The Philly DA’s race is seeing little money and even less noise with one month to go

When former Municipal Court Judge Patrick Dugan challenged two-term incumbent District Attorney Larry Krasner in the Democratic primary last spring, it was an uphill battle.

He lost decisively. This fall, as Dugan takes on Krasner again — this time as the Republican nominee — his effort to unseat the progressive district attorney in deep-blue Philadelphia is more akin to scaling a mountain.

And he’s doing it with far less help than he had before.

With about one month until the Nov. 4 general election, the district attorney’s race is awfully quiet. There’s been little in the way of advertising and no public events featuring both candidates have been scheduled. Neither candidate has a full-time campaign staff.

And fundraising papers filed last week show Dugan took in just $26,000 since announcing he would challenge Krasner again, a small sum compared to the spring, when he took in hundreds of thousands of dollars and far out-raised Krasner. Missing this time from Dugan’s arsenal: the financial might of the politically potent unions that backed him in the primary.

“It’s moving off to just a slow start,” Philadelphia GOP chair Vince Fenerty acknowledged. But, Fenerty said, he believes momentum is on Republicans’ side. “We’re doing our best to rev up our troops.”

» READ MORE: What the general election campaigns against Larry Krasner and Zohran Mamdani say about the Democratic Party

Krasner, for his part, raised $70,000 in the same time frame — a relatively small amount for a citywide race that shows he and his supporters aren’t terribly concerned about his chances. He beat Dugan by 28 percentage points in May.

Meanwhile, Krasner at times seems more focused on Washington.

The progressive prosecutor, who has long been Philadelphia’s chief antagonist of President Donald Trump, has posted frequently on social media about the administration and has made appearances on national TV programs and podcasts. He hosted town hall events about how the city should respond if Trump were to deploy the National Guard to the city, even though the president has not publicly threatened to send troops to Philadelphia.

Krasner did not respond to a request for comment.

» READ MORE: DA Krasner to host town halls to discuss how residents can respond if Trump deploys National Guard to Philadelphia

Dugan, who has characterized himself as a more tough-on-crime alternative to Krasner, said he’s hopeful Republicans and independents will join with the centrist Democrats who backed him in the spring to lift him over Krasner. He says he’s an “independent Democrat,” despite appearing on the November ballot as the Republican nominee.

His nomination was the result of a spring write-in campaign by the GOP, which didn’t run its own candidate in the primary. Dugan’s campaign manager said during the primary that Dugan wouldn’t accept the Republican nomination, but Dugan said he changed his mind after “a lot of conversations and a lot of urging from regular people.”

“What pushed me over the top was the fact that if I didn’t accept the nomination, then I was giving Larry Krasner a free pass, where once again he thinks he has a mandate to implement his policies of anarchy,” Dugan said. “And I couldn’t allow that to happen.”

The partisan about-face turned off some of his most prominent supporters, most notably Ryan Boyer, the head of the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council.

The deep-pocketed trades unions poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Dugan’s Democratic campaign in the spring to unseat Krasner, but Boyer said in August he was “shocked” by Dugan’s decision to accept the GOP nomination and that the council would no longer back him.

» READ MORE: Philly’s building trades unions have turned against Pat Dugan as he runs against DA Larry Krasner as a Republican

Dugan said he still has the support of some individual union leaders. Mark Lynch, who leads the city’s long politically powerful electricians’ union, has said he and his members are still with Dugan. Wayne Miller, another top labor leader in the city and head of the sprinkler fitters’ union, said he is personally supporting Dugan, whom he characterized as a friend.

But, despite the pledges of personal support, none of the city’s top organized labor groups have yet spent significant resources on the general election race. Some of the building trades unions that backed Dugan in the spring gave the maximum contributions allowed in a single calendar year under the city’s campaign-finance law, so they can’t contribute more directly to his campaign.

In theory, the groups could establish an independent expenditure organization to boost Dugan, as such groups do not have to abide by the same contribution limits. But, as of Wednesday, no such effort had materialized.

Dugan said he has a handful of fundraisers planned for October, but he acknowledged that raising money for his campaign has been harder than it was in the spring.

He said he’s focused on “touching as many voters as I possibly can on an individual basis,” and is targeting what he called the “silent majority” of people who did not vote in the primary. (About 16% of registered voters cast a ballot in the primary — one of the lowest voter turnouts in the city in a decade.)

“They’re the people who have been coming up to me for years saying ‘We got to get rid of Krasner,” Dugan said. “Frankly, Philadelphia needs to stop complaining about Larry Krasner and come out and vote.”