Philly City Councilmember Kendra Brooks is considering running for mayor, sources say

Kendra Brooks, a progressive who made history as the first third-party candidate to win a seat on Philadelphia City Council in 100 years, is considering challenging Mayor Cherelle L. Parker in the spring Democratic primary election, according to two sources familiar with her thinking.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the matter publicly, said Brooks is mulling a campaign but has not yet made a decision. She declined to comment Friday.

To run in the mayoral primary, Brooks would have to resign from her seat on Council and change her party registration from Working Families Party to Democrat.

A bid for the mayor’s office would pit Brooks, the de facto leader of the city’s Working Families Party and democratic socialist faction, against Parker, a centrist who has longed been aligned with the city’s Democratic Party establishment.

Brooks, longtime organizer from North Philadelphia and the minority leader on Council, got her start in politics as a public education advocate and has served on Council since 2020. Her most high-profile legislation this year was a package of bills that placed new restrictions on federal immigration enforcement in the city, in the city and drew legal challenges from the Trump administration.

She has been critical of Parker, especially with regard to the mayor’s strategy of largely sidestepping criticism of President Donald Trump’s administration. Brooks has said that officials who don’t outwardly oppose the president’s mass deportation campaign are engaging in “complicity disguised as strategic silence,” and she accused the mayor of “caving” to Trump when the administration last year quietly abandoned race- and gender-conscious contracting goals.

“People want to see leaders fighting for something,” Brooks said at the time, “and right now we don’t see our city fighting for anything.”

Aren Platt, the executive director of the mayor’s political campaign arm, declined to comment.

Brooks’ supporters see the mayor as potentially vulnerable as progressives have ascended nationally and notched wins over more traditional Democrats. That includes Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory last year in New York City and Abdul El-Sayed’s win in the Michigan Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

Closer to home, the left is emboldened by State Rep. Chris Rabb, who was backed by Brooks’ coalition and in May won the Democratic primary for a seat in Congress representing about half of Philadelphia. He toppled two centrist Democrats who were each supported by party leaders, big donors, and politically powerful labor unions.

Despite the energy on the left, no progressive has officially launched a run for mayor ahead of the May primary election. Shania Bennett, the mayor’s former director of youth engagement who has never run for office before, said this month that she will challenge Parker. Bennett said recently that she had not yet hired a campaign team or developed a policy platform.

» READ MORE: She was Mayor Parker’s director of youth engagement. Now, she’s planning to run against her former boss in 2027.

Any challenger to Parker faces significant hurdles. No Philadelphia mayor has lost reelection in modern history, and Parker would be backed by the city’s Democratic Party, which can now spend unlimited amounts of money in coordination with its chosen candidates due to a new board of ethics policy.

Parker will also be supported by the deep-pocketed building trades unions that boosted her in the crowded open mayoral primary in 2023.

“We’re going to put all the resources, both financial resources and people resources, to bear to make sure that Mayor Parker has a second term,” said Ryan Boyer, the head of the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council. “I want to be clear and vociferous that the Philadelphia Building Trades ... are fully and completely behind Cherelle Parker.”

Parker is likely to see support from a super PAC bankrolled by city developers, and she also has her own massive war chest. Her campaign had $1.4 million in the bank as of May, according to the most recent campaign finance paperwork available. Brooks had $17,000 on hand as of her last report in January.

But Brooks, who has won citywide election twice to represent the city as an at-large member of Council, could be a formidable opponent. She is one of the most prominent left-wing politicians in the city, and she is well-known in national progressive circles.

The Working Families Party’s chapter in Pennsylvania recently commissioned a poll that showed Brooks as broadly popular with the city’s Democratic primary electorate but with much lower name recognition than Parker, according to polling documents obtained by The Inquirer.

According to the survey of 900 respondents, 35% said they had a favorable view of Brooks with just 4% saying they had an unfavorable view. Nearly 40% of respondents said they did not know who Brooks was.

Nearly all of the respondents knew of Parker. Forty-eight percent said they had a favorable view of the mayor, and 40% said they had an unfavorable view. Those findings are similar to a June Suffolk University/Philadelphia Inquirer poll.

Nick Gavio, a spokesperson for the Working Families Party, said in a statement that the organization often conducts polling on public opinion in the city and that the survey was “one test among a battery of others that we conducted in Philadelphia ahead of the 2027 elections.”

“We are pleased that the Working Families Party and Minority Leader Brooks are so popular,” he said, “which we believe reflects our focus on the issues that matter to the working people of this city.”

Several other leftist politicians in the city have been rumored to be considering running for mayor against Parker, but none have said publicly that they intend to launch a campaign.

One is District Attorney Larry Krasner, the third-term prosecutor who is one of the most prominent progressive district attorneys in the country. Krasner has been increasingly critical of Parker, and in June said that he would not rule out the possibility of running against her.

But the district attorney has recently faced significant scrutiny related to his handling of a complex post-conviction case. This week, U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond said that Krasner may have committed federal crimes and that he had referred the matter to the Department of Justice for investigation.

Krasner has denied wrongdoing.