User:FlyingToaster/John Turner (Texas politician)

John Turner is a politician and attorney. He won the Democratic open primary election on March 6, 2018, and went on to win the Democratic primary in Texas 114th district on May 22, 2018.

Early life and education
Turner was born in Crockett, Texas. His mother was president of the local school board. His father, Jim Turner, was first a state legislator and later a congressman. As a child, Turner worked for his grandfather’s small home-building business, and later as a news and weather broadcaster at a local radio station.

Turned earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, and a law degree at Yale University. He married Jenia Turner, a law professor at Southern Methodist University, in 2004. The couple have two sons.

Currently, Turner is an attorney with Dallas-based law firm Haynes and Boone.

Political career
Texas' 114th was held by Represntative Jason Villalba, who was defeated in the Republican primary on March 6, 2018.

Ocasio-Cortez was among a slate of nationwide Justice Democrats/Brand New Congress candidacy announcements livestreamed on May 16, 2017. In August 2017, she attended the Netroots Nation Conference in Atlanta, appearing on a panel with fellow candidates on "how to run a grassroots campaign that puts people above party".

Ocasio-Cortez was the first person since 2004 to challenge the Democratic Caucus Chair, Joe Crowley, in the Democratic primary. She faced a significant financial disadvantage, but said, "You can't really beat big money with more money. You have to beat them with a totally different game." Nearly 75 percent of her donations were small individual contributions, while less than 1 percent of Crowley’s contributions were. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign spent US$194,000 to the Crowley campaign's US$3.4 million.

Ocasio-Cortez has not previously held elected office, and her campaign video began with her saying "Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office." She held several debates with Crowley, who was criticized for not showing up to one debate and sending a surrogate instead.

Ocasio-Cortez was endorsed by progressive and civil rights organizations such as MoveOn, Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, Black Lives Matter, and Democracy for America, and by gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, who, like Ocasio-Cortez, is also challenging a longtime incumbent, Andrew Cuomo, in the 2018 New York gubernatorial election.

Governor Cuomo endorsed Crowley, as did both of New York's U.S. Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, 11 U.S. Representatives, 31 local elected officials, 31 trade unions, and progressive groups such as the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the Working Families Party, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, among others. California representative Ro Khanna, like Ocasio-Cortez a Justice Democrat, initially endorsed Crowley, later also endorsing Ocasio-Cortez in an unusual dual endorsement.

Following her win, Ocasio-Cortez explained her campaign strategy:

"'I knew that if we were going to win, the way that progressives win on an unapologetic message is by expanding the electorate. That’s the only way that we can win strategically. It’s not by rushing to the center. It’s not by trying to win spending all of our energy winning over those who have other opinions. It’s by expanding the electorate, speaking to those that feel disenchanted, dejected, cynical about our politics, and letting them know that we’re fighting for them.'"

Primary election
On June 26, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez received 57.13 percent of the vote (15,897) to Joe Crowley's 42.5 percent (11,761), defeating the 10-term incumbent by almost 15 percentage points. Time magazine called her victory "the biggest upset of the 2018 elections so far"; CNN made a similar statement. The New York Times described Crowley's loss as "a shocking primary defeat on Tuesday, the most significant loss for a Democratic incumbent in more than a decade, and one that will reverberate across the party and the country." The Guardian called it "one of the biggest upsets in recent American political history". Her victory was especially surprising as she was outspent 18-1. Merriam-Webster reported that searches for the word "socialism" spiked 1500 percent after her victory. In a sign of her outsider status, as of 11p.m. on election day Crowley had not phoned Ocasio-Cortez; she believed he did not have her phone number and stated that she did not have his. Earlier in the evening, however, Crowley, an amateur guitarist, did play a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" at his election night watch party as a way of conceding defeat, dedicating it to Ocasio-Cortez.

Bernie Sanders congratulated her, saying, "She took on the entire local Democratic establishment in her district and won a very strong victory. She demonstrated once again what progressive grassroots politics can do." Noam Chomsky saw her victory as "a quite spectacular and significant event." He believes her win shows a split in the Democratic Party and he thinks that "she was right in saying that the policies she’s outlined should have broad appeal to a very large segment of the population."

At 28 years old, Ocasio-Cortez is one of the youngest nominees for Congress. If elected, she would be the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. That distinction is currently held by New York Republican Elise Stefanik, who was elected at age 30 in 2014. Ocasio-Cortez will be 29 at the start of the 116th Congress.

Several commentators noted the similarities between Ocasio-Cortez's victory over Crowley and Dave Brat's 2014 victory over Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia's 7th congressional district. Like Crowley, Cantor was a high-ranking member in his party's caucus. Since her primary win, Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed several progressive primary challengers to Democratic incumbents, leveraging her fame and spending her political capital in a manner not usually seen even in unexpected primary winners.

Without campaigning for it, Ocasio-Cortez won the Reform Party primary as a write-in candidate in a neighboring congressional district, New York's 15th, albeit with a total vote count of nine. She said she appreciated the show of support, but would decline the nomination.

Criticism of media coverage
Many journalists faulted the traditional national news media (with a few exceptions such as CBSN) for not identifying, or even recognizing, the newsworthiness of Ocasio-Cortez's campaign. Brian Stelter wrote that progressive media outlets such as The Young Turks and The Intercept "saw the Ocasio-Cortez upset coming". Margaret Sullivan said that traditional metrics of measuring a campaign's viability, like total fundraising, were contributing to a "media failure". Wikipedia did not have an article on her until her electoral win, and Ocasio-Cortez was barely mentioned in print-media coverage until around the same time.

Post-primary media attention
After her primary win, Ocasio-Cortez quickly garnered nationwide media attention, including numerous articles and TV talk-show appearances. She appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The View in the first few days after the primary and later on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Conservative Allie Stuckey also aired a fake interview.

Ocasio-Cortez also drew a great deal of media attention when she and Bernie Sanders campaigned for James Thompson in Kansas in July 2018. A rally in Wichita had to be moved from a theater with a capacity of 1,500 when far more people said they would attend. The event drew 4,000 people, with some seated on the floor. In The New Yorker Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote that while Sanders remains "the de-facto leader of an increasingly popular left, [he is unable to] do things that do not come naturally to him, like supply hope." Wallace-Wells suggested that Ocasio-Cortez has made Sanders's task easier as he can point to her success to show that ideas “once considered to be radical are now part of the mainstream.”

General election
Ocasio-Cortez will face Republican nominee Anthony Pappas in the November 6 general election. Pappas, who lives in Astoria, is an economics professor at St. John's University. According to the New York Post, Pappas has not actively campaigned, and because the 14th has a Cook Partisan Voting Index of D+29 and contains six registered Democrats for every Republican, "Pappas' bid is a long shot."

Crowley also remains on the ballot, as the nominee of the Working Families Party (WFP). Neither Crowley nor the party is actively campaigning, with both having endorsed Ocasio-Cortez after her Democratic Primary victory. On July 17, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, who himself won reelection on a third-party line after losing the Democratic Primary in 2006 (see United States Senate election in Connecticut, 2006), expressed hope that Crowley would actively campaign on the WFP ballot line in a column in the Wall Street Journal. Dan Cantor, Executive Director of the WFP, wrote an endorsement of, and apology to, Ocasio-Cortez for the New York Daily News, and called on voters not to vote for Crowley if his name remains on the general election ballot.

Political positions
Ocasio-Cortez is a self-described democratic socialist. She supports progressive policies such as Medicare for All, a job guarantee, tuition-free public college, ending the privatization of prisons, and enacting gun-control policies.

Education
Ocasio-Cortez campaigned in favor of tuition-free universities and public schools, saying that "[f]or the cost of the GOP’s tax bill, we could forgive ALL the student loan debt in the United States."

Environment
Ocasio-Cortez is a self-described hardliner on climate issues. She advocates for the United States to transition by 2035 to an electrical grid running on 100% renewable-energy production and end the use of fossil fuels. She also calls for a Green New Deal in the United States, in which the federal government would invest in the construction of large-scale green-infrastructure projects.

Healthcare
Ocasio-Cortez supports transitioning to a single-payer healthcare system, calling healthcare "a human right". She says that a single government insurer should ensure that every American has insurance, while reducing costs overall. On her campaign website, Ocasio-Cortez says "Almost every other developed nation in the world has universal healthcare. It's time the United States catch up to the rest of the world in ensuring all people have real healthcare coverage that doesn't break the bank."

Immigration
Ocasio-Cortez supports a "path to citizenship" for immigrants who entered the United States legally and illegally. She supports abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), calling it "a product of the Bush-era Patriot Act suite of legislation" and "an enforcement agency that takes on more of a paramilitary tone every single day". She has called immigration detention centers operated by the Department of Homeland Security "black sites", citing limited public access to those locations. Two days before the primary election, Ocasio-Cortez attended a protest at an ICE child-detention center in Tornillo, Texas. Ocasio-Cortez said in 2018 that ICE was required to meet a quota of 34,000 detainees, which The Washington Post and PolitiFact described as an "urban legend" and "false", respectively.

Impeachment of President Trump
On June 28, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez told CNN she would support the impeachment of President Trump, saying, "I think that, you know, we have the grounds to do it." She cited Trump's violations of the Emoluments Clause.

Israeli–Palestinian conflict
After 60 Palestinian protesters participating in the 2018 Gaza border protests were killed on May 14, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez criticized the Israel Defense Forces' use of deadly force, tweeting, "This is a massacre. I hope my peers have the moral courage to call it such. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else. Democrats can't be silent about this anymore." In a subsequent interview, she said, "The idea that we are not supposed to talk about people dying when they are engaging in political expression just really moved me", and noted that many constituents, including Jewish Americans, had thanked her for taking that position. In an interview with the PBS series Firing Line, Ocasio-Cortez clarified that she is "a proponent of a two-state solution."

After her primary victory, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami expressed his support for "a new generation of candidates who are more outspoken about their opposition to the policies of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and are eager to see the US play a more constructive role in making life better for both Israelis and Palestinians".

Puerto Rico
Ocasio-Cortez calls for "solidarity with Puerto Rico." She has advocated for granting Puerto Ricans further civil rights, regardless of Puerto Rico's legal classification. She also advocates for both voting rights and disaster relief. Ocasio-Cortez was critical of FEMA's response to Hurricane Maria and the federal government's unwillingness to address Puerto Rico's political status. She believes the federal government should increase investment in Puerto Rico.

Social issues
Ocasio-Cortez is supportive of the LGBT community, thanking its members for their role in her grassroots campaign. She spoke at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2017.

Awards and honors
Ocasio-Cortez was named the 2017 National Hispanic Institute Person of the Year by Ernesto Nieto.

Personal life
Ocasio-Cortez has family in Puerto Rico: her grandfather lives in a nursing home there. After Ocasio-Cortez's father's death in 2008, her mother and grandmother relocated to Florida due to financial hardship.