Maria Quiñones Sánchez won’t be Philadelphia’s first Latina mayor, but she can still propel Latinos forward

I’ve never been a big fan of the “maybe it’s for the best” response when things don’t go as we hoped. It’s always struck me as toxic positivity’s equivalent of a participation trophy.

But as surprised as I was that Maria Quiñones Sánchez dropped out of Philadelphia’s historic 100th mayoral race, that’s the way I’m leaning.

The first Latina mayoral candidate in Philadelphia history announced this weekend that she decided to end her bid because of the “obnoxious, obscene amount of money” tipping the race.

When we spoke on Monday, Quiñones Sánchez was still seething about how money too often trumps merit in today’s politics.

She was proud of the $800,000 her campaign raised and grateful to those who believed in her, she told me. But “it was never going to add up.”

Not when six weeks before the primary, $22 million have already flooded the race, much of that total from self-financed candidates, including $7 million that real estate magnate and former Councilmember Allan Domb gave to his own campaign. There’s also the $2.5 million in “dark money” that anonymous donors have given to a super PAC backing candidate Jeff Brown — whose fundraising activities have come under scrutiny from the Philadelphia Board of Ethics.

And while Quiñones Sánchez saying that “it doesn’t matter that you’re the most qualified” reflects some of her disappointment, it does speak to the question of dues-paying by candidates and the rise of folks who are well-financed but may have otherwise thin résumés.

If you’re ever wondering why politics is such a mess, why many politicians often bear so little resemblance to the constituents they represent, start with the entrance fee in politics. Five of the candidates in this year’s race have already raised more than a million dollars.

Sure, the $800,000 that Quiñones Sánchez collected would be a respectable sum in most election years. But here’s some perspective on the kind of financial competition Quiñones Sánchez was up against: One candidate, Brown, was able to loan his campaign the same amount that she spent months cobbling together from donations.

And in Philadelphia — the poorest big city in the nation — that reality shuts out a lot of people who may best represent its underrepresented residents, including Latinos.

Latinos make up 16% of the city’s population but held just one of 17 Council seats before Quiñones Sánchez resigned to run for mayor.

(Quetcy Lozada, who used to work for Quiñones Sánchez, won a special election for the right to serve the final 14 months of her former boss’s term; Lozada is running for a full, four-year term in the May primary.)

Before joining the race, Quiñones Sánchez was the first Latina to serve on City Council, representing the heavily Puerto Rican 7th Council District for 15 years.

With Quiñones Sánchez out, there are no Latino candidates in the race, and only two other Latinas running for citywide races — Erika Almirón, an immigration activist, and Luz Colón, who led the statewide Latino commission for former Gov. Tom Wolf, are competing for five at-large seats in the Democratic primary. That means the city’s Latino population — which has grown tenfold over the past half-century to nearly a quarter million people — could find itself underrepresented yet again in City Hall.

To try and combat that, Quiñones Sánchez simultaneously announced her withdrawal from the mayoral race with a series of policy proposals that she’s calling Agenda Latina — a plan to increase Latino representation in Philly politics, improve language access in city government, and launch a new affordable housing subsidy program in a city where Hispanics have the highest poverty rate at nearly 40%.

Quiñones Sánchez hopes that the plan serves two purposes: inspiring the rest of the mayoral field to focus on issues vital to Latinos in the city and also motivating Latino voters to show up for the primary on May 16.

Turnout in Latino-majority precincts is typically among the lowest in the city.

“No one has been talking to us,” Quiñones Sánchez said. “And maybe because I was in the race, they figured they couldn’t get that vote, but whoever wins is going to do it with a small margin. Latinos can pick the next winner, and over the next 30-plus days, I’m going to make sure that they come out and vote and pick the next mayor.”

In return, she expects whoever wins to pay a lot more attention to Latinos in the city. And after Monday night’s Latino Mayoral Forum, where candidates were embarrassingly short on specifics about how they planned to uplift Philly’s Latino community, she’s got her work cut out for her.

This is where the “maybe for the best” comes in, because I’ll be honest here, as a fellow Puerto Rican in a city with such little Latino representation in top positions, it was disappointing to see Quiñones Sánchez bow out. Was she going to win? Probably not. But I expected her to go down fighting until the bitter end.

Except that’s just it — this isn’t the end, not by a long shot. Quiñones Sánchez is a supersmart policy wonk who ran as an accountability candidate promising to “get stuff done” (although she used a more colorful word than “stuff”). Having all of her intellect and all of her energy laser-focused on the needs of 16% of the city may finally help push Latinos into positions from which they’ve long been absent.

When I noted that, Quiñones Sánchez said she’d always thought of going to a charitable foundation to end her career, but maybe it’s time to go to a place where she can put some money toward efforts to increase representation.

Why not? There are far too many rooms, in the city and across the nation, where Latinas are still among the first or the only, if they are represented at all.

Quiñones Sánchez may have been the first Latina to run for mayor — but we have to ensure she will not be the last.