Melissa Harris-Perry: You're back with The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. On Tuesday, Democrats voted in the primary for a special election to fill the Congressional seat in Ohio's 11th district. Marcia Fudge vacated that seat to join President Biden's cabinet as housing secretary. Shontel Brown, the chairwoman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party won the primary, beating out Nina Turner, a former State Senator and co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.

Now Ohio 11 is a safe Democratic District, and Brown is strongly favored to win the general election in November. Now, this single house seat, though, it's a big deal because the battle between Brown and Turner was build as a surrogate showdown between the progressive and moderate forces in the National Democratic Party. Here to walk us through the special election primary in Ohio is Julie Carr Smyth, an AP reporter based in Ohio. Welcome, Julie.

Julie Carr Smyth: Happy to be here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Amy Walter is back with us to talk more politics. Amy is the editor in chief of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and former host of Politics with Amy Walter from The Takeaway. Welcome back, Amy.

Amy Walter: I am once again so very happy to be here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, Julie, I have to say I was surprised by the results. Turner looked like the frontrunner and had a lot more fundraising dollars. How was it that Brown won this?

Julie Carr Smyth: Well, what we saw was this huge surge in the last several weeks of the campaign, and you are absolutely right, Nina Turner had been campaigning hard here for months, and she's a firebrand, fiery speaker, inspires a lot of crowds who are favorable toward Bernie Sanders. All of a sudden, Shontel Brown became the local favorite, establishment Democrats like Jim Clyburn and Hillary Clinton and others hopped into the race and got behind her a bunch of unions and a bunch of super PACs.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Amy, all politics are local. That's the great story and yet this one was certainly hyper-local but also very much not local.

Amy Walter: [laughs] That's right. My line now is all politics is local except when it's not, and more and more, it's not. I think in many ways it was the proxy fight between the Biden and Bernie Sanders's wings of the party, but really what it is is not ideological. It is much more about the kind of person to sit in the seat in terms of their temperament, their personality. More important, whether this person is going to be a team player, which is what Shontel Brown was arguing, not only going to be a backer of Joe Biden, which Joe Biden won this district in the primary against Bernie Sanders.

Hillary Clinton won this district overwhelmingly back in 2016 against Bernie Sanders. Saying I'm going to be on the team which Nina Turner has come out against both of those leaders when she was with the Sanders's campaign. "I'm going to be on the team, I'm going to be [unintelligible 00:02:59] with leadership. You can't count on Nina Turner being part of the team. She is a sort of rogue agent. When Democrats have just a narrow majority in the house, when Joe Biden's agenda depends on 50 senators sticking together and every single one of the Democrats in the house sticking together, we can't afford to have a rogue individual on the Democratic side.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Julie, help me walk through this a little bit because in certain ways, Nina Turner's rogueness is precisely why she is who she is on a national stage. It was her willingness to go against the establishment repeatedly at the state level, that is part of what made her so popular and also in Ohio, supposed to be pretty like independent thinking.

Julie Carr Smyth: That's a really good point. Of course, ironically, the day Ohioans made this choice was the same day that progressives in Washington achieved a big goal of pressuring president Biden to roll back his reticence on this eviction moratorium. Yes, they were seeing some huge victories, and that kind of pressure was what they wanted to continue with her, but I do think that Amy is right that the idea that she might defect from a Democratic majority that's so slim was maybe frightening to some of these Democrats.

We at AP just had had a poll that showed really the Democratic Party loyalists are very happy with their party right now. They're happy with Biden. They're happy with what's happening in terms of the agenda, and they really wanted that to the extent that they poured into our state and started rallying for her, and Nina Turner who had had a double digit lead early on and for a long time, according to whatever polling was available, just wasn't able to overcome.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm also interested, Amy, in the kind of race-gender politics of this. These are two Black women running for a seat recently vacated by a Black woman and held prior to that by another Black woman, Stephanie Tubbs Jones who passed away suddenly and quite young in 2008. I'm wondering about this idea of being an African American woman but also you're meant to be a team player for the Democrats.

That's something we get called on all the time by the party as voters and apparently as legislators and yet the Congressional Black Caucus has also always been kind of the conscience of the party, pushing the party to be a bit more progressive than it otherwise would be. Is that changing?

Amy Walter: That's a really good point. Remember the CBC came out and endorsed Shontel Brown in this race. Jim Clyburn went out and campaigned for Brown, which, well, we think of him as somebody who gets involved in politics. Obviously, his endorsement of then candidate Joe Biden was critical in the 2020 primary.

He's not the kind of person who shows up in the individual house races. I think that why you saw the CBC engaged here was the sense of we do need a sticking togetherness, our ability to actually get things done, to shift the conversation, to make sure our priorities are put on the front burner is to be united, and to be united means that everybody understands that we've got to work together on this team.

I think what really frustrated so many folks about Turner, Jim Clyburn said this specifically, was the fact that it's not just that she wants to push the establishment or to speak her mind, it's that she publicly attacked Clyburn, publicly attacked Biden, was circumspect about her 2016 vote.

In other words, that not only was she not a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the primary but may not have voted for her against Donald Trump. I do think that there was a, "Look, we understand the important role that African American voters play in the election, that they play to the core of the Democratic base, how important they are, and at the same time, if we want to get anything done, we all have to be rowing in the same direction."

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Julie, let's talk about the general election that is coming up now. Again, Ohio 11 should be a safe Democratic District. As I was just talking about around Black women holding this seat, turns out the Republican nominee is also an African American woman. Is that going to make a difference?

Julie Carr Smyth: It's very interesting, isn't it? Laverne Gore is her name, and she easily won the Republican primary. There wasn't really much competition, but doesn't that in some ways begin to erase the ability of Shontel Brown to talk about Black and women's issues in November as a way to choose her over Laverne Gore. Gore is going to try to talk about the failure of Democratic leadership in the City of Cleveland where the functional illiteracy rate is 66%, and it's the second poorest district in the country congressionally.

Those are going to be things that resonate. We spoke to Shontel for an AP interview the other day, and she said, well, but Ohio has been run by Republicans at the state level and that's kind of a misguided idea that Cleveland is somehow suffering because of Republicans, but it is certainly going to be a conversation in the fall or heading into the fall. I just don't think there's any way that a Republican can win this district. It was something like 60% for Biden.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I hear you. There's a part of me that thinks, "Oh, this is kind of like that moment in Illinois when Jack Ryan was running against this young guy Barack Obama for the US Senate. Ryan had to go, and they brought in Alan Keyes, and it was a whopping.

Alan Keyes had no chance even though he was an African American man running against another African American man, but then there are also these moments when a scandal for whatever reason takes out the Democrat and then boom, you end up with a Republican. I think about Joseph Cao down in Louisiana. Amy, I'm just wondering, given that Nina Turner is who she is and she is a talker and she is someone who's not going to go quietly into that good night, is there a possibility either that Turner herself might try to make a bid as an independent candidate or that she might work as a spoiler in some ways relative to this general that's coming up?

Amy Walter: First of all, I love that you just dropped all of this knowledge on politics in the last two seconds. Names that most people, even who are deeply involved in politics don't remember. A+ on that. They're great examples. Look, you're right that Nina Turner even soon after her loss did not go quietly. She argued that it was this outside super PAC money, outside-of-Ohio forces who really turned this race to Shontel Brown's favor. This is somebody who is not only happy about the results but does believe that she was wronged in some way.

I don't know what the sore-loser rules are in Ohio. In some states, you actually cannot file to run as an independent if you've already run in a primary or in another race. I will say this, the bigger challenge, I think, for Democrats, especially in a state like Ohio, is that this is a redistricting year.

While there is an independent commission in charge of redistricting in Ohio, that map has to go in front of the Ohio legislature, which is Republican. They can overturn it. They can say, "We don't like this map. We're going to draw it ourselves." In which case, Ohio could become a state where there really are only a couple of Democratic seats, one being this Cleveland seat and the other being one closer to in and around Columbus. That, to me, is the bigger worry for Democrats right now in that state that there's really nothing left for the party except a couple of districts, this being one of them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Amy, you're right. There is a sore-loser law. I just looked it up. Thank you for reminding me of that thing and for clarifying that. It won't happen in that way, but I really appreciate your focus here on the redistricting. I'm wondering, Julie, if you have heard from state Democrats in sort of as the work that you're doing on there reporting about what they're facing relative to this question of redistricting. It's an issue facing us here in North Carolina. It's huge in Texas. What is Ohio saying about this?

Julie Carr Smyth: Absolutely. The first meeting of our redistricting commission is actually today. It is going to be interesting because we are losing a seat due to population not growing to the extent to keep what we have. We are absolutely right. I don't think that Nina Turner would want a Republican in that seat. Personally, she may be a spoiler or looking to something higher, but I think that the Democrats desperately need to keep the Cleveland seat because that's what they have.

We are hearing exactly that it would be only two Democratic seats, and they'll try to keep the other, I guess, 13 or 12 for the Republicans who already control the governor's office, every statewide office, the Supreme Court and both chambers of the legislature, but the Republicans are involved in a huge scandal right now themselves. We had a speaker of the house indicted in bribery or arrested for bribery and racketeering. That is not by any means over. Just yesterday, our Republican Attorney General roped and looped some more individuals into that. That is facing them down in an election year next year.

The redistricting process was put in place by voters, and they are highly supportive of fair maps. We really need them here. We're one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. If you look at some of the districts, they look like ducks and snakes and everything else. They will be paying attention according to the advocates who are the reporters heard from yesterday, including possibly going to court.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Julie Carr Smyth, an AP reporter based in Ohio, and Amy Walter, editor in chief of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter who has me googling things in the middle of our conversation. Thank you both for joining us.

Julie Carr Smyth: Thank you.

Amy Walter: It's been great. Thank you.

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