A deep dive into GOP nominee David Oh, who hopes to make this mayor’s race a competitive one

It’s still amazing to us that six City Council members ran for mayor this year.

Philadelphia requires city employees, including Council members, to resign if they want to run for an office other than the one they already hold. That means the lawmakers had to give up their salaries of more than $130,000 to enter a race they had no guarantee of winning.

Two of those former Council members, Democrat Cherelle Parker and Republican David Oh, are now duking it out in the general election. In this week’s newsletter, we’ll do a deep dive on Oh, with a heavy focus on his time in Council. (Oh, by the way, has tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the “resign-to-run” rule, but the voters seem to like it.)

Also this week, we’ll update you on the ongoing drama between establishment Democrats and progressives over the Working Families Party’s bid for Oh’s old Council seat, and take a look back at the last time a Republican won a Philadelphia mayor’s race.

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There are 28 days 🗓 until Election Day. Let’s get into it.

— Anna Orso and Sean Collins Walsh

In the spring, The Inquirer published in-depth profiles of the leading Democratic candidates. Back then, David Oh was running unopposed in the Republican primary, so we waited until the general election campaign to do a deep dive into his biography and career.

Our profile on Oh came out today. Here are the highlights:

Oh grew up in Southwest Philly, and he still lives there. Oh is the son of Korean immigrants, and his father was the pastor of the first Korean church in Philadelphia. He served briefly as a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office before joining the Army National Guard. But he prides himself on still living in a tough neighborhood in Southwest Philly.

Oh has clashed with both the Democratic and Republican machines. As one of the few Republicans elected to city government during his career, Oh was of course not a favorite among Democrats. But he also butted heads with the Philly GOP, which consistently backed other Republicans when Oh was on the ballot, even as an incumbent. Oh probably didn’t improve the relationship called when he pushed for audits of the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which is controlled by the state and is home to some of the last patronage jobs that the GOP has influence over.

Oh has also repeatedly clashed with his City Council colleagues. As a Republican, Oh did not have much of a chance of accomplishing anything big on Council. But he made headlines nonetheless, through some high-profile dust-ups with other lawmakers. Having little hope of winning a divided vote, Oh sometimes arranged for numerous people to show up for citizen comment and criticize his colleagues’ proposals or a city agency. That didn’t go over well.

Cherelle Parker is probably not the opponent Oh was hoping to face. When Oh entered the mayor’s race in February, he acknowledged that his best chance of winning the Nov. 7 general election would be if Democrats nominated a candidate from the left wing of their party. That did not happen. Parker is a moderate, and she is arguably to the right of Oh when it comes to public safety, the most important issue for voters this election cycle.

We’ve always known that Oh has a unique political coalition for a Philadelphia Republican.

He gets votes from all across the city, and not just in traditional GOP strongholds. And his supporters range from Uzbek immigrants to veterans to mothers whose children have been taken into custody by the Department of Human Services.

To better understand Oh’s unique political coalition, we once again turned to our colleague Aseem Shukla, The Inquirer’s data-driven storytelling reporter.

Shukla crunched the numbers by analyzing the demographics of voters in the 30 precincts where Oh outperformed his Republican rivals by the largest margins in the 2019 Council election. He also looked at the 30 precincts where the other Republicans did the best compared to Oh.

tl;dr ... The precincts where Oh did best compared to other Republicans were more racially diverse, less wealthy, and had more foreign-born residents.

Read more about what Shukla found here.

Tensions between progressive and establishment Democrats escalated last week after a pair of events related to the upcoming City Council race pitted the factions against one another.

First, the super powerful coalition of building trades unions, which is closely aligned with the Democratic party (and Parker), announced it’s endorsing five candidates for Council seats — including Republican Jim Hasher.

It’s not out of the ordinary for the trades to back a GOP candidate or two. But the nature of the Council race this year means that they’re now bankrolling a candidate who could beat incumbent Councilmember Kendra Brooks, of the Working Families Party.

Safe to say progressives aren’t thrilled. Then, the following day, a Democratic ward in South Philly took the rare step of endorsing the Working Families Party candidates, in addition to all five Democratic nominees.

That didn’t go over well with Democratic party leaders. Chair Bob Brady said it’s against the party bylaws to endorse candidates outside the party, and he vowed to seek the removal of ward leaders and any committee people who voted for the endorsement.

Brady has made no secret of his disdain for how the Working Families Party is trying to take the two seats on City Council that are essentially reserved for non-Democrats. He doesn’t appreciate that they’re basically asking voters to skip two Democrats and cast ballots for their people instead.

Brady threatening to drive out WFP supporters is one thing. Doing it is another. In 2019, he said he’d kick defectors off the city committee, but expulsions didn’t happen. We’ll be watching to see if it’s different this time around.

💥 The key takeaway: The intra-party tumult is itself not new and it’s a bit of inside baseball. But it does show that some in the Democratic party’s rank-and-file are willing to challenge Brady, and underscores how the Working Families Party has remade the political calculus in the city, especially around Council races.

The last time Philadelphia elected a Republican to the mayor’s office was 1947, when GOP nominee Bernard “Barney” Samuel defeated Democrat Richardson Dilworth.

Dilworth, a leading figure in Philly’s mid-century Democratic reform movement, went on to become mayor in the 1950s, and his legacy is well-known. But Samuel’s story isn’t told as often, which is odd because he had an immensely consequential career as a Council member and mayor.

Here’s a primer:

🕰️ Samuel was the longest-serving mayor in Philadelphia history. While serving as City Council president, he was elevated to the mayor’s office upon the death of Mayor Robert Lamberton in August 1941. He then won reelection twice and left office in January 1952.

🏙️ He appointed Edmund Bacon (who has zero degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, since he was the actor’s father) to be city planner, a hugely influential decision that literally shapes Philadelphia to this day.

💸 Samuel was instrumental in the creation of the city wage tax, which is now the city’s largest revenue source — and one of its most hotly debated issues.

📜 The campaign to write a new Home Rule Charter took place during his administration. The adoption of the charter, which is still the city’s governing document, coincided with the end of the Republican machine’s control of City Hall. The first wave of Democrats, including Dilworth, were reformers, but it wasn’t long before machine-style politics took over the newly dominant Democratic Party.

The first-ever convention of the 🔴 Republican Party 🐘 was held in Philadelphia in 1856. Last weekend, our city hosted the first-ever convention of the 🟣 Working Families Party 🟠 — which just so happens to be attempting to eliminate the Grand Old Party from elected office in Philadelphia. One of the featured speakers was U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D., Allegheny), seen above stepping off-stage after her remarks.

That’s all until next week. In the mean time, we’ve got hiiiiiigh hopes that the Braves will soon be enjoying a lengthy offseason.

— Anna and Sean