In a mayor’s race stacked with political outsiders, Cherelle Parker is the consummate insider

When Cherelle Parker got married in 2010, she was given away by City Councilmember Marian Tasco and State Rep. Dwight Evans.

Her groom was Ben Mullins Jr., a union leader in the building trades. Mayor Michael A. Nutter was in attendance, former state welfare secretary John F. White Jr. sang the Lord’s Prayer, and the Rev. Dr. Alyn Waller, one of the city’s most influential clergy members, presided over the service.

Parker, who lost much of her family at a young age and started interning for Tasco when she was in high school, isn’t just a member of Philadelphia’s Black political establishment. She was practically raised by it.

Those connections are paying off for Parker as she runs for mayor this year with endorsements from two U.S. representatives, four state senators, nine current and former state representatives, five Council members, and a growing roster of Democratic ward leaders.

That’s far more nods from local elected officials than any of the other four front-runners in the May 16 Democratic primary.

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The relationships she built over years as a lawmaker, first as chair of Philadelphia’s delegation to Harrisburg and later as Council’s majority leader, have also yielded endorsements from important unions like the Building Trades Council and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union.

For Parker, those are proof she can build coalitions to execute her priorities if she is elected. But to her critics, they mean a Parker administration would preserve an undesirable status quo.

“There is a desire for change, and [Parker’s opponents] are all trying to position Cherelle as status quo,” said Joseph P. McLaughlin Jr., who represented the city as a lobbyist under several mayoral administrations and later led Temple University’s Center on Regional Politics. “In that sense, I think Cherelle does carry the burden, perception-wise, of being the machine.”

Parker objects to the notion that electing the city’s first Black female mayor would preserve the status quo. And she stressed that she built relationships for years to earn her endorsements.

“Nothing has ever been handed to me on a silver platter. I have had to be intentional about the work done in my life, particularly professionally,” Parker said in an interview. “I don’t have a luxury of thinking that anything is just going to be given to me just because.”

She takes particular pride in winning over the building trades, a coalition of 30 construction unions whose members lean white and suburban, and Local 32BJ, which represents building services workers and has a more diverse and low-income membership.

“It took a lot of hard work and being very strategic,” Parker said. “Anyone running for mayor who doesn’t understand that you need advocates — they don’t really know what it takes to govern and get something done.”

The Democratic City Committee declined to endorse a candidate in the primary. That’s the party’s usual practice in open mayoral elections. Without a citywide endorsement, the candidates must court each of the party’s 69 ward leaders — often in the form of a generous contribution.

Nonetheless, party chairman Bob Brady in recent days has hinted that his allegiance and those of many other ward leaders lies with Parker. At the party’s annual dinner on Tuesday night, Brady invited Parker on stage.

“She came here to respect us, to take time out of her busy schedule to come to this cocktail party,” Brady told the attendees. “We need to show the respect back to her.”

In Philadelphia, there isn’t one Democratic machine, but a constellation of political families that dominate elections in their corners of the city. They often start as insurgent challengers to the previous old guard before taking over their area, such as the storied Northwest Coalition that birthed Evans’ and Tasco’s careers.

They propagate themselves by orchestrating noncompetitive elections in which proteges or top staffers take over the seats their former bosses held before retiring or running for higher office. Parker replaced Tasco in Council’s 9th District in 2016 and has also taken over for Tasco as Democratic leader of the 50th ward, which often boasts the highest voter turnout rate in the city.

To expand beyond her base had in the Northwest, Parker needed to court local officials elsewhere.

In West Philadelphia, she won over State Sen. Vincent Hughes, who is the effective heir to former U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah’s old political network, and Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr., who also got his start with Fattah.

There is no comparable organization in North Philadelphia, but the political progeny of former Mayor John F. Street looms large there. While Street has endorsed Rebecca Rhynhart, he is less politically active in his old stomping grounds than his son, State Sen. Sharif Street, and his protégé, Council President Darrell L. Clarke. Both are behind Parker.

Perhaps the most notable Black Philly politician who has not endorsed Parker is State Sen. Anthony H. Williams (D., Philadelphia), the leader of the political organization founded by his father, Hardy Williams, that dominates in Southwest Philadelphia and western South Philly.

Williams did not respond to an interview request.

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Parker is also making a play to be competitive in Northeast Philadelphia, which is dominated by more conservative working-class white voters. In addition to the building trades, she has secured the endorsement of U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, as well as a slew of ward leaders in the Northeast.

With several other candidates vying for votes in those neighborhoods, it’s unclear whether Parker can take a significant amount of votes there.

But she said her outreach to parts of the city outside her base could pay off by making her more effective as mayor. Her opponents, who haven’t sought support from all pockets of the city, she said, would struggle to “get to nine,” the majority of Council’s 17 members needed to pass legislation.

“When they get in Council, they can’t get to nine because they haven’t worked on and been strategic about developing relationships with people and developing structures that will help them in governance,” she said. “It’s not enough for me to get elected.”

Each of the other four contenders in the mayor’s race are outsiders to the city’s Democratic establishment in their own ways.

Helen Gym burst onto the Philly political scene as a rabble-rousing education activist before running in 2015 for Council, where she often stood alone as a progressive critic of the body’s centrist Democratic majority.

Also in 2015, real estate magnate Allan Domb poured hundreds of thousands into his own winning Council campaign, vowing to bring his business acumen to city government.

Rhynhart left a career on Wall Street to join city government under Nutter’s administration before running for city controller in 2017 and defeating a party-backed incumbent in the Democratic primary.

And Jeff Brown, a ShopRite proprietor who had never run for office, made his chaotic entrance into local politics in this year’s election, criticizing his opponents for being part of the City Hall status quo while also making a series of unforced errors that more experienced politicians would likely have avoided.

That makes the race in some ways an inverse of the 2007 election, when Nutter, a Council member with an independent streak and few friends in the Democratic establishment, shockingly defeated a field of political heavyweights, including Evans, Fattah, and Bob Brady.

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One reason so many political outsiders have thrown their hats in the ring may be that they felt they could capitalize on dissatisfaction with City Hall, McLaughlin said.

“That’s partly a feature of the strong disappointment across the board with City Hall and the fact that it’s an open seat. There’s no incumbent,” he said. “There’s a widespread feeling that the city has a lot of problems it’s unable or unwilling to deal with.“

But City Hall lobbyist Mustafa Rashed said that because voters are focused on public safety, attempts by some of the other candidates to paint themselves as outsiders — despite recent tenures in government — may prove ineffective.

”Public safety is that important and critical right now, and if I’m a voter, I want to know which of these candidates based on their previous experience has a plan and can implement it,” he said. “You’re only allowed a certain amount of time being an outsider before you’re an insider.”

When Mayor Jim Kenney entered the 2015 race at the eleventh hour, he stepped into a ready-made campaign with guaranteed financial support from the building trades and teachers unions, as well as a slew of elected officials poised to endorse whoever ran against the early front-runner, Williams.

Looking at Parker’s dominance among party insiders this year, it would be reasonable to assume that she was similarly handpicked by the political class.

But Parker entered the mayor’s race with few guarantees of support. For some key endorsements, she had to cajole officials into backing her campaign months after she threw her hat in the ring.

Hughes considered running for mayor himself before backing Parker. Two of her most recent endorsers — Parker’s former Council colleagues Derek Green and Maria Quiñones Sánchez — indeed did run against her in the mayor’s race before bowing out. Even Evans, who is now a member of Congress, took a conspicuously long time to endorse his onetime mentee.

Ken Snyder, a media consultant for Kenney’s 2015 campaign, said Parker has been able to rack up endorsements for several reasons.

“She gets [endorsements] by default to some extent because the other candidates haven’t played an inside game,” said Snyder, who also worked on Green’s mayoral run this year before he dropped out. “She also gets it because she earned it. She’s just very good at organizational politics.”

Through her years in Harrisburg and Council, Snyder said, other officials and unions have come to know Parker “as someone who you can work with.”

“Some people view that as a negative. Some people view it as, ‘Oh, she’s transactional,’” Snyder said. “But really, you want your mayor to put coalitions together.”

Staff writer Chris Brennan contributed to this article.