Don’t be stupid: election reflections
I'm feeling intensely bummed. Last Tuesday was election night in Philadelphia and the left got routed. Helen Gym, the our mayoral candidate, placed third behind a white technocrat. The winner, by far, was the moderate political machine's candidate--and the city's first Black woman mayor--Cherelle Parker.
There are a handful of reflections coming out now, and I want to write about the election in that way too, with the obvious caveat that I've been nowhere near as involved in the campaigns on the ground as others, nor have I been engaged with the historical trends in which these results flow and ebb. But I think reflection is necessary because, speaking personally, I was very wrong. I'd like to learn from that.
Plus, I had some anecdotal experiences working at a poll station on election day that maybe gave me glimpses of how I could be so wrong. If these articulations, vignettes and loose hypotheses are helpful for others, even if they provide a place to start assessing what happened, then great. If not, feel free to tell me to go to hell--I already feel like that anyway!
What I thought would happen
I was convinced, and felt comfortable publicly predicting, that Helen would win for mayor and the same forces creating the conditions for her victory would usher in others running for city council, both at large and in district races. Bracketing my ideological alignment with Gym, I had some numbers and tactical reasons to back this up.
First, of all the candidates, Gym was the only one with a track record of getting hundreds of thousands of votes in a citywide election. People all over the city knew her and had voted for her in the past. Second, Helen had her lane to herself. She was coming from twenty years of movement organizing, working with big diverse coalitions. None of the other candidates had that credential.
Third, or maybe part of the second point, all the other candidates were various flavors of moderate: from white technocrat to business-friendly millionaire to Black political machine. Ideologically, these candidates were crowding each other out. The two white male millionaires were spending vast sums in neighborhoods where the Black political machine had operated. Meanwhile, the wealthy professional-managerial class, seduced by 'practicality', would also break up on the split rocks of these moderates.
Third, the unions--very much kingmakers in Philly--were split too. The trade unions were split between the labor council and the trades; the service workers were split. But the teachers union, by far the largest in the city, was behind Helen.
Fourth, voting blocs in the last few elections had been looking more and more 'progressive', giving the left clear wins at many levels. From Helen herself to Larry Krasner to Liz Fiedler to Kendra Brooks to Rick Krajewski and Nikil Saval, all the way to John Fetterman, it seemed like a group of wealthier white progressives were voting with left-leaning young people and curious old-timers in the city to sweep away old moderate politics in favor of a newer and exciting left politics. The machine looked old, rickety, and rusty.
So I thought: Gym's base is very loyal and the voting blocs would be familiar with her. She had a strong operation built by the new left apparatus, specifically Reclaim Philly and UNITE-HERE, while other groups got behind city council candidates. The currents were churning left. Much like Krasner's victory in 2017, moderates were crowding each other's space and would pilfer votes from one another, letting the left candidate sail through.
A left left behind
But that's not what happened at all! I don't feel confident saying much about what did happen in any kind of profound way. I'm not a politico. I know what everyone else knows: Helen got 18.6% of the vote. Rhynhardt, the white technocrat with no union support, got 19%. Parker got a strong 28%. Rhynhardt over-performed where Gym should have, and Parker over-performed where Brown and Domb I thought should've gotten more traction.
In the down-ballot races, Amanda McIllmurray, a left champion who helped construct the left's winning political coalitions c. 2016, placed seventh in the at-large race, behind candidates with whom voters were already familiar (except, perhaps due to the machine's approval of her, Rue Landau). In two district races where the left was taking on entrenched machine candidates, Andrés Celin lost by eight points behind his rival Quetcy Lozada; and Seth Anderson-Oberman is still a few hundred votes behind. The latter is still not called, but his opponent, an entrenched incumbent, declared victory.
Some other things of note from the race, as we try to make sense of what happened: there are 1.02 million registered voters in the city and only 240,000 voted in this election (by comparison, twice that number voted in 1983's primary). The 79,000 of that total who voted Parker likely don't represent Philly's working class. It was the Black middle class of Philadelphia that came out in droves, by Parker's own marketing the "middle neighborhoods." That voting bloc is older, moderate, and while their income is lower on average, again, that doesn't make them working class.
I say this because one right wing narrative, which centrists and post-lefties love to push, is that the left--while saying it fights for the working class--doesn't have its support, particularly on issues like crime. But taking a look at breakdowns in majority Black and Latino and low-income divisions, Gym got 17% and 16% of the votes there respectively, according to the Inquirer. She finished second behind Parker. So there's support for her in those areas.
Also, don't forget Jeffrey Yass, a conservative billionaire, spent a million dollars of his own money on ads against Gym and the left this cycle. Along with a wave of cash from the real estate fraction of Philadelphia's ruling class, like Allan Domb paying for ads bashing the left, there were powerful resources behind the left's failure this time around.
Encounters with the terrain
But there's something to this idea that the left isn't in touch with the diverse working class in its fullness, that we're not engaged with the many layers of the city. My experience working at a poll station in North Philly for four hours during election day was a case study.
I was in deep North Philly, standing outside a rec center, handing out literature for the DSA-backed district 7 candidate, Celin. While voters trickled in I handed them flyers, trying to get a good word in for Andrés in case they hadn't decided yet. Most took the flyer and kept walking. Some refused to take them. Others did listen, but, as I was to found out, not just to me.
There were other workers from different campaigns outside the polling station too. This is a common practice: electioneering. Legally, you're required to stand 10 feet from the entrance to the polling place, but you can wear a t-shirt for your candidate and hand out literature and have conversations there.
Two other campaigns had workers at my location: Quetcy Lozada, running against Andrés, and Cherelle Parker, the mayoral candidate. There were signs for other candidates but these were the campaigns who had workers handing out literature. There were also volunteers and political operatives of various kinds walking in and out of the poll. The poll watchers, inside the center, would come out and take smoke breaks. (By contrast, we were poll standers.)
I'm not great at campaign conversations. I'm a little nervous and awkward, but I can do it when it's needed and it's fine. I'd never been a poll stander before. I'd knocked doors for every election cycle here and was familiar with the genre: have a quick conversation, try to get a point in, make a connection if possible to sway the voter.
As a DSA member, I got recruited to this poll location because it's in a Spanish-speaking area and I speak Spanish. I live in West Philly though, far from the neighborhood, and I'm white-PMC and relatively new to the city. The other poll standers and watchers I talked to were very different from me and it was in talking with them that I encountered the possible limitations of my understanding of the terrain here; the ways my imagined relations to real conditions didn't quite match those real conditions. These are obviously anecdotes and single experiences, and thus not enough to draw any solid conclusions from. But they are enough to hammer out some questions maybe (I've changed all their names).
Inez, Irven, and Tomas
I got to know three people who made an impression: Inez and her son Irven, Quetcy's poll standers, and Tomas, a local committee person from the neighborhood who was volunteering to help with whatever might need doing at the poll. I'll start with Inez and Irven. I was handing out flyer for Andrés, who was running against Quetcy, their candidate. At first I didn't know how to approach them since we were obviously in competition. But we started chatting and I quickly realized I couldn't hold a candle to Inez in terms of electioneering, though I found ways of advocating for Andrés.
Inez was a spry 81-year old originally from a small town in the rural east of Puerto Rico. She told me that she lived in Chicago for 30 years, doing politics and community work in the orbit of Richard Daley, and then spent the next 30 years doing similar stuff here in Philadelphia, starting with Marian Tasco. Her legs are only good for about five hours, she said, and that she's fiercely political. She joked that on her birth certificate it listed her name, date of birth, and "Democrat."
Inez drives a beat-up Bronco, with which she delivers food to seniors twice a week. She says the city gives her a little bit of money to do this, but it's not even enough to cover her gas costs. She does it because she loves her seniors.
She's just as loyal to Quetcy, who worked for Maria Quinones-Sanchez (the outgoing district councilwoman), who herself worked for Tasco. It's a political dynasty in Philly, whose members had provided direct help to Inez and her family. She said that Quetcy had personally taken time to drive her to doctor's appointments and helped her with various issues. While she thought Andrés was fine, neither he nor his people had taken care of her like Quetcy and Maria had. Indeed, the campaign is paying her and Irven for the day (she didn't tell me how much), providing more support.
She told me all this with piercing blue eyes behind wrinkling olive skin, with a mop of thick white hair blowing in the breeze. Many of her teeth were missing, giving her Spanish-inflected English a kind of pillowy sound, each word wrapped in a raspy decisiveness that made her political maneuvers and analyses all the more compelling.
When I asked her about the mayor's race, she said she supported Maria, who had to drop out because of the amount of money others were spending (Quinones-Sanchez had been the first to drop out of the crowded race, particularly once the "millionaire's clause" had been activated, letting personal and group contributions increase exponentially after millionaires had contributed significant sums to fund their own campaigns).
Now that Maria was out, she didn't really have a horse in the race. I asked her what she thought of Helen and she said she couldn't support someone who's husband was in the pharmaceutical industry, and behind "all that stuff you see in Kensington." The implication was that Helen's husband, who does indeed work for a drug company, helped create the opioid epidemic ravaging many of Philly's neighborhoods, most famously in Kensington, where viral videos have captured addicts passed out on the street and needles riddling the sidewalks.
I tried to push back against this brilliant bit of ideological engineering, saying you can't blame him for that, it's not the kind of pharma he works on, and anyway Gym recused herself whenever appropriate (not to mention other candidates' connections are way more corrupt). I knew I couldn't move her but I was curious how she'd respond. Inez would have none of it. "You can't defend that," she said, waving me off.
These kind of conversations, I should note, jumped effervescently from subject to subject, interrupted by new voters coming and going, jokes, associations, and diatribes. It's not a form of dialogue I hear a lot and it was a good wake up call about how others talk.
Irven, Inez's son, was a joker, an older man himself, helping his mother put up posters and generally hamming it up with people. Other than smiling and helping everyone out with various problems (particularly keeping posters taped up on walls and around trees, which were constantly falling off in the breeze), we had one back and forth worth noting. The question of defunding the police came up, I can't remember how, and he looked right at me (he had a very close way of talking, putting his nose about a quarter inch closer to mine than would be normal) and asked, with a serious mien, "are all cops bad apples?"
"Well, it's not really about any individual cop, it's more about the systems and policies in place. They're supposed to come help people, but they end up killing them," I said.
He paused, looked away, then back at me for dramatic effect: "I'm an ex-felon, take it from me, it's not the systems' or cops' fault." Then he walked away to deal with another poster that'd come undone.
The conversation about defunding the police included Tomas, who was there for most of the time I was handing out flyers. A young, first generation son of immigrants from the Caribbean, he managed a pharmacy before getting into politics post-pandemic. He ran a small campaign for state senate the previous cycle, which he'd lost, but the campaign got him in touch with the powers that be in his local political machine, namely the wards, and landed his current job working in a state politician's office.
Tomas wore a doo rag, horn-rimmed glasses, and a sweatshirt, a tangly beard rising from his youthful face. He's a political junkie following the numbers and trends. He's non-aligned ideologically, looking for where his neighborhood does or doesn't get support from the various power centers in the city. He told me his mother came to the US from the islands with nothing, worked double and triple shifts as a nurse and put him and his two siblings through school.
Tomas helped me out a bit with the electioneering. He could see I wasn't from the neighborhood and when I gave voters a flier for Andrés, he subtly supported what I said.
I asked how he'd come to support Celin. He told me that he'd called both candidates, Quetcy and Andrés, asking to have a conversation with them. He explained that he's a committee person for his division, representing the smallest unit of city government, usually a few square blocks. The divisions compose wards, which are led by well-connected ward leaders. This intricate system is pretty important, since the wards endorse candidates for city council, mayor, state rep, state senate, etc, and whip votes for them. Committee people tend to know the voters in their divisions and have an inside knowledge of their little area, as well as the ward.
Tomas, as a committee person, wanted to chat with the candidates who'd be representing his council district. Quetcy never got back to him, but Andrés did. They had a good conversation. Tomas was impressed and starting whipping division votes for Andrés, and therefore was sympathetic to my awkward attempts to talk to voters on his behalf.
And yes, it was awkward. If a voter walked up to the polling place, then me and Inez jumped into action, putting a flyer into the voter's hands and saying something. Usually I'd say, "we hope you'll vote for Andrés, he doesn't take money from billionaires," but I'd say it quickly, hesitantly, nervous about the theater of it. Inez on the other hand had perfected a slow walk with the voter, whispering comforting things like a grandmother might soothe a child, telling them that Quetcy was the Democrat and already their council member (most voters, if they asked us anything, just wanted to know who the Democrat was--but both candidates were Democrats).
When Inez got a Spanish-speaking voter, she was even better at this. I didn't have much of a chance. Of course I could speak Spanish, but I'm not from the neighborhood, I'm not from Puerto Rico. I'm an awkward white Jewish college professor who happened to live in Ecuador for a few years and moved to the city in 2016. So I did what I could, but Tomas would nod or smile at the voter I was handing my literature to, with a wink. This was more effective than you might think, as his gestures came with a warm smile and a quick intimacy, which got people's attention.
In between these moments with voters, we chatted. The topic was usually local politics of course. But there are multitudes within local politics. One dimension of it is like talking sports: who's who, who's won or lost what races, what tactics have worked. (Like how John Sabatina, now running for Register of Wills, had run for and won nearly every other position available except for mayor. He won the Register of Wills race.) It's a more Machiavellian angle where the substance of the issues fade to the background and the maneuvers, personalities, and specificities of the terrain come to the foreground.
Yet the issues are always there, structuring everything. And if you get into local politics you need to talk about these issues, have a stance on them, and be able to evaluate others' positions quickly and convincingly, much like Inez did in the exchange about Helen's husband. In that way, I guess it's also like sports, except instead of winning games the stakes are people's actual material lives, the dialectic, history itself.
A couple exchanges stand out. I asked Tomas about Helen Gym and he said he couldn't vote for her. He said this in a cryptic way, like he didn't want to be pushed on it, so I didn't. I wasn't sure how to interpret it, but earlier in the conversation we were talking about racial constituencies and how it'd be hard for him to run in a division or ward with Spanish-speaking residents. Inez threw in that Asians have their politicians and Helen is most likely seen, for better or worse, as representing them.
"But what about how Helen has fought for and won policies that benefit everyone?" I asked. Inez gave me a look that became familiar to me throughout the day: pursed lips, a hand on her hip, a furrowed brow, and unblinking blue eyes boring into me, as if to say, "don't be stupid"-- a message whose political-ontological punch I could feel viscerally.
The conversations were all like this, weaving in and out of issues, going over the current election and previous elections, making predictions, agreeing and disagreeing. It was lively and fun and I genuinely liked my fellow poll workers.
I'd brought a bag of clementines with me, and about halfway through my shift I offered them all some fruit and they accepted readily, all of us peeling and chewing the citrus together in the sun.
Our brief time together gave me insight into ideologies and experiences that were far from mine--far from the ones I read online, see on my curated social media, and chew on with friends. Through the conversations I came to see very clearly that this ideology of mine was off, or didn't capture the parts of the terrain that theirs did.
Cities and takeaways
Who knows what to make of these scenes, I'll be thinking on them for weeks. The least I can say is that I found myself thrust into other worlds that day, which the election numbers themselves bore out: my predictions, based on my observations, all made from my vantage point and my own imagined relations to real conditions, were incorrect. When Inez looked at me, I could profoundly sense my stupidity in this sense, the ways I just didn’t and don’t understand the cities in my city and the political terrain underneath.
My limitations must have something to do with my context, my day to day life in this city which I geographically share with the people who I met at the polling place, but with whom socially I simply haven't shared time and space. We're in the same city, voting in the same election, but seem to occupy radically different cities, and this radical difference must have something to do with how radically I was wrong about what would happen.
Strategically, my reflections have at least a few concrete takeaways to think about:
Creating solidarity and trust is more than canvassing, door-knocking, and campaign infrastructure. You need all that, but it probably has to keep going, basically all the time, even when no one is running and there’s no campaign happening or in the works. It’s constant social and cultural infrastructure: providing aid, sharing resources, and creating cultural connections.
Relatedly, I think the word ‘machine’--as in ‘political machine’--covers up a lot of intricate dynamics and relationships and practices and protocols that ultimately add up to power blocs and voting coalitions. Maybe we need to lift up the hood on that word. What is a machine? What does it do? What should it do? How do you fight them? How do you build them? Is it even a 'machine'?
We have to figure out how to be less ‘stupid’ in the sense above. How to do that I’m not sure, probably it has to do with 1 and 2.
If it's not already happening, it might be good for people in our movement to try to connect with and meet existing committee people. Talking with them, getting to know them, making the effort—if Tomas's experience with Andrés is any indication—could go a long way. Alignments aren’t a priori, they can be forged.