Nina Turner came to national prominence as an outspoken supporter of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 bid for the presidency. In June 2017, Turner became president of Our Revolution, the nonprofit organization that grew out of Sanders’s presidential campaign.
Nina Turner is a lifelong activist from a working-class family in Cleveland, Ohio. Before serving as an Ohio state senator, she held elected office at the city level in her home state beginning in 2005. Turner came to national prominence as an outspoken supporter of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 bid for the presidency. In June 2017, Turner became president of Our Revolution, the nonprofit organization that grew out of Sanders’s presidential campaign. We spoke by telephone in early September.
Q: Let’s start by talking a little bit about your background, growing up in Cleveland.
Nina Turner: I’m the oldest of seven children. My parents got divorced when I was really young so I grew up in a single-parent household, which I believe gives me my deep sensitivity to people who struggle socially and economically. We have to have people—particularly but not exclusively in the elected space—who understand that they are there to really push public policies and help create vehicles and opportunity.
One of the things that really attracted me to Senator Sanders is the whole notion that we should invest in colleges and universities so people have the opportunity to go to school tuition free. Had it not been for higher education, I don’t know where I would be today. I am a first-generation college graduate and that has made all the difference in my life and the life of my family.
I got a chance to work for a state senator in the late 1990s. And that really opened my eyes to state government. I never dreamt that I would go on to become a state senator. After that internship, I worked for Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White. And then I ran for city council for the very first time in 2001. I didn’t win that race, but four years later, I ran again and won.
After that, I became a state senator in 2008, and served in the Ohio senate for about six years. I could have run one more time but I elected instead to run for Ohio secretary of state in 2014. It was a hard experience but it helped me go to the next level in terms of increasing my profile and meeting so many people across the state.
We have eighty-eight counties in Ohio and I was able to visit the overwhelming majority of those counties. I came to see that people in rural communities want the same things as people in urban areas. They want to be able to live a good life, have a safe community, with a future for themselves and their children. And that is universal.
And so that experience in 2014 really helped me to understand what I call the “elected ministry”—what it means to try to listen and understand where people are coming from, and how it’s unfortunate that in this political environment we are being pulled apart. I consider myself more of a humanitarian than a Democrat these days. As Stephen Covey put it, “Seek first to understand and then to be understood.” We could certainly use more of that.
Q: You were asked to run as vice president of the Green Party, but you turned it down because you said your commitment was to work in the Democratic Party.
Turner: [I was] certainly honored to have been approached. But I’ve been a Democrat all of my life and am still to this moment, even with my disappointment with this party in terms of really stepping up and at least even answering its own progressive platform. We talk a lot about having passed the most progressive platform in the history of our party or at least its modern history, which is all a beautiful thing. But unless we have elected officials who are willing to act on that platform, it’s just pretty words on white paper.
I still believe that Democrats can get out of their own way, stop being centrist, and really answer the call of the people.
I still believe that Democrats can get out of their own way, stop being centrist, and really answer the call of the people. It can be the party of FDR and Shirley Chisholm, who defied the establishment of her time, in 1972, and dared to dream a dream that was bigger than anybody could conceive. Her whole notion of being unbought and unbossed is really what we need in the twenty-first century.
My critique of the Democratic Party is that it has to get back to those activist roots that separate us from the Republican Party. We have to be unapologetic about the people we serve and really push the policy agenda, even if it causes some anxiety in certain communities.
Q: You recently became head of Our Revolution, the organization that grew out of the Sanders campaign last year. Talk a little bit about your vision for that organization and where Our Revolution is going.
Turner: I often say that Bernie Sanders lit the match, he lit the spark, and it’s our job to keep it burning. And that’s what Our Revolution plans to do. We organize grassroots folks. We empower them. We give them tools and resources all across this country.
Right now, we have about 425 groups across the country and internationally. Seven of those groups are international groups, so Our Revolution is worldwide. We’re trying to keep people engaged and remind them that no matter what things look like, they do have the power to be the change that Mahatma Gandhi talked about. My goal is to continue to carry out the mission and the vision that Senator Sanders had when he created this organization. It really was and still is about grassroots organizing. We do that all across this country on all levels, not just the federal level. While we were so focused on the presidency over the last eight years, our Republican sisters and brothers focused in on state legislatures and governors’ mansions, which led to Democrats losing over 1,100 seats in less than ten years.
So we gotta take the focus back. Local elections matter, too. In many ways they matter more than the people who are elected on the federal level because government that is closest to the people reacts and responds the quickest. That is the kind of work that we’re doing all over this country.
Q: How are you going about this?
Turner: We are fueled primarily by the desires and the push of our local affiliates. We have empowered them to nominate people for office and tell us why they want us to support a particular candidate and what they plan to do to help that candidate win, and that is from school board all the way to the Congress.
That’s hard work to do that. But it is the work that is going to transform this nation. And we support progressive issues, like doing away with Citizens United, like increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, making voting more accessible. We are bringing the synergy of millions of our supporters across this country to bear to help issues like that have a fighting chance.
And then the other part of our work is to absolutely transform the Democratic Party, one state at a time. We have won seven [state party] chairships across this country thus far. And we have helped hundreds of people become precinct and state central committee people. We work on the ground to get people to run for those open precinct seats so they could have a voice within the Democratic Party structure. That is the kind of work we’re doing all over this country.
Q: What’s the relationship between the national Our Revolution organization and the various state organizations?
Turner: Anybody can form a group, they just need ten people. They complete a memorandum of understanding that basically talks about our principles and what we believe in as Our Revolution, and they have to have a point person and they can become an affiliate of our group. And that’s true grassroots organizing.
We talk to our groups on a regular basis. We have workshops, we have teleconferences with our groups. We visit these states and we get in there and help them. The most recent group that we helped to form is in Birmingham, Alabama. I was just there about two weeks ago helping our candidate who’s running for mayor, Randall Woodfin. But within that trip we were also able to form another affiliate.
People came to the meeting; we talked to them about what being an affiliate looks like. The kind of technical support that they would get. That’s pretty much how we help people form the groups. They can communicate with us on a regular basis. We have an entire organizing department. We have a help desk, where any group can ask for help if they need it. We always try to send someone if they make a request.
The progressive left is pushing the Democrats back to where they should be. Back to jobs, housing, a safety net if you’re older or you lose your job or have been incapacitated in some way, health care.
Q: You were quoted recently saying it’s not Our Revolution’s job to fit into the Democratic establishment. What is that job as you see it?
Turner: The progressive left is pushing the Democrats back to where they should be. Back to that 1944 economic bill of rights, when FDR said what the American people should expect, what they deserve. He didn’t say wish for, hope for, kinda. He said what they deserve, what they should expect. And in that list, it was jobs, it was housing, it was having a safety net if you’re older or you lose your job or have been incapacitated in some way. It was health care. What the American people should expect! And that is what we have to get back to. And so our job on the progressive left is to remind Democrats of where we fought to be, and push us there. And it’s uncomfortable, but that’s okay. Great things come out of discomfort. And that’s what we’re doing on the progressive left.
Q: Your predictions for 2018 and 2020?
Turner: It’s going to be hard. I hope that no one is taking President Trump for granted. Even though he has pretty much proven himself unworthy of that seat at this point. What he did show with 2016 is that he has nine lives. So resistance is not the only thing we need to do as conscious-minded folks, as Democrats. It has to be more than resistance; we have to make sure that we plan. Democrats can be successful if they are willing to shift their focus to what everyday Americans want, need, and are asking for. But that requires some humility and a willingness to listen to what people are saying.
Q: Is Bernie going to run again in 2020?
Turner: I hope so! I hope so!