David Oh isn’t a typical Republican. He likes it that way.

Republican David Oh stood onstage at a cavernous South Philly dim sum restaurant last month and spoke to dozens of supporters about his long-shot campaign for mayor, promising them they could “change the face of politics in the city.”

During a 15-minute speech, he rattled off a list of the ethnic and racial groups represented in his coalition — twice.

“Ukrainians, Georgians, Belarussians,” Oh, 63, said. “Iranians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Dominican, Italian American, African American, Caribbean.”

His point?

“We cannot really have a great city, we cannot turn this city around, we cannot provide,” the former City Council member said, “if everyone is not at the table.”

» READ MORE: David Oh has a unique coalition of voters. Here’s how he is different than other Philly Republicans.

Oh, who is Korean American, has a unique role in Philadelphia politics. As a Republican in a Democratic town who has clashed with both party establishments, he has won three Council elections by patching together a diverse coalition of groups not typically involved in city politics, from Ukrainian Americans to “the DHS moms,” his name for mothers whose children are in the custody of the Department of Human Services.

His atypical voter base was apparent in the last several Council elections, in which he won votes across the city while other Republicans drew almost exclusively from more conservative areas in the Far Northeast and South Philadelphia.

It’s why Oh was able to win reelection in 2019 while his GOP colleagues came up short against the progressive Working Families Party’s historic attempt to capture Council’s two seats that are effectively set aside for non-Democrats.

The question now is whether Oh can use his unique base of supporters to make this the first competitive general election for mayor in 20 years.

“In being a citywide elected official, I tried to represent people that have been just ignored by the city,” he said, adding: “It’s almost impossible for a Republican to win, all things being equal. [But] all things are not equal.”

By that, Oh means that he is not a regular Philadelphia Republican.

Albert Eisenberg, a local GOP political consultant, said he believes Oh will do better than Republicans have in recent elections because he “has demonstrated crossover appeal, which is crucial.”

“The Asian restaurant owners — they all know David Oh. The Uzbeks in Northeast Philly — they all know David Oh. The veterans — they all know David Oh,” Eisenberg said. “He is someone who knows how to show up and knows how to represent constituent groups’ needs.”

» READ MORE: David Oh is serious about running for mayor. The GOP is listening.

Still, Oh faces a monumental challenge in the Nov. 7 general election against Democratic nominee Cherelle Parker in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 7-to-1 in voter registration.

No Republican has won a Philly mayor’s race since Bernard Samuel in 1947, and the last GOP nominee who came close was Sam Katz, who lost to Mayor John F. Street in 1999 and 2003.

The son of Korean immigrants, Oh grew up in Southwest Philadelphia and graduated from Central High School and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.

His father, the Rev. Ki Hang Oh, was the founder and pastor of the first Korean-American church in Philadelphia.

He still lives in Southwest Philadelphia with his wife and four children and says it shapes his policy positions, particularly on public safety. In 2017, he was stabbed near his home during a botched robbery.

He says he has a nuanced view on policing, believing that officers must be empowered to enforce laws, but “you can’t simply just deploy police all over the place, because people feel invaded.”

“Other Council people present like they grew up in the hood. They haven’t lived there in 40 years,” Oh said. “A lot of people in our city do not really know how other people live, and they don’t know really what impacts them.”

Oh earned a law degree from Rutgers University in Camden and worked as a prosecutor in Philadelphia before resigning in 1988 to join the Army.

He graduated from the Officer Candidate School and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army National Guard, stationed in Maryland.

Oh’s characterization of his military service has generated controversy. In 2011, he apologized for claiming that he was a member of the Green Berets, the elite special forces of the Army. Oh’s National Guard unit is part of the Special Forces, and he began the selection process to become a Green Beret after his unit was activated during the first Gulf War.

» READ MORE: Philly mayoral candidate David Oh once apologized for saying he was a Green Beret. But he now repeats the claims.

But Oh was not selected to complete the training, and his unit was never sent into combat. The issue seemed to be behind him until this year, when he repeated his claim to being a Green Beret and was criticized by a veterans group.

After receiving an honorable discharge, Oh opened a law practice in Philadelphia and became involved in civic and political activities. He served on former Mayor Ed Rendell’s transition committee and led a trade mission to South Korea for former Gov. Tom Ridge.

He ran for Council unsuccessfully twice before prevailing in 2011 and winning reelection in 2015 and 2019.

Oh’s victories are notable because he was never backed — and was sometimes actively targeted — by the Philadelphia GOP establishment. On Council, Oh cemented his antagonistic relationship with his own party by pushing to audit the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which is controlled by the state and was widely seen as the last bastion of Republican patronage jobs in city government.

For the most part, Oh steered away from partisan political issues in Council, preferring to work on issues important to niche communities. On a range of issues from immigration to abortion, he is well to the left of the national Republican mainstream.

But he voted repeatedly to cut taxes, and he joined his GOP colleagues in 2016 by voting against Mayor Jim Kenney’s tax on soda and other sweetened beverages.

Oh says he cast a write-in vote for Republican Jeb Bush in the 2016 general election for president, but voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

He said he’s trying to separate himself from national politics because “President Biden or Trump or whomever has no authority to fill a pothole in this city.”

As one of only a handful of Republicans on Council, Oh was rarely involved in passing major legislation. But he became entangled in several notable disputes with his colleagues, sometimes sparked by him pushing legislation that had little chance of passing but was important to an overlooked constituency.

Oh, for instance, frustrated his fellow lawmakers last year when he insisted Council call for a no-fly zone over parts of Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion. The resolution failed, with then-Councilmember Helen Gym saying, “I do not believe our City Council body should issue a declaration of war.”

Three months later, another colleague, Katherine Gilmore Richardson, accused Oh of starting a “misinformation campaign” around her legislation to provide municipal hiring preferences to candidates who complete career and technical education.

Gilmore Richardson said Oh riled up veterans by saying it would effectively weaken hiring preferences for them — ignoring that the legislation stated those students could not get a job over a veteran with similar qualifications.

“I’m not the first colleague he’s done this to,” Gilmore Richardson said during a Council session. “Councilmember Oh, can you please publicly state to this body how you came to my office and asked me not to introduce this bill and basically, you would sic the veterans on me if I did?”

Oh denied the episode happened and said he was standing up for a community that sees him as an ally.

» READ MORE: This Philly mayor’s race isn’t over yet. Here’s what to expect this fall.

And in 2017, Oh was the chief opponent of legislation to regulate so-called stop-and-gos, convenience stores that serve alcohol. The bill, crafted by Councilmember Cindy Bass, banned large food establishments from installing bulletproof glass partitions, which she said dehumanized customers in Black neighborhoods.

Asian American beer deli owners, supported by Oh, rallied against it, saying the legislation could jeopardize their safety. The debate was heated, with the two sides split largely by race. The legislation ultimately passed.

The next year, Oh accidentally broke his son’s collarbone while practicing martial arts, a hospital social worker reported the incident, and the city Department of Human Services investigated. They ultimately cleared Oh of wrongdoing, but he was nonetheless incensed that he had been investigated.

He questioned the agency’s child removal policies and a year later held a hearing featuring dozens of mothers criticizing city officials in emotional testimony. The agency pushed back on Oh’s accusations, and the hearing did not result in significant policy changes. But Oh had tapped into a new community of supporters.

In each of these cases, Oh says he saw it as his duty to represent a constituency he sees as ignored.

“It’s important to show them that they’re important to us in the city,” Oh said. “And beyond showing up to festivals, dinners, and flag-raisings. They have issues.”

Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr. said he admired Oh for being outspoken and “unapologetically himself,” but hasn’t seen many tangible results.

“It’s good to take a relevant issue and try to amplify it on this platform,” Jones said. “But at the end of the day, does it become a verb? Does it become an action?”

When Oh resigned from Council in February to enter the mayor’s race, he acknowledged that his best shot at winning the general election would be if Democrats nominated someone from the far left wing of their party.

But Parker, like Oh, is a centrist with a tough-on-crime platform and a diverse coalition of supporters. In other words, Oh ended up with perhaps the most challenging general election matchup he could have gotten.

Oh is nevertheless campaigning seriously. He has raised about $467,000 as of the last campaign finance reporting period, a respectable sum for a GOP candidate but well short of the millions what he would likely need to compete with Parker.

Oh thinks he’ll draw more Democratic support than GOP candidates have in the past. He’s pitching himself as a former prosecutor who believes state and local laws need to be enforced. He says the police should arrest people for public drug use, and he opposes efforts to keep police from enforcing some low-level offenses.

He’s also telling voters that he’s the candidate most capable of making change because he’s clashed with both party machines — unlike Parker, a political insider.

And he says he’s doing the work to meet with residents from groups large and small, while Parker has kept a light campaign schedule since the primary.

“The momentum’s with me, and it’s not because the money’s with me,” he said. “There will come a point in time where [Parker’s] team is going to understand... that she might lose this race.”

» READ MORE: Cherelle Parker is proud of her West Oak Lane roots. As mayor, could she save Philly’s ‘middle neighborhoods’?

Oh is hoping he can pull off the upset with the support of voters like Allan Wong, of South Philadelphia, who attended Oh’s event last month at the dim sum restaurant.

Wong switched his voter registration from Democrat to independent and said politics don’t matter much to him, but he has followed Oh’s career for years.

“His support is a lot broader than most Republicans,” Wong, 77, said. “He’s a person who really wants to help the community, and not just Asians. He reaches out to the entire city, and he hears us.”

Staff writer Aseem Shukla contributed to this article.