David Oh has a unique coalition of voters. Here’s how he is different from other Philly Republicans.

David Oh is not your typical Philadelphia Republican. But that doesn’t mean he defies political gravity.

Oh, the Republican mayoral nominee, is running against Democrat Cherelle Parker in the Nov. 7 general election. The Inquirer analyzed past election results and found that Oh’s voter base is more diverse and geographically dispersed than that of other GOP candidates.

» READ MORE: David Oh isn't a typical Republican. He likes it that way.

Oh’s unique political coalition is the primary reason he was able to hold on to his Council seat in 2019, when the four other Republicans running for Council’s at-large seats came up short.

Oh is hoping that same coalition will make him the first competitive Republican candidate in a mayor’s race in 20 years. But he still faces an uphill battle against Parker in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

The citywide coalition of voters that helped Oh win three terms as an at-large member of Council differs markedly from the coalitions other Republican candidates have relied on.

Usually, Republicans draw almost all of their support from the more conservative areas of the Far Northeast and South Philadelphia. Oh, however, won votes across the city while performing comparatively poorly in the traditional GOP strongholds.

This map, which shows how Oh did relative to his fellow Republican candidates for Council’s at-large seats in the 2015 general election, at first glance looks as if it may show a Democratic candidates’ results.

From promoting businesses in Chinatown to giving a platform to mothers who believe that their children were wrongly taken by the Department of Human Services, Oh has made a career out of championing the interests of diverse groups of voters who are not typically involved in Philadelphia politics.

He has also butted heads with the GOP establishment in Philadelphia, which is dominated by white voters.

Consequently, Oh has carved out a more diverse voter base than other Republicans.

To illustrate how different those voters are, The Inquirer analyzed the demographics of voters in the 30 precincts where Oh outperformed his Republican rivals by the largest margins in the 2019 Council election, as well as the 30 precincts where other Republicans most strongly outran Oh. The analysis involved comparing Oh’s vote total in each precinct to the average of the four other Republicans’ totals.

The precincts most supportive of the other Republican candidates compared to Oh were 72% white, 9% Black, and 7% Asian. Meanwhile, the precincts in which Oh bested his GOP rivals by the largest margins were 37% white, 19% Black, and 27% Asian.

The Oh-friendly precincts were also poorer and had more renters and foreign-born residents than the precincts where other Republicans most outperformed him. But they also had higher rates of college attainment.

There are two problems facing Oh as he tries to pull off a win over Parker.

First, there simply aren’t many Republicans in Philadelphia. Second, Parker is not the type of candidate who is likely to drive Democrats into the GOP fold.

When he entered the mayor’s race in February, Oh acknowledged that his best shot would be if Democrats nominated a far-left candidate. Instead, they picked Parker, a tough-on-crime moderate who also has a diverse voter base.

» READ MORE: The voters who propelled Cherelle Parker to victory

In the 2019 general election, for example, the Democrat who did the worst in the at-large Council race, Allan Domb, won more than three times as many votes as Oh.

Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, was coasting to reelection against Republican Billy Ciangalini. Oh, meanwhile, was in a fight for his political life against an unprecedented attempt by the progressive Working Families Party to capture the two Council at-large that are effectively reserved for non-Democrats.

Oh survived that challenge narrowly, an impressive victory. But in doing so he captured fewer than 54,000 votes. Kenney, whose performance in that election is the best indicator of how will do Parker this year, got about 235,000 votes.