We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s May 20, 2023 session on the Philly Mayoral Election and Continuing Hegel’s Science of Logic. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.
We’re talking about the Democratic Party primary [in Philadelphia], which pretty much decides who will be the mayor because the Republican Party in many respects is a nonentity in terms of people who are voters and registered as Republicans. So we’re talking about, I think it’s estimated between 775-778,000 registered Democrats in the city of Philadelphia. A huge number. Almost everybody that is registered to vote in Philadelphia, or the majority who are registered to vote in Philadelphia, are Democrats.
Now of those 775-778,000 Democrats, about two-thirds to 70% are African Americans. If you add Latino or Spanish-speaking and Asians, it takes you up to about 70-73%. However as the city gentrifies, a growing number of educated – what we call the managerial technocratic elite – are moving to Philadelphia and are registered as Democrats for obvious reasons. They want to have a political impact. These are primarily white voters, they live in certain neighborhoods as Emily mentioned, for example around the University of Pennsylvania, perhaps in Northern Liberties, in Old City, in these neighborhoods, parts of Chestnut Hill that we associate with the professional managerial class, the highly educated. They make up anywhere from let us say, one-quarter to one-third of the registered Democrats, and they’re growing. They are concentrated again in certain divisions and certain wards.
My neighborhood – of which you never used to see white people manning the polls – now that’s all who man the polls down here, they control the Democratic Party apparatus and they get out to vote. So they vote in high numbers, very high numbers of them would have a propensity to vote for Helen Gym, to have been influenced by the rally that Bernie Sanders and AOC held here in Philadelphia. It didn’t even warrant a notice by most black voters, I mean I doubt that many even know who AOC is, maybe they know Bernie Sanders. But that rally, which was in this neighborhood by the way, was designed to mobilize the very group of white technocratic, highly educated people.
But the real story, as Emily points out, is the people who voted by not voting. When you look at the [city’s] divisions, that is the place where people go to vote. For example, where you vote is the division within a larger ward and those divisions are defined by income, homeownership or non-homeownership, education, and so on. So it’s kind of a mirror of the grassroots, and when you look at those divisions – which not only in this election, but in the last election and the election before that and the election before that – divisions which have 2% turnout, 5% turnout, you’re talking about 95-98% of the people not voting.
And then when you go to what we call the stable black working class, the lower middle-class people who are professionals but in the lower rung of that, for example in Cobbs Creek, maybe in certain parts of West Mount Airy, and so on. When you look at their voter turnout – and it too is not at that very low level that you find among the poor working class and all of that – but their voter turnout is below 25%. These are people who you would normally associate with an interest in, a motivation to vote and they normally did [in the past].
And if you go back to Philadelphia’s elections, they constituted – not only the activists – [the voting base] to elect the first black mayor, the second black mayor, the third black mayor. To the point where they just got tired of electing black mayors that did nothing for the most part, except raise their taxes. They have substantially withdrawn. And if you’re in certain divisions and certain wards like Cobbs Creek or West Oak Lane or parts of West Mount Airy – once again the stable working class, homeownership is high, especially if you go to West Mount Airy – beautiful blocks, people care about their homes and so on: a low voter turnout, in an election which the media and political commentators have said is a consequential election of a city in crisis.
So here’s my point, first of all if you look at certain things in the Philadelphia Inquirer they say, “Well we’re estimating between 25 and 30% turnout.” I question your estimate. One of the things they’re overestimating is the mail-in ballots that have not yet been counted. The other thing is that Cherelle Parker – congratulations to her, she graduated from the place that I went to college, whatever that means. She got under 100,000 votes. Which is a kind of way of saying that the winner won with less than 12% of the vote – I think my math is right – less than 12% of the [total] registered voters.
Now why do we say it was an insider or outsider race? First of all, this crystallized in the last month of the election – it was unclear how this would play out. Bob Brady, who was a longtime political player, he’s the chairman of the city Democratic Committee, which means the machine. The machine controls, in Philadelphia, there’s 67 voting wards, over 1,700 voting divisions. The city Democratic Committee controls the apparatus of voting as well as getting people to the polls. Maybe it’s a conflict of interest you might say, they control both the voting apparatus and mobilizing people to get to the polls. That’s a lot of power.
So the city Democratic Committee more or less in the last week endorsed Cherelle Parker, which meant that the entire apparatus for the most part, of 67 wards – 48 of them got letters from Bob Brady and did endorse Cherelle Parker. Huge advantage, insider advantage. Then early on she was endorsed by the Building Trades Council. That is the council that represents the Building Trades – the most conservative, most white, and in history the most racist of the union movement. But then she got the endorsement of two of the largest parts of the building trades and politically most influential: the Electrician’s Union – and all you have to do is drive down Spring Garden Street and see its headquarters to get a sense of how rich and powerful they are. The Electrician’s Union and the Carpenters Union, also a very big magnificent union headquarters on Spring Garden Street. But these two which would normally not endorse a black candidate, the Building Trades were known for endorsing Frank Rizzo, for example, when he was a Democrat and [later] when he was a Republican.
However the Building Trades are now aligned with a remade Democratic Party, nationally and locally and statewide. It’s a really interesting dance to look at, how they moved from an all-white union organization to now endorsing black candidates and a black mayoral candidate and even having, as the head of the Building Trades Council, a black man, at least the titular head, the symbolic head. So now you get to the city Democratic Committee, the most powerful – at least financially in a lot of ways, and electorally – parts of the union movement, the Building Trades. You know where service industry unions are in decline in membership, the Building Trades are always working because of all of this building that goes on in Center City. By the way, a good part of their membership don’t even live in the city and don’t even vote upon who the union leadership is going to endorse.
But the other side of this was [AFSCME] District Council 33, which is the largest of the group of unions, city workers, mainly non-professional city workers. It’s the largest group of workers in the city at this time. They came out, the council came out and endorsed Jeff Brown. However the largest union within the council, the sanitation workers – from which most of the leaders of the overall District Council have come from, the most organized, the most politically aware group – that part endorsed Cherelle Parker, went against the council and endorsed Cherrelle Parker. So now you get the largest part of the city workers, the largest union of city workers, the District Council of Building Trades, plus the city Democratic Committee.
This is an insider operation now. Then you add to it all of the formerly mayoral candidates, I think two or three black mayoral candidates who dropped out and then endorsed Cherelle Parker. The President of City Council, Darrell Clarke, endorses Cherrelle Parker, although there were two other former city council people running for mayor. Then you get the probably the most highly organized political machine among black people [in Philadelphia], and that is in the Northwest. That is West Mount Airy, West Oak Lane, parts of Germantown – from which Cherelle Parker came in her political evolution, but is controlled by Congressman Dwight Evans. You put all of this together, and it is almost insurmountable in a low-turnout election. Then you add to it the negative ads that were run against the three alternative candidates to Cherelle Parker.
They started with Jeff Brown when it looked like he was the leading candidate. They start with Jeff Brown, a bunch of negative ads. “He’s not what you think he is, he is not giving jobs that you think he is.” You know, all of that. Then they went to Allan Domb, again a former city councilman, negative ads and each of these people were either at one time in the lead or potentially leading in the polls. Then the last one they went after, Helen Gym. And this was a smear campaign the likes of which I don’t know we’ve ever seen in Philadelphia politics. Never. And of course with negative ads, she didn’t have a chance to respond to all of them. And it was to take her down, and they did, they succeeded in that.
Now what you have to know is that this was the most expensive mayoral campaign in the history of the city. And when you say expensive that means ad campaigns. Cherelle Parker was the only candidate that was not targeted by negative campaign ads, which suggests that the negative campaign ads were coming from people associated with Cherelle Parker. What I’m saying is in an election like this, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Cherelle Parker would win. All of the advantages were on her side, probably including money, I’m quite certain about that. There were many PACs around her and if you look at her campaign staff – and I’m not just talking about the get-out-to-vote staff – I’m talking about the strategists, the pollsters, and so on. These were people from the Biden campaign, from any number of mainstream, mainly white campaigns. Black face, white strategist, we know what that suggests. But with all of that and targeting the black vote – because this is what her campaign was designed to do, to block Helen or Jeff Brown for the most part from getting any black votes, even though people like Michael Coard and Uncle Bobby’s Marc Lamont Hill and them endorsed Helen Gym.
Helen Gym was cut off purposely from the black vote and this started early on. I heard it early on, that, “Well she’s not what you think she is.” And frankly none of this I knew about, I mean as I told people here a lot of times I’ve never found her to be the person that they were talking about. I know Bobby Zankel said to me, we talked on the phone after the election, he said, “Yeah there were people who said that ‘she wasn’t this, she wasnt that.’” I said I don’t know that person, and it’s easy to smear someone who people don’t know. “Oh you think you knew her or you didn’t really know,” you know, blasé, blasé. But they cut her off from the black vote. Bernie Sanders and AOC didn’t help the matter at all, which says something because I want to go forward 2024.
But what the data shows, and this is the story: The political system and the government of the city is illegitimate to the majority of people. It is a crisis of legitimacy. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the mainstream news outlets and so on are going to say one thing because they represent the establishment, and they wish to establish the legitimacy of this election. This election shows the illegitimacy of the ruling elite and the political class – black, white, or otherwise in this city. That is what the story is and Emily is absolutely right – there were no, as far as I know, town hall meetings among union members to take a straw poll over “who should we endorse.” This didn’t happen in the Electricians Union, it never does. In the Carpenters, in District Council 33, or in the Sanitation Division of District Council 33. It didn’t happen in any union and never does. So these unions, politically, operate un-democratically and their members know it. And that’s why the membership votes many times, or most times, increasingly the opposite of what the union leadership says they should do.
Of course now I’m going forward to 2024 in Philadelphia. Robert F. Kennedy Jr has a real potential base of voters’ support coming up to a Democratic primary for president. The no-turnout was not just against the city Democratic Committee but all of their connections including Joe Biden, and to [US Senator John] Fetterman, and to [PA Governor Josh] Shapiro, and others. In other words, to anybody that still thinks this is the game in town, they’re going to be deeply disappointed. These insiders are going to be left out in the cold, as they say. You know, just to say, this is the opposite of the 1983 election in Chicago where Harold Washington demolished the Chicago political machine, probably the strongest political machine in the country.
He demolished it from the grassroots, this was not a grassroots election and it reinstalled the machine rather than the people. The other thing is people are looking for outsiders, that’s why Jeff Brown had such resonance in the beginning, he just couldn’t put together a ground team. He was politically inexperienced but he had the goodwill of many black people because of hiring people, hiring people out of jail. People like Pastor Keith [Collins of the Church of the Overcomer] supported him and I’m certain that in my own neighborhood, I saw signs for him among people who don’t put signs in their window. I know this because I know these people. So it was a certain outsider appeal of Jeff Brown. Now, Robert Kennedy: outsider with a name that resonates with a lot of black folks, the Kennedy name. The other thing is the outsider appeal of Donald Trump to black folk, and there’s some polls that show that he is favorably looked at by 30% of black voters, no small thing.
You have to understand the historical attachment of black people to the Democratic Party, and this means Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; John F. Kennedy, this bright young man who called Martin Luther King, who was in jail when John F. Kennedy was coming up to the general election of 1960; Lyndon Johnson in the signing of the Civil Rights bills; Robert F. Kennedy, tragically assassinated at a time where he was talking about taking up the mandate of Martin Luther King and the war on poverty and opposing war – at the very moment that he’s about to be the nominee, he just won the California Primary, and that night they assassinate him. And then of course Barack Obama. There is a lot of emotional and actual connection to the Democratic Party, and then the Republican Party having lost black support because at least at one time at least 40%, maybe 50% or more of black voters were Republicans because of Abraham Lincoln.
But now as we saw from this election, most black voters in Philadelphia, probably 80% of black voters are saying we do not have a political party and the past is in the past, and what is today neither party, neither group of insiders are addressing. This makes 2024 an even more dynamic and explosive political moment than any election, perhaps since the election of 1860. And to fight in these big cities for the black vote is going to be the great struggle, the great ideological struggle. And all of the issues of war and peace, of poverty, of the working class are on the table. This is probably one of the great ideological moments in the history of this country. I mean, so we have to prepare.
I think in the Free School we’re kind of prepared for it, we’re not surprised by any of this. So that’s all I would say about that.
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