Philly Republicans failed to win even one at-large City Council race in this month’s election, reducing them to just a single district seat on the 17-member legislative body for the first time in modern history.
The loss has elicited laments about the supposed death of the party in Philadelphia.
Nicolas O’Rourke, a winning candidate for the progressive Working Families Party, crowed that they’d “left the Republican Party to the dustbin of history.”
But while the local GOP could not match the enthusiasm, organization, and out-of-town funding the WFP mustered this year, it’s a little early to start writing eulogies for the city’s Republican establishment, political observers say.
For example, David Oh did better than any Republican mayoral contender since Sam Katz in 2003, and Republican District Councilmember Brian O’Neill outshone his well-funded Democratic challenger, they point out.
Even the losing Council at-large candidates, Jim Hasher and Drew Murray, received more than 60,000 votes apiece despite not being incumbents.
That’s more than Oh got when he was reelected to Council in 2019, and almost as many as WFP Councilmember Kendra Brooks received when she first won her seat that year. Those two at-large seats are effectively reserved for non-majority parties and were previously always held by Republicans.
“I don’t think what we did was a failure,” said Albert Eisenberg, a political consultant who was previously a spokesperson for the Philly GOP. “The votes show that there’s a lot of concern for Philly voters about the way that our city has moved to the extreme left.”
Despite antipathy toward Trump and anger over the Dobbs abortion ruling and other issues, he and other Republicans insist that sticking with relatively conservative positions — like attacking progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner over crime — remains a winning strategy.
But the state Republican party could do more to boost city candidates in the future, argued political consultant Neil Oxman, who’s run many Democratic campaigns across Pa., as well as Katz’s Republican mayoral bid in 1999.
Republicans control most Pennsylvania county governments, the state Senate, nearly half of the state House, and 8 of 17 U.S. House seats. In addition, despite facing tough attacks over abortion and voting rights, the losing Republican candidate in this year’s hotly contested state Supreme Court race still managed to pull in close to 47% of the vote.
This year’s Philly Council candidates “lost close enough that if the county people and the people in Harrisburg had done something for them and paid attention, and had some organization in the city, they could have held on,” Oxman said. “The 25% of the vote that Oh got would have been enough for both Hasher and Murray to have gotten elected to City Council.”
The question, he and others said, is whether state and local party leaders can restore that degree of organization and energy in Philadelphia.
In a city where Democrats have a 7-to-1 voter registration advantage, and where independent voters now number about the same as Republicans, GOP insiders say it’s long been a struggle — since well before the WFP came to town — to even recruit ward leaders and candidates willing to challenge Democratic dominance in many neighborhoods.
“Political parties are nothing more and nothing less than the people that make them up,” said Matt Wolfe, a Republican ward leader in West Philly and a lawyer specializing in election law. “We need to build a stronger party. We haven’t done what we need to do.”
Elimination of straight-ticket voting comes back to haunt Philly GOP
The early returns on the evening of Nov. 7 seemed to show the Republican Council candidates doing well enough to win at least one of the two at-large seats. But around 10:30 p.m., WFP candidate O’Rourke’s numbers leapfrogged theirs and the watch party mood darkened.
At Jimmy’s Timeout, the sports pub Hasher owns in Torresdale, a boisterous crowd jammed the bar as the candidate huddled in the next room with Councilmember Mike Driscoll and a few other supporters.
For Hasher the big issue was mail ballots, which many Republicans distrust as a potential source of voting fraud. He estimated Brooks went into this month’s election with a 7,000-vote lead in mail-ins. Last year, when Hasher ran in a Council special election, his total mail votes only came to about 3,900, he said.
“Tonight I probably received 8,500. That shows you how far we came, just basically educating ourselves and knowing how we had to work this,” Hasher told Billy Penn on election night. “So we’re getting there. We just need a lot more work and making sure that we’re not behind the eight ball every time we get into a race.”
Mail ballots are crucial because they can capture less-involved voters who don’t vote in person, said Wolfe, the lawyer and ward leader. They’ll be important again next year, when Philadelphia and Pennsylvania are expected to play pivotal roles in the 2024 presidential election.
“It’s important that Republicans talk about that, because of the talk about how terrible mail ballots were,” Hasher said. “We layer campaign techniques on top of each other. If we’re going to have no-excuse mail voting, then you take advantage of that.”
Pennsylvania established no-excuse mail balloting as part of political compromise in 2019. Republicans demanded that the voting reform law also eliminate straight-ticket voting, which let people pull a lever or fill a single bubble to vote for all the candidates in one party.
As intended, the absence of a straight-ticket voting option hurt Democrats in lower-profile races, said Oxman, the longtime consultant. For example, former state treasurer Joseph Torsella narrowly lost his reelection race in 2020, despite leading in polls and fundraising.
But in Philly this year, the lack of straight-ticket voting may have deprived Republicans Hasher and Murray of crucial votes.
Conservative-leaning residents voted in the Supreme Court and mayor races, and then didn’t bother digging through the rest of the lengthy ballot to find Republicans running for Council and other positions, Oxman suggested.
“If there had been a straight lever, given what Oh got, I think that the Republicans would have won those seats,” Oxman said. “But there’s no straight lever, and so people have to hunt and peck.”
Path forward? Start at the ward level and run more candidates
If Philadelphia Republicans are going to win back one or two at-large seats in 2027, and perhaps have a shot at more spots on Council and other offices, they need to raise more money and do a much better job at recruiting committeepeople and quality candidates, political observers say.
In each of the city’s 66 wards, Democrats have ward leaders and volunteers doing the hard work of flyering and door-knocking for candidates before elections. But many Republican wards have vacancies and others have leaders in name only, Oxman said.
“The Republicans [once] had their share of real committeepeople,” the political consultant recalled. “That’s gone away, to a large degree.”
To incentivize residents to join committees, Republican wards could be democratized so that the committees make endorsements and other decisions rather than ward leaders, as is done in a few “open” Democrat wards, said Wolfe, the GOP ward leader. Registered community organizations (RCOs) and other groups that play important roles in neighborhoods could also be tapped for political volunteers.
“Here are people that care about their city, that are engaged, that are willing to put time in, and not that many of them are active with either party. That’s someplace that we should be recruiting from,” Wolfe said.
Running candidates is a challenge, he said, because there are so few registered Republicans that it’s difficult in some areas to collect enough valid petition signatures (usually 750 or 1,000). This year the only Republican district candidate was O’Neill, the incumbent in District 10 in the Far Northeast.
But it nonetheless remains critical to put names on the ballot, even in uphill races, in order to pull Democratic officials to the right, Wolfe said.
“We need to present alternatives to Philadelphia,” he said. “We need to force the party in power to temper the things they do that helped them get reelected but are not in the long-term interests of the city.”
Some state-level GOP officials recognize the importance of activating Republican votes in the city and helped raise funds before the election, Wolfe said. He mentioned well-known GOP activists Andy Reilly, Rob Gleason, and Bob Asher as among those who helped.
Conservative billionaire Jeff Yass also tried to influence the Council election this fall by putting $300,000 into a super PAC called the Coalition for Safety and Equitable Growth, the Inquirer reported. The group put out ads attacking the Working Families Party but did not mention the Republican candidates.
“It was a pure negative operation. They didn’t do anything to boost Drew [and Jim],” Wolfe said.
Yass has spent millions to support Pennsylvania Republican candidates, including a large sum on Carolyn Carluccio’s unsuccessful Supreme Court run this year, but often to little effect.
