When Shontel Brown defeated Nina Turner in Tuesday’s primary for a vacant House seat in a deep-blue Northeast Ohio district, it was seen as a victory for the establishment Democrats over the party’s left wing, a proxy battle in the years-long war that roughly mirrors the divide between Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters in 2016.
Turner, a former Ohio state senator who earned a national profile as an early and vocal backer of Sanders in the 2016 primaries, was endorsed by Sanders along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the left-wing Squad. She also got support from the Justice Democrats, a left-wing group that works to defeat centrist Democrats. Brown, in contrast, was endorsed by establishment figures including Clinton and House Whip Jim Clyburn and boosted by independent expenditures from Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a PAC that spent over $2 million opposing Turner, and the centrist Third Way PAC, which contributed over $500,000, according to the latest FEC filings reviewed by Blue Tent.
Progressives painted this support as evidence that Brown was a corporate Democrat. DMFI’s largest donor was an oil and gas heir, reported The Intercept, which also noted that Republican donors were contributing to Brown. Turner herself seemed to nod to this narrative in a fiery concession speech where she said, “We didn’t lose this race—the evil money manipulated and maligned this election.”
It’s important to be clear-eyed about why Turner failed, because it has implications for future progressive primary campaigns. If the problem was that “evil money” led to Turner losing, a logical conclusion for left-wing donors is that next time one of their candidates is going against the establishment, they should put more money behind that candidate. If the only thing stopping Sanders-style, socialist-adjacent Democrats winning is that the other side has more money, well, that seems like a fixable problem.
But if that diagnosis is wrong, something else needs to change, and it may not be something donors can do by themselves.
Turner had a big war chest
There was a major gap in outside spending between Brown and Turner, mostly as a result of DMFI putting huge amounts of money behind communications highlighting Turner’s history of railing against the Democratic Party. Some pointed to a quote in which she compared voting for Joe Biden to eating “a bowl of shit.” Others (more deceptively) claimed she was against universal healthcare and raising the minimum wage because she voted against the party platform at the 2020 convention, a protest against the leaving off of Medicare for All. Somewhat controversially, Brown’s website all but suggested directly that anti-Turner PACs use these messages, which pushes the envelope on how much candidates are allowed to communicate with supposedly independent PACs.
Turner supporters can point to these tactics as dirty pool. But besides those PACs, Turner actually had a pretty big money edge over Brown, outraising her $4.5 million to $2 million as of the most recent FEC reports. And campaign money is probably more valuable than PAC money, since campaigns (theoretically) are in a better position to know what their candidate needs than outsiders.
A majority of Turner’s money came from small (under $200) donations, while only around 10% of Brown’s contributions were small donations. Tellingly, Turner got over $460,000 from California donors, more than double what she got from Ohioans, which shows the national reach of her operation. Like other progressive congressional candidates such as Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush, she tapped into a distributed network of left-wing small donors. These are the same sorts of progressives who helped fund Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 presidential race, and have the muscle to make challenges to the centrist Democratic establishment possible.
Still, Turner’s big fundraising advantage over Brown wasn’t enough to secure her victory.
If money wasn’t the problem, what was it?
None of the Squad members who defeated centrist Democrats to win seats in Congress have Turner’s history of outspoken, sometimes performative disagreement with the party. Turner not only made the “bowl of shit” comments, she contemplated joining the Green Party in 2016 after Clinton’s nomination and stirred up a bizarre online discourse involving donuts when, as head of the group Our Revolution, she attempted to deliver a petition to the Democratic National Committee but was blocked by security. Incidents like these may explain why so many moderate Clintonite figures tried to defeat Turner, but they also made it pretty easy for DMFI to portray Turner as a fringe character who wasn’t a “real” Democrat. This was pretty inarguably a major negative for her in a Democratic primary.
And it wasn’t like Turner’s track record of friction with the party was a secret—it was a major part of why she’s well known in politics in the first place. But her campaign didn’t seem able to counter what should have been fairly obvious attacks on her. In an interview with David Klion of Jewish Currents, HuffPost reporter Daniel Marans, who covered the race, partly blamed a lack of campaign competence for Turner’s defeat: “There’s a hanger-on problem in the left political subculture—you have a lot of Bernieworld people who end up filling not just volunteer positions, but consulting gigs and major campaign roles. When left-wing candidates aren’t willing to confront uncomfortable truths about the things they’ve said and done in the past, because the people around them keep them insulated, then they’re going to keep losing.”
There’s sometimes an unspoken assumption that left-wing ideas are widely popular and that when progressives lose it’s because of malign establishment forces and their money. What Marans is pointing to is that sometimes left-wing candidates have serious weaknesses, and sometimes their campaigns are not well run. Winning a primary against an establishment candidate is always going to be an uphill climb; we’ve seen that it’s possible for an insurgent to raise a lot of money, but they need to make smart tactical decisions, as well.
The case for avoiding primaries as a donor
This intra-Democratic conflict stuff is interesting to journalists because it’s a way to discuss the future of the party; conflict always drives stories. A lot of Democrats are also very personally invested in these battles, as evidenced by how much was spent on both sides in this election.
But the stakes of this primary were always smaller than they appeared. Ohio’s 11th District remains a safe blue district. Meanwhile, Democrats are facing a tough midterm cycle in which they could lose both the House and the Senate. Whether you were pro- or anti-Turner, surely a larger priority is maintaining Democratic majorities. It’s much, much more important to donate money and energy to that cause than it is to expend resources on divisive primary fights. For donors who are laser-focused on 2022, this election was largely meaningless.
You know what actually feels like a bowl of shit? Republicans winning.