These are the special interests vying for your attention | 100th mayor newsletter
We break down how special interests are vying for your attention — and your vote — with TV ads in the most expensive mayor’s race in Philadelphia history.
One. Week.
Since the first contenders declared their candidacy in September, this mayor’s race has been unique. It’s featured public spats between political factions, a high-profile ethics investigation, 34,000 community forums, and enough candidates to field a baseball team.
In today’s newsletter, we’ll dive into which special interests are trying to buy your vote, explore the neighborhoods that raised these candidates, and recap the weird mayoral moments of yore.
There are just seven days 🗓 left until election day. Get the information you need about every candidate. Let’s get into it.
— Anna Orso and Sean Collins Walsh
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It’s a whole lotta money in this mother of a mayor’s race
Well, it’s official: This is now the most expensive mayor’s race in Philadelphia history. Spending has already surpassed $31 million, and that’s likely to climb higher as five top candidates squeeze donors to fund their closing messages and get-out-the-vote programs.
Money can buy a lot of things, but much of what it buys is time in front of voters. The most effective way for campaigns to do that is through television advertising, meaning the mayor’s race is blanketing the airwaves and making you think about politics every seven minutes during Jeopardy.
The candidates are spending big to get your attention — especially Allan Domb, who’s put a whopping $10.2 million of his own money into the race. Other interests are vying for your TV-watching eyeballs:
Building-trades unions and carpenters’ unions have sunk a ton of money into a group running ads to boost their preferred candidate, 🔑 Cherelle Parker. They’re also bankrolling negative ads about Rebecca Rhynhart (the one that calls her a “Wall Street banker”) and another that attacks Jeff Brown and Allan Domb (the one that calls them rich).
Teachers’ unions have shelled out hundreds of thousands to a group running TV ads that boost Helen Gym, who has long been aligned with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. They ran ads about Gym’s crime plan, 🔑 and have reserved more airtime this week.
A new group that’s running commercials blasting Gym was largely funded by Jeffrey Yass, a conservative Main Line billionaire who is a strong proponent of charter school expansion.
A lot of people contributed to a group supporting Jeff Brown that ran a bunch of ads early on, including controversial spots that featured Michelle Obama. 🔑 We don’t know much about who funded them because most of the donors routed money through a nonprofit that hasn’t had to disclose who contributed. The PAC is dormant, but a court case over it could reshape how big money flows into Philly elections.
💥 The key takeaway: Lots of people are undecided and primary voters are more likely than general-election voters 🔑 to change their minds. Last-minute TV commercials could sway the race. Just keep in mind: There’s always someone paying for them.
Spotlight on: The neighborhoods that made a mayor
Every candidate in this race has at one point or another leaned on their life experience to tell the story of how they landed at this political moment. Our colleagues on The Inquirer’s Communities and Engagement Desk sought to tell the story of every Democratic candidate running ahead of the primary. So they interviewed them in their first Philly neighborhood. Some examples:
Amen Brown took us to 56th and Market in West Philly, where he spent his formative years.
Allan Domb walked through Center City, where he took classes in real estate decades ago.
Jeff Brown swung through parts of Northeast Philly, where he was born, and then hung out in West Philly, where his father owned a grocery store.
Videos about Helen Gym, Cherelle Parker, and Rebecca Rhynhart will drop in the coming days. Keep an eye on this space.
📮 How much does a candidate’s history in the city mean to you when you’re considering who to vote for? Keep your responses to 50 words or less for a chance to be featured in an upcoming newsletter. Email us here.
The weirdest mayoral moments
Now that we’re in the home stretch, we thought we’d break form a bit to relive three of the wackier mayoral campaign trail moments of the past.
The greatest Philadelphia press conference of all time
Milton Street was being investigated by federal agents when he held a rally for his floundering 2007 mayoral campaign and brought a casket on stage as a prop. He sang a gospel hymn while draped over the coffin, in a moment forever cemented in Philadelphia political history.
”Where’s the beef?”
The 2007 election was full of some doozies. That was also the year Dwight Evans handed out empty hamburger buns to reporters in a stunt to slam fellow candidate Tom Knox’s record. “Here’s my record, extremely beefy,” Evans said, gesturing at a poster board of his accomplishments with a picture of a juicy hamburger. “Tom Knox’s record, no beef, nothing,” he said, pointing to the empty buns.
A mayoral meltdown
On the same day late in the 2003 general election, both candidates lost their cool. Democrat John Street snapped at a Daily News photographer for taking too many photos, accusing the photographer of trying to snap one that would make him look bad. Republican Sam Katz accused an elderly woman at a senior center who asked him a tough question of being a plant sent there to attack him. As our own Chris Brennan put it back then: “It was a passionate collision of politics and paranoia.”
— Julia Terruso
Data Dive: Mail ballots and what they mean for the mayor’s race
🎤 This week, we’re going to pass the mic to our colleague Jonathan Lai, a journalist who leads our data-driven storytelling team.
Today is the last day to request a mail ballot in this election, and as of Monday morning, more than 93,000 voters in Philly had done so. That means we’ll end up with about 100,000 mail ballots. But that number doesn’t tell us much.
📬 We don’t know how many votes to ultimately expect to be cast by mail.
About 83,000 of the ballot requests came from registered Democrats, the only ones who can vote in the Democratic primary. Of the rest, nearly 5,000 requests came from Republicans and nearly 6,000 from third-party and independent voters.
Not every voter who requests a mail ballot will use it. Some will end up voting in person, and others won’t vote at all.
Some voters will try to vote by mail but have their votes rejected because of errors with the ballot. This will affect some groups, such as older voters, more than others. 🔑
📨 Mail voting won’t swing the election itself. These are engaged voters who know what they’re doing.
Mail voting generally doesn’t increase turnout and create new voters — it provides convenience for people who were going to vote anyway, study after study has shown. (Here’s one from last week.)
In Philly, the mail ballot requests are largely coming from voters who are highly engaged, including “supervoters” who participate in every election.
🗳 It’s unclear what the mail ballot numbers tell us about overall turnout.
Since 2020, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the votes have been cast by mail.
If Democrats cast 80,000 mail ballots and that’s between 25% and 33% of the overall vote, that could translate to overall turnout between 242,000 and 320,000. That’s a big range! I wouldn’t try to predict turnout.
And those numbers are in flux as we come out of the pandemic while also normalizing mail voting. We don’t know yet what The New Normal is.
What else we’re reading
Big progressive names like Bernie Sanders and AOC are lining up behind Helen Gym. Will it give her a boost?
Most Philly elected officials want Cherelle Parker to be the next mayor. Some say that’s a big problem. 🔑
ICYMI: We asked the contenders for their tax returns, and three candidates (sort of) shared them. Here’s what was in them.
🧠 Trivia time 🧠
Question: At a recent forum featuring five of the top candidates for mayor, every candidate said they support the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard subway 🔑 — except one. Who was it?
A) Cherelle Parker
B) Allan Domb
C) Rebecca Rhynhart
D) Jeff Brown
Find out if you know the answer.
Scenes from the campaign trail
Political fundraisers are often stuffy affairs. Not the drag show fundraiser Gym had last week at Cockatoo in the Gayborhood. Here’s the mayoral candidate cheering on Asia Monroe, one of several queens who performed.
Thanks for sticking with us through this helluva campaign season. Next week’s newsletter will be a special one: election day. Take deep breaths. We’ll see you then.
— Anna Orso and Sean Collins Walsh