Marcus Jackson
Morgan Harper launched her campaign last July as a virtual unknown but has gone on to secure significant endorsements in Ohio’s Third District race.
Morgan Harper, a progressive challenger running for Congress against an incumbent Democrat in Ohio’s Third District, has earned the endorsement of the Working Families Party, the group announced today. Harper is challenging Representative Joyce Beatty for a district that includes most of Columbus.
“It’s been inspiring for me to see just how much people are responding to the idea that we can take back control of our future,” Harper said in an interview Saturday. “It doesn’t have to be what it’s been for the past 40 years.”
Harper started her run for Congress on her own. She had no known endorsements when she declared her candidacy on July 1, 2019. “It was tough for a lot of people to believe at the beginning that we would have launched this without any backing,” she told the Prospect. But that soon changed: Justice Democrats endorsed her candidacy in August, and the Sunrise Movement announced its endorsement in December. It’s part of an emerging trend of left-leaning groups rejecting longtime incumbents in favor of progressive challengers.
“She’s representing the same wave of leadership we saw take the House in 2018 and do it unapologetically,” said Nelini Stamp, national strategy director for the Working Families Party. “She’s representing the next generation of people that are the wave of leadership that brought you the Squad, the next generation of youth leaders that are being unapologetic about the issues.”
The endorsement comes just weeks before the March 17 primary in Ohio, where early voting has already begun. Harper, 36, said she thinks having a presidential primary the same day helps generate excitement to turn out new voters. She added that Ohio’s Third District is one of the most millennial districts in the country, and she’s focused on increasing turnout among that cohort. “We have 60 volunteers, and we are increasing the number of doors by a thousand every weekend,” Harper said. “People are so excited about the Working Families endorsement. It will enable us to take all of that to the next level.”
Part of Harper’s strategy involves countering the voter “purges” Republican administrations in Ohio conducted, which removed more than 200,000 people from the voter rolls if the state believed they were deceased, living elsewhere, or a duplicate. But the purge mistakenly removed thousands of active voters, and organizers and activists have had to counter this in the last two cycles to ensure people are registered.
“[Harper] very much understands where people are and how fed up people are with the status quo in Columbus,” said Marques Jones, a member of the Working Families Party’s local branch, Yes We Can Columbus. Jones emphasized that he doesn’t see the race as “us versus them” as much as he sees it as Harper fighting for Columbus community members and being unafraid to talk about the issues plaguing communities. “The infant mortality rate for black women is three times higher than it is for white babies. People are literally being kicked out of their homes and are now living in homeless shelters. These are the issues that [the Franklin County Democratic Party] very much runs away from,” Jones said.
Ninety percent of Harper’s 6,000 individual donors had ZIP codes in her district. Harper said her campaign has raised money from more individuals in the Third District than Beatty has raised over her entire career in Congress. Harper has sworn off donations from corporate PACs, lobbyists, and the fossil fuel industry. She also refuses to accept donations from firearm manufacturers and payday lenders, the latter part of a theme of combating financial wrongdoing that she has made a central plank of her campaign.
“It’s a validation of the message because a lot of folks would like to make people believe that somehow the policies we’re representing … are coastal elite ideas,” Harper said. “No, these are the ideas of Columbus, Ohio, and people who want these policies.”
HARPER’S POLITICAL VISION centers on making institutions work for working people. Her experience at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) working to protect consumers from predatory lenders showed her how the federal government can address these issues at scale, she said.
“Seeing the ability of a federal agency to really impact folks’ bottom lines in a very tangible way, returning $12 billion to 29 million consumers,” Harper said. “That’s what’s possible when you give an agency in the federal government the authority to accomplish something and the resources to do it.” Her time at CFPB also exposed her to thousands of working families across the country who became victims of predatory lending, but especially to the situations that put them in that position in the first place. “People don’t have enough money,” she said. “The economy is not working for everyone and creates the condition to be vulnerable to then get trapped in these kinds of financial products.” Ending systemic economic segregation was a focus of Harper’s tenure at the CFPB and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.
Working in Washington, she also noticed that representatives often receive money from the exact industries that exploit working people.
Harper’s opponent, Congressional Black Caucus member Joyce Beatty, is in her fourth term in Congress. Beatty sits on the House Financial Services Committee and the Joint Economic Committee. Beatty’s fundraising, as Rachel Cohen and Ryan Grim have explained for The Intercept, relies on corporate PAC money from industries such as real estate, commercial banks, and insurance companies—the last a major industry in Columbus. It’s part of a strategy that fills in a wealth gap that persists in majority- or plurality-black districts, which makes it more difficult to raise the funds necessary to keep a congressional seat—even a safe seat.
That this is a safe seat was a motivator for Harper. “We need leadership,” she said, not a representative who “takes 80 percent of her donations from corporations” and “enabled a payday lending industry in the state.” She added that Beatty’s fundraising makes her inclined to do industry’s bidding and not to fight for working families.
“We have a lot of representatives [in Congress] who are also cynical like my opponent,” Harper said. “We have representatives that embody that cynicism.”
“She’s representing the same wave of leadership we saw take the House in 2018 and do it unapologetically.”
Born at The Ohio State University hospital, Harper spent her first nine months of life in foster care before being adopted and raised in Columbus by a Columbus Public Schools teacher with union-negotiated benefits. The union was crucial to her mother’s ability to financially provide for two children. “I got exposed early on to the economic segregation that exists here,” Harper said. “I’m not sure we would have made it in this current climate.” Harper soon got financial aid to attend a private college prep school. With more financial aid, she attended Tufts University, then earned a master’s at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a law degree from Stanford.
Access to these institutions, she said, showed her how opportunities like this are more often cordoned off for a select few. “I think we should have more of people having a fair start so they get to live out their potential wherever it takes them,” Harper added.
Harper recently told Elle magazine that she was committed to only serving four terms if she wins. “It’s a commitment I’m making to show people that I’m serious that I’m not trying to go to Congress to build a career. I already have a career. I’m a lawyer, I’m a policy person. I’m getting into Congress to advance an agenda. And the agenda is the policy platform,” she told the Prospect.
Despite the emerging narrative of a thriving state capital, this is a tale of two cities, according to Will Petrik, an organizer for Yes We Can Columbus. “There’s one Columbus that has access to opportunities and there’s another Columbus that has a really high infant mortality rate,” he said.
Longtime residents are left out of the boom. Formerly middle-class neighborhoods in Franklin County have deteriorated; neighborhoods experiencing rejuvenation are actually experiencing gentrification. The state minimum wage is less than $9 an hour, as Harper highlighted in the interview, but it costs $18 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Columbus. “If you’re working hard … you deserve to get a fair shot and that has slipped away for a lot of people,” Harper said. “Even folks who are in a somewhat comfortable position now know that they might be just one medical emergency away from losing that.”
A progressive movement in Columbus has been coalescing as Harper advanced her bid for Congress. “One voice may not lead to all the mass reforms we want to see,” Petrik said, “but one voice will make a difference in the direction of the country and the conversation.”
