Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP
A cardboard cutout likeness of Nina Turner atop a campaign vehicle
As recently as June, the special election to replace Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District looked like a non-event. According to the only available polling, Nina Turner, a well-known progressive running a fairly standard Democratic campaign, led the next closest challenger, moderate city councilmember Shontel Brown, by a 50 to 15 margin. In an exceedingly low turnout primary for a deep-blue seat that went for Biden in 2020 by 60 points, the broader outcome was hardly up for grabs.
But help was on the way. A couple months prior, Brown posted "redbox" messaging on her website, a section full of negative talking points about Turner enclosed in bright red, just in case any “independent” super PAC felt so inclined to spend lavishly on attack ads but was unsure of how best to craft the messaging. (“Redboxing” is a term used by campaign operatives, describing the method by which candidates and political parties publicly share messaging strategy with political action committees, despite being barred from coordinating directly.) To send home the appeal, Brown featured quotes from Mark Mellman, president of the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), a famed anti-progressive super PAC, atop her endorsements section, ahead of endorsers with actual name recognition like Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept reported at the time, they made for the “least subtle messages sent to a super PAC since the outside money groups were legalized” a decade ago.
This eventually resulted in a seven-point triumph for Brown over Turner in a low-turnout primary on Tuesday. What hasn’t yet been reported is how DMFI’s ads, which flooded television, Facebook, Google, YouTube, radio, and mailers throughout June and July, followed the themes and messaging that Brown’s site offered up nearly to the letter.
In a TV ad spot titled “No Thanks,” DMFI PAC’s voiceover declared that “the country is more polarized than ever, and Nina Turner is no help ... Instead, Turner said voting for Biden was like eating s**t.” In Facebook ads, DMFI lampooned Turner for not supporting Biden and the proposed Obamacare expansion. On Google and YouTube, they claimed that Turner opposed the entire Democratic platform and the Biden-Harris agenda. And in mailers, they said Turner was opposed to universal health care and raising the minimum wage. (Turner’s criticisms of Biden were likely to be a liability for her in a district that supported him by so much; the idea that she opposed a minimum wage increase was a whole cloth fabrication.)
By sinking millions into reinforcing Brown’s tactics, the Democratic Party has reached a low moment in its commitment to campaign finance standards.
Notably absent from all of those ads is any mention of Israel, a consequential omission for a group called Democratic Majority for Israel. Instead, those messaging points were all lifted, nearly verbatim, from the redbox on Brown’s website. (DMFI briefly attacked Turner for refusing to condemn the BDS movement and endorsing conditions-based aid to Israel when they endorsed Brown back in February, but it was not a major factor in the race.) The distance between DMFI’s stated mission and the messaging in its Ohio-11 ad buys is a strong indication that the super PAC would not have used those messages if not for the clear, color-coded suggestion from the Brown campaign. In other words, there’s no credible case to be made that DMFI PAC was simply expressing their own views about Turner, which just so happened to coincide with those of the Brown campaign.
The Brown campaign’s super PAC appeal even came with specificity of medium: Her campaign website declares that “voters across Northeast Ohio need to see, read, and hear” these negative talking points; soon enough, DMFI was delivering them on TV, in mailers, and over the airwaves. As a recent review in The Yale Law Journal indicates, this sort of overture is both explicit and familiar as redbox messaging.
A few days before election day, DMFI had reported over $2 million in spending on the race, the bulk of it not supporting Brown but opposing Turner. In the race’s final days, Third Way, a centrist Republican and conservative Democratic group, kicked in over $500,000 to aid the same cause, bringing the total anti-Turner spending close to $3 million. All that for a race in which Shontel Brown triumphed with 37,000 votes, itself a stunning dollar-to-vote ratio.
In its historically brazen public appeal to super PAC support, the Brown campaign managed to outsource its negative messaging, and avoid the risk of alienating voters with excessive attacks. Remember, it is illegal to coordinate with a super PAC. Many of these ads could yet be deemed Federal Election Commission violations. Of course, a few infractions matter little compared to the outcome, and now Brown will head to Congress.
Brown’s use of redbox messaging and public courtship of super PAC support was pioneered in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary by now Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. An FEC complaint filed by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center details how the Buttigieg campaign courted a super PAC called VoteVets. “On February 5, 2020, a senior official at Pete for America tweeted, ‘Pete’s military experience and closing message from Iowa work everywhere especially in Nevada where it’s critical they see this on the air through the caucus,’” reads the complaint. “One week later, VoteVets—the only super PAC supporting Buttigieg’s campaign at the time, and therefore the only group that could reasonably be expected to follow through on the ‘critical’ request—aired over $639,000 in broadcast ads in Nevada, slated to run through the caucus, touting ‘Pete’s military experience’ and highlighting the theme of unity that Buttigieg had used as his 2 ‘closing messages’ in the final stretch of the Iowa caucus.”
The 2020 presidential primary was also where DMFI first announced itself as a major meddler in a progressive versus centrist Democratic primary. In the early months of that race, they put up $1.4 million in independent expenditures in Iowa and elsewhere to oppose then-frontrunner Bernie Sanders. Then, they spent nearly $200,000 opposing Alex Morse in Massachusetts in his primary race against Ways and Means chairman Richie Neal, in which Neal triumphed handily. In their biggest, failed foray, they dropped more than $1.5 million attacking Jamaal Bowman and supporting then-incumbent Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th District.
Contributing over $2 million in a race without an incumbent and without even mentioning Israel marks a drastic departure in the group’s political profile, and in Democratic politics broadly.
The success of Brown’s campaign is now a blueprint for super PAC takeovers of elections and campaigns going forward, something the country’s big political spenders are keenly aware of. So it’s worth asking why the Democratic establishment, including third-ranking House Democrat Jim Clyburn, the Congressional Black Caucus, and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, went to such extreme lengths to campaign for and support a candidate in Shontel Brown, who engaged in such an egregious violation of the spirit of what little campaign finance law exists in this country (and potentially in the letter of the law itself). Given that DMFI has been funded by donors who routinely give to Republican causes and candidates, Brown just created a roadmap for Republican takeover of Democratic elections, and Democratic leadership sanctified it.
That, too, marks a drastic departure from a series of pledges that had been in vogue among Democrats in recent years. In the Trump years, Democrats were eager to swear off corporate PAC money, as a winning distinction between themselves and the obvious corporate corruption of the Republican Party. It worked. Despite handwringing from Democratic apparatchiks like Bakari Sellers, who whinged about “unilateral disarmament,” numerous Democrats ran and won in 2018 while forswearing corporate PAC money as part of a Blue Wave takeover in the House. While corporate PAC money is relatively meager in the grand scheme and an easy pledge to make, in the 2020 presidential primary, nearly all the major candidates agreed initially to adhere to a more robust version of this standard, committing to go without super PAC support. (Sellers, perhaps leery of what his own thinking wrought, was a last-minute endorser of Nina Turner).
But the first candidate to go back on that pledge was none other than Joe Biden, who went on to become president. Kamala Harris, his eventual VP, had super PAC–produced ads cut and ready to run when she dropped out. Buttigieg, of course, got his super PAC support after that highly dubious courtship of VoteVets. The highest profile deserters of that basic money-in-politics standard were rewarded with plum White House jobs. Soon enough, Democrats began shedding that commitment far and wide. In fact, Nina Turner also benefited from a super PAC created by the Working Families Party, albeit at a much lower investment of $150,000. After all, she couldn’t engage in unilateral disarmament.
By reinforcing Brown’s tactics, the Democratic Party has reached a low moment in its commitment to campaign finance standards. Predictably, campaign finance reform has also functionally disappeared from the docket of legislative priorities. And while the party has abandoned its credibility in talking about campaign finance reform, a move that has proved fruitful in helping moderates best progressives in intraparty races, there’s no indication that that will do anything to help Democrats beat Republicans in the fast approaching gerrymandered midterms, which are looking more daunting by the day.
