Centrists back Seth Bluestein for Philly city commissioner, with an eye to 2024

Two things loomed large Thursday as the Forward Party endorsed Republican incumbent Seth Bluestein in November’s election for Philadelphia city commissioner.

First was 2020, when Bluestein and other officials who oversaw the presidential election faced a torrent of abuse from people beguiled into believing then-President Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud.

Then came 2024, and the expectation that Philadelphia will again be the target of conspiracy theories.

The Forward Party is a centrist group founded by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. He cochairs it with former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.

Whitman on Thursday, with Independence Hall as a backdrop, said the nation’s founding fathers warned in Philadelphia about political parties becoming instruments of power.

Bluestein protected democracy against that, she said, as a deputy city commissioner in 2020 while enduring “horrific attacks.”

» READ MORE: Working Families Party candidate drops out of race for Philadelphia city commissioner

It wasn’t a huge news conference. And it came the day before the only candidate posing a challenge to Bluestein in November, Jarrett Smith of the progressive Working Families Party, dropped out of the race just hours before a hearing Friday on a challenge to Smith’s candidacy.

Still, the effort captured the bipartisan concern about the need for a credible and experienced Republican managing the election tally next year in a city where the GOP is outnumbered by Democrats 7-to-1.

The commissioners administer elections in Philadelphia, and Bluestein and Smith are competing for a seat on the three-member board reserved for a member of the nonmajority party.

Trump, despite serious and impending criminal trials, appears likely to be his party’s nominee and has continued to spread lies about election fraud. The former reality television showman’s 2024 season script reads for now like a rerun of his 2020 season.

Bluestein touted his record while acknowledging the “antisemitic harassments and violent threats against me and my family” in 2020.

“Election administration should not be a partisan activity,” he said. “There is no Democratic or Republican way to run elections.”

Unlike upstart political groups such as the Working Families Party and No Labels, the Forward Party is not recruiting candidates. Instead, it supports candidates who pledge to work in an open and bipartisan fashion.

Craig Snyder, a Republican political consultant working with the Forward Party in Pennsylvania, said the group would help recruit volunteers and raise funds for a super PAC to back Bluestein.

He too cited Bluestein’s 2020 work with then-City Commissioner Al Schmidt, now Pennsylvania’s secretary of state.

“They were standing in the breach against all the false claims about fraud and the election in Philadelphia being stolen,” Snyder said. “I do not think the Working Families Party candidate, if he were to replace Seth, could stand in that same role and have that same national respect.”

Trump faces state criminal charges in New York and federal indictments in Florida and Washington. Another state indictment looms, likely next week in Georgia.

But the guy who can’t stop lying about how he lost the 2020 election got a little good news in a legal case in Philadelphia.

Yes, from the city about which he infamously and baselessly intoned: “Bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Erdos ruled last week that Trump can invoke presidential immunity in a defamation case filed in 2021 by James Savage, a Delaware County voting machine supervisor who accuses the former president of pushing unsubstantiated claims that he tampered with the 2020 election results.

Trump, who was still president, made those claims in phone-in testimony during a state Senate committee hearing in Gettysburg three weeks after the 2020 election and a tweet two days later.

Erdos wrote that it’s not his job to determine Trump’s “mindset” when he made those comments. But he also noted that no court has found “any widescale fraud or significant vote tally inaccuracies” and that Trump’s motivation “could have been to overturn the election results even if he actually believed that he had fairly lost.”

Erdos ruled last month that Trump’s immunity does not extend to an October 2022 letter Trump sent to the U.S. House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump was no longer president when he sent that letter, which included his Delco allegations.

Savage can take that to trial, since Erdos also rejected Trump’s request to dismiss the case.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner likes the Working Families Party so much that he signed the progressive group’s nomination petitions twice — on March 25 and June 15 —for a slate of candidates for City Council and city commissioner.

Several Clout sources closely parsing the petitions took notice.

One problem: That’s not allowed under the state’s election code.

Maybe he didn’t know?

Clout certainly had a difficult path to finding the answer. The Pennsylvania Department of State initially referred our question on double-signing to Philadelphia’s Law Department, which refused to answer in case this became “the subject of litigation.”

Back to the Department of State, where we got confirmation that the double-signing was not allowed.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer for Krasner’s political operation, offered this legal summation: Meh.

“It’s not like there’s any consequences for signing more than one,” said Bonin, one of the city’s top election lawyers. “I don’t encourage people to sign multiples. But, it’s also not a problem.”

Clout provides often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.