The Far Left Grasps at Bigoted, False, Dumb Straws to Cope with Nina Turner's Loss



The brogressive left can't take it.

Their most high profile candidate since Bernie Sanders lost a race they had every expectation and early advantage to win, and they are grasping at every possible straw to avoid the inevitable conclusion: the left's ideological dogmatism and confrontational approach against Democrats isn't sitting well with Democratic voters in high-turnout elections.

The Turner campaign had expected to win the race - which had tightened after Turner being up by a whopping 35 points margin in June - because even under their own insider estimates, they had expected a voter turnout of around 40,000. Instead, over 75,000 people turned out in the Democratic primary, and now-nominee Shontel Brown beat Turner by a 6-point margin.

Since the wild upset, the alt-left has been searching for explanations. That is not to say that they have been searching for the truth. Rather, they have been searching for a narrative that they can settle on that will not offend the core tenets of revolutionary socialism, including, and most centrally, class reductionism.

And so for the moment, they appear to have settled on the following narrative: Nina Turner was the candidate of the Black and white working classes who was defeated by the evil wealthy Jews.

This narrative is the starkest in an article published in the socialist magazine Jacobin titled "Nina Turner Showed That a Left Candidate Can Win Black Workers," which cherrypicks - on occasion falsely - data about the voting patterns of certain parts of the district to make this case. The author, Matt Karp, himself a white history professor at Princeton, argues that there is strong evidence that Turner won the Black working class through the merits of her leftist politics despite her history of confrontation with Democratic leaders.

There is not.

Before we get to Karp's bizarre cherry-picking - thank your lucky stars that he is a professor of history and not of statistics - it is important to understand why Turner stan is contorting itself into pretzels to try to explain her defeat.

Occam's razor is pretty damning on this: a candidate, who started with more than three times the support of their closest competitor, amassed an early campaign war chest, and racked up early star power endorsements from the extreme left went down to an embarrassing defeat because the more voters learned about who she is, the less they liked her. When the race got underway, she was as close to an incumbent as can be - she was the default choice with the rest of the field still largely unknown. None of the usual analysis about which demos Nina Turner won or lost really applies without the glaring conclusion that she had to have lost support from nearly all demos since the start of the campaign to have blown a 35-point lead in two months.

Having said that, let's dive into not-Statistics professor Matt Karp's argument about why Nina Turner's loss is good for the alt-left, actually.

Cope #1: Nina Turner won Cleveland, so it must mean she won working-class Blacks.

Karp points out that Turner won 5 of Cleveland's 9 wards, and the city as a whole. This, he says, proves her strength among the Black working class.

But, as it turns out, Nina Turner actually won Cleveland by relying on the whiter, western parts of Cleveland, while Shontel Brown cleaned up among wards in east Cleveland, which are more heavily Black.


The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper that had endorsed Turner, had a similar take in their coverage of the results:

City-level data from Tuesday’s election showed Brown performed best against her chief rival, former state Sen. Nina Turner, in Black and Jewish enclaves as turnout in the city of Cleveland remained dampened.

Tarp's confusion - or pretense, depending on how charitable you're feeling - about how the Black population in Ohio's 11th district voted continues in his delusion about the other large city in the district, Akron.

Cope #2: Nina Turner won Akron, so she won the Black vote.

The following line, claiming that Turner won the "black-majority city of Akron", may be the most hilarious - and factually false - line that Karp writes in his piece (emphasis mine).

[Nina Turner] won the city of Cleveland overall, as well as the black-majority city of Akron.

There are two gigantic problems with this statement. First, Akron is a white majority city, at least if you believe the census. 60% of Akron's population is white, and only 30% is Black.

But that's not all. Turner's true base in Akron, the real reason she won the city, is the University of Akron. The racial divide on campus is even more pronounced than in the city as a whole: 75% of students at the University of Akron are white. Less than 9% of the student body is Black, according to statistics provided by the university.

So yes, Nina Turner won Akron, a white-majority city, on the strength of the University of Akron, a white-supermajority campus.

Well, that was easy to take down.

Cope #3: The darn wealthy Jews took advantage of Ohio's open primary system put Brown over the top.

It is true that because of her support for Israel and Nina Turner's open hostility to the world's only Jewish democracy to defend itself, Shontel Brown not only cleaned up among the district's Jewish voters, she also succeeded in driving some of the highest turnouts in the district in its Jewish enclaves. As one local's analysis showed, Brown earned her margin over Turner in the Jewish-heavy areas alone.

It is also true that Ohio has an open primary system, where voters can ask for any party's ballot. Recognizing the threat Nina Turner - and a growing far-left Squad in Congress - posed to the bipartisan support for security for the US's most steadfast ally in the middle east, it may well have been that some Republicans voted strategically in a district that has no hope of electing a Republican on the November ballot. It is also possible that Turner's hostility to Israel simply drove turnout among Jewish Democrats - which is how the vast majority of American Jews vote.

Allow me to a few words about this ugly strain of antisemitism raising its hooded head among the politics of the far left.

First and foremost, let's be clear about something: Votes of American Jews do not come with cooties. They have the right to participate in American democracy just like any other American. And they have the right to vote en bloc to promote whatever interest they believe in. It is ugly antisemitism to scapegoat them, and worse yet to do so by insinuating dual loyalties.

Second, no one simped harder for open primaries - elections in which voters who are not registered as Democrats can vote in a Democratic primary - than Bernie Sanders and the far left because they had believed that the independent vote would be Bernie's ticket to the Democratic presidential nomination. They cannot now complain about an open primary possibly having hurt their candidate in good faith.

Third, and finally, just as part of Brown's numbers was the Jewish vote, which in the district is largely white and broke in a big way for Brown, Turner was badly dependent on the ultra-white University of Akron. Turner supporters, at best, are throwing stones from inside a glasshouse.

The bigoted, divisive reason for this narrative: the destruction of the Democratic party.

I reckon, though, that Karp - and the far left media establishment in general - have a specific purpose in spreading this false, bigoted narrative that somehow, wealthy Jews took the election away from working-class Blacks. And that is to break up the formidable Black-Jewish alliance that delivered them the most humiliating defeat they have faced since Super Tuesday last year. If that alliance stays intact, the mission of the alt-left, some of whom are already openly talking about creating an "economic alliance" with pro-Trump neo-Nazis, to shatter the Democratic party becomes that much harder.

We will not let that happen.


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