Ohio voters will pick nominees for vacant House seats today, settling a fight over Democratic Party loyalty in Cleveland and testing the power of Donald Trump’s endorsement in Columbus’s conservative exurbs.
In the 11th Congressional District, which stretches from Cleveland to Akron, former state senator Nina Turner is locked in a bitter fight with Shontel Brown, a Cuyahoga County councilor and chair of the local Democratic Party. Turner, who co-chaired Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) last presidential campaign, entered the race as the best-known candidate, and an ally of the left-wing “squad” of House Democrats.
“Please send me Nina,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told voters during a late July swing through the district. “We need Nina.”
Brown started to catch up last month, after House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) endorsed her, and after Democratic Majority for Israel’s PAC ran ads warning that Turner could undermine the Democratic agenda. Brown’s campaign emphasized that she’d worked to elect President Biden; the PAC’s ads reminded voters that Turner had cast a protest vote against the 2020 Democratic platform, and had compared the choice between Trump and Biden to eating a full bowl or half bowl of human excrement.
“We knew it was coming, because of my experience with Sen. Sanders,” Turner said in an interview. “We tried to plan accordingly, and we really came in honestly on the issues themselves. Medicare-for-all, increasing the minimum wage, canceling student debt, environmental justice, racial justice, all the things I’ve been working for.” On the trail, she said she’d push Biden’s agenda to the left, working as “a partner, not a puppet.”
Turner’s campaign did not set out to re-fight the Democrats’ last presidential primary. She raised $3.9 million thanks both to her popularity with Sanders supporters and her connections in Ohio, and she got the endorsements of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson as well as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, both praising her work as a state legislator. In the campaign’s final days, a city councilor who’d endorsed Brown switched to Turner, citing the negative ads.
