” and Congress must act to extend the ban. Biden asked Pelosi if she had any legal experts with a different take. Pelosi provided Biden with several names, including Laurence Tribe, the well-known Harvard Law professor. Tribe also has a long friendship with Klain, himself a Harvard Law grad. Tribe encouraged White House officials to move ahead with the revised moratorium. 

When Biden decided to make his announcement on Tuesday on the new moratorium, the first person he called was Pelosi, who’d just finished a caucus call with her members and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

“Today is a day of extraordinary relief,” Pelosi said in a statement released by her office. “Thanks to the leadership of President Biden, the imminent fear of eviction and being put out on the street has been lifted for countless families across America. Help is Here!”

Cori gets one line. A joke.

And here's another celebratory anti-left article from the 

NYT: On Politics: Kyrsten Sinema vs. the Left

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Dem Party Goes After Nina Turner and Bernie Wing of Party

“I don’t begrudge anybody wanting to get involved in the race,” Ms. Turner said, “but the entire Congressional Black Caucus PAC? That’s sending another message: Progressives need not apply.

I just gave Nina Turner another $100 for the Ausgust 3 primary in Cleveland. I'm fascinated by these internal struggles between the left and center right inside the Dem Party, a much more fun group than Republicans where there is no longer a fight. In the next two weeks there will be a battle royal. Guess which side our own UFT would take?

liberal activists around the country have rushed to Ms. Turner’s defense, with money, volunteers and reinforcements. Her campaign has raised $4.5 million for a primary, $1.3 million in the last month. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York will be knocking on doors for her the same weekend Mr. Clyburn will be in town. Mr. Sanders will join the fray in person the last weekend before Election Day.

"We have worked very hard to center the poor, the working, poor, and the barely middle class in this election with a laser focus on the issues that will benefit working families. My opponent, however, is not running on the issues but on lies." — Nina Turner

CHIP IN $27 NOW TO HELP SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT >>>

DONATE

Let's bring this thing home!

- Nina 💜

KNOCK DOORS

MAKE CALLS TO VOTERS

 

Hilary, Obama, Clyburn, Jeffries, the Black Caucus --- their actions show serious fear of the progressive wing. Nina Turner is a threat to the Dem establishment. 

Nina Turner’s move from Bernie Sanders’s campaign co-chairwoman to House candidate has highlighted a Democratic divide between impatient young activists and cautious older voters.

The Democratic establishment is throwing copious amounts of time and money into an effort to stop Nina Turner, a former Cleveland councilwoman and Ohio state senator.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/us/politics/nina-turner-shontel-brown.html 

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Clyburn/Big Pharma and Corporate Dems join Our union in Proxy War On Medicare For All - The Daily Poster

Let's refer to our UFT/AFT leadership as corporate Dems and question whether Big Pharma money has infiltrated the unions as an explanation for their opposition to

public healthcare management and support for the privatize for profit industry.

In mid-June, Democratic congressional candidate Nina Turner launched a television ad campaign promoting her support for Medicare for All. Less than two weeks later, the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists and its bankrolled lawmakers on Capitol Hill are trying to block her election to Congress through an opponent who has been publicly vilifying Medicare for All amid the pandemic....  
The Daily Poster- Dems Launch Proxy War On Medicare For All.... Click here to become a paid subscriber

Wednesday, June 30, 8:30 AM - by Norm Scott

Good morning Medicare for all supporters and friends --- 

I'm taking the 10:15 Rockaway ferry to join and film the big (I hope) rally, march (or slow walk) up Broadway to City Hall.

Let's keep in mind that the UFT/AFT/NYSUT leaderships are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate Democrats. Even most of the squad don't use that term enough but Jamaal Bowman used it on CNN recently. And AOC has flirted with it re: Joe Manchin. It's time to use corp dems for Randi, Mulgrew and the rest of the Unity slug machine. What a contrast between Jamaal and Clyburn.

Many on the left have been triggered by the attempts to gang up on Bernie pal Nina Turner who is running in the August primary for Congress in Cleveland and scares the hell out of corp dems --- I maintain they prefer Marjorie Taylor-Greene. The day Hillary endorsed Nina's opponent, she raised the most money. Let's see what happens now as big Pharm pours it in. I think corp Dems and industry pals have decided to swat the left wing knats.

See Nina go at them: https://youtu.be/FVJQSOZDTCc

As a follow-up to yesterday's post --Are Municipal Unions Selling Out Retirees? Hell YES - Sirota has a follow-up upon the news that James Clyburn, who gets away with a lot because of his race, has joined other corp dems like Hillary Clinton to go after Bernie fave Nina Turner in her race to join The Squad. 

I contributed to Nina's campaign - join me: Can you make a $5 contribution to our campaign before our end of month deadline comes to a close? As long as we stick together, we’ll hit our goal and be ready for anything that comes our way before Election Day.

Sirota/Rock article 

Clyburn has vacuumed in more than $1 million from donors in the pharmaceutical industry — and he previously made headlines vilifying Medicare for All during the 2020 presidential primary.

,

Dems Launch Proxy War On Medicare For All

Dems bankrolled by Big Pharma are suddenly targeting Nina Turner right after she aired an ad touting Medicare for All.

https://www.dailyposter.com/dems-launch-proxy-war-on-medicare-for-all/