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FOCUS: Abigail Tracey | "The Black Caucus Unified With the Progressive Caucus? Watch Out, Baby": Nina Turner, Progressive Disciple, Could Make Waves in Biden's Congress
Abigail Tracey, Vanity Fair
Tracey writes: "The longtime activist and organizer is a progressive favorite to win Marcia Fudge's vacated House seat - and, allies predict, would take Congress by storm."
“She knows how to build multiracial coalitions around progressive values,” says Rep. Ro Khanna. “She would bring a tremendous passion and charisma on the floor of the House.”
hen, within a week of suspending his presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden, the calculation was clear: progressives would get on board to take out Donald Trump, but they’d want something in return. Now, with Trump scheduled to vacate the White House in just over a month, the bill is coming due. As the so-called Squad swells with the additions of Congress members-elect Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones, progressive lawmakers in the House are preparing to meet the Biden administration head-on. And in a somewhat ironic twist of fate, Biden—by tapping Congresswoman Marcia Fudge to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development—may have paved the way for one of his most formidable potential antagonists.
After weeks of rumors, prominent progressive and top Sanders ally Nina Turner announced her campaign for Ohio’s 11th Congressional district, Fudge’s old seat, pending Fudge’s confirmation. And Turner—who once likened voting for Biden over Trump to eating half “a bowl of shit” instead of the “whole thing”—has no patience for half measures as the COVID-19 crisis ravages the country, making societal inequities impossible to ignore. “The pandemic leaves no doubt that the system is rigged in this country…a system that does not benefit the poor, the working poor, and the barely-middle class,” she told me in an interview on Wednesday. “If people were hesitant before, there should be no hesitancy now. The pandemic has set everybody free who has the benefit of holding the people’s power to go bold or go home.”
Fudge’s district is a deep-blue enclave in northeast Ohio that covers a large swath of Cleveland, so the Democratic candidate who wins the primary is widely expected to head to Capitol Hill. A number of others have jumped in or signaled an interest in Fudge’s seat, but Turner’s backers are banking on the national profile she built during her time as a Sanders surrogate, and the cash expected to accompany it. Activists are fired up at the prospect of Turner, who’s running on a slew of progressive policies: Medicare for All, free college, a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage, and consistent direct COVID relief payments throughout the remainder of the crisis, among others. “The enthusiasm for Nina Turner from progressives around the country is nothing short of phenomenal,” Norman Solomon, a Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and 2020 and the national director of the progressive RootsAction, told me. “What she can bring to the House is tangibly vital at the same time that she also offers an ineffable spirit that can definitely help shape future history for the better.”
Turner’s entry into the race fits neatly into progressives’ strategy to expand their ranks in Congress by running against moderates in primaries for safe blue seats across the country. And while Fudge was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Turner falls much further to the left. “She would be an incredible asset. She’s a terrific organizer…. she knows how to build multiracial coalitions around progressive values. And that’s something that we need to do better at,” said Congressman Ro Khanna, who served alongside Turner as one of four cochairs of Sanders’s 2020 campaign, though Khanna characterized her as “the first among equals.” “She would bring a tremendous passion and charisma on the floor of the House to Congress.”
Turner’s ideology predates her ascent in Bernieworld. “I guess progressive politics kind of found me even before the word progressive was cool,” she said. She recalled her parents passing out leaflets for Carl B. Stokes, the first Black mayor of Cleveland, and a get out the vote advocacy group she helped launch when she was a junior at Cleveland State University. She went on to work for former state senator Rhine McLin and former Cleveland mayor Mike White, then as director of government affairs for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. In 2005, she won a seat on the Cleveland City Council before she was appointed to the Ohio Senate, where she later won a full term and was elected minority whip. In 2014, she lost a bid for Ohio Secretary of State. “As I reflect on my life thus far, you kind of look backwards a little bit, and little did I know that maybe that advocacy was actually preparing me for many other political moments,” she said.
Sanders first popped up on Turner’s radar in December 2010, when the Vermont senator filibustered a bipartisan tax deal for eight and a half hours that was ironically, given the politics of the current moment, crafted by then Vice President Biden and then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “I saw the speech and I was just enthralled,” she explained. “I said to myself, ‘Who is this man just standing up for, not just the people in his state, but speaking for poor and working poor, middle-class, barely-middle-class people all over this country? And he was so precise about what the problem was.”
Roughly five years later, Sanders captured Turner’s attention during the Democratic presidential primary. She said her husband called to tell her about a Democratic candidate from Vermont who sounded a lot like her. She knew exactly who he was referring to and, in a shocking move, after having been involved in Hillary Clinton campaign activities, chose to endorse Sanders instead. It was Sanders’s free college and Medicare for All platforms, in particular, that won over Turner, a first-generation college graduate whose mother died at 42 without life insurance and on welfare. Turner, the eldest of seven children, was left with the burden of helping to care for her siblings in her early 20s. “Some people feel like I betrayed them,” she said of the decision to endorse Sanders.
That’s the thing about Turner: She has no qualms about pissing off Democrats. “They will say this about me, that I’m not a real Democrat, even though you can go back to all of my service and see very clearly that I am a Democrat,” she said. “People may define [a Democrat] as somebody that doesn’t critique, somebody who just walks the line. That’s not me. I think you must critique the party to help it to be better. So [if] people interpret my critique as somehow making me not of the Democratic Party, they are wrong. I am an independent thinker. I have my own thoughts. I have my own agency. And I push because I care.”
Even in the progressive bubble, Turner is known for having sharp elbows. Her previous leadership of Our Revolution, the political group Sanders launched after his 2016 loss, has been the source of mixed reviews. One progressive source said Turner has a reputation for being “quick to criticize people to the right of Bernie, which is a lot of people in the progressive movement.” But her loyalty to the movement has never been in question. “She’s propelled by a kind of compassion that’s at once personal and political. Countless times, I’ve heard in her voice—not just the words but the tenor—a connection with people who are anything but abstract to her even though she’s never met them,” Solomon said. “Anyone who thinks that Nina Turner is harsh or strident doesn’t get who she is, what makes her tick. She’s tough in the service of human gentleness and caring. Just what we need in a political arena dominated by uncaring and often cruel forces.”
Turner offered a similar assessment. “I’m a very passionate person, but a soft spirit at heart. So many people who know of me, especially nationally, they only see me in fight mode…. But the people who’ve gotten to know me over the years in a deeper way, they will tell you that I’m a softy at heart. I really am,” she said. “I’m sure probably some people think I can be too brazen at times. My heart is always in the right place. It is always, I believe, in the inherent value of all people, and [I] fiercely believe that those of us who are given the power of the people must wield that power in such a way that we leave no doubt on whose side we are on.”
Turner’s approach could be exactly what the House progressive caucus needs amid a push from some of its members to flex more frequently in legislative battles, not unlike the House Freedom Caucus on the other side. “When it comes to hard-charging progressives on the Hill [who] are willing to challenge leadership on a lot of core principles that matter to a lot of progressives and a lot of ordinary people, I think that she could be a valuable addition to the House progressive bench,” a senior progressive staffer told me. “She does bring a lot of clarity and vision and authority to a lot of these kinds of moral issues, and so I think having that at the dais, in committees and on the floor, I think will be powerful.”
When I spoke with Turner, she sounded primed for legislative brawls—even intraparty ones. “We have the progressive caucus, but we [also] have the Congressional Black Caucus…the history of Black folks in this country, we might not call ourselves progressive, but it doesn’t get any more progressive or going against the status quo than fighting for your freedom, that is the nature of the Black existence in this country,” she said. “We suffer disproportionately under [this] system…. The Black caucus unified with the progressive caucus? Watch out, baby. We can get a whole lot of stuff done. And to the point of Congressman John Lewis, make a whole lot of good trouble. It is time.”
And as for President-Elect Biden, Turner isn’t pulling any punches. “That’s unacceptable,” Turner said in reference to Biden suggesting he would veto Medicare for All if it came to the Resolute Desk. “The nature and the level of suffering demands that we do something different and we do better. And the Democratic Party, my party, has the opportunity. So we need to seize it.”
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