Meet the staffers who ran Cherelle Parker’s historic campaign and will lead her mayoral administration

Aren Platt cemented his relationship with Cherelle Parker almost a decade before she ran for mayor, as a canny adviser who helped her navigate a dark chapter in her political career.

Sinceré Harris didn’t enter the picture until late last year, when Parker lured her away from a dream job in the White House.

Together, Harris and Platt were the architects of a campaign that culminated in Parker’s history-making victory last week. And come January, they will be two of the most important officials in the administration of Philadelphia’s first female mayor.

» READ MORE: Inside Cherelle Parker’s winning campaign for Philly’s Democratic mayoral primary

“This is the team,” Parker said of the duo in her election night victory speech. “When there were folks who said, ‘You are not going to do this because you won’t be able to raise the money,’ they never questioned our competence. They never questioned our ability.”

Parker has kept a tight inner circle since winning the Democratic nomination in May, and Harris and Platt are part of almost every major decision. It will fall largely to them to implement Parker’s agenda next year.

Both are Mount Airy natives. Both share much of Parker’s centrist Democratic politics. And both keep the type of hours that would be seen as unhealthy by most people but are commonplace in high-level politics.

Platt, 47, says he goes to bed around 10 p.m., wakes up at midnight, works for a few hours, and goes back to bed again before getting up for the day. He estimates he gets four to five hours of sleep per night.

Asked how she manages work-life balance, Harris, 40, said, “Oh, there isn’t one.”

In separate interviews, both said, unprompted, that they have a problem with people who move out of the city. Platt said he is dismayed by people who have “this sense of fatality about the city, that it’s never going to get better” due to public safety issues or other concerns.

“I will always live in the city. I will never live in the suburbs,” Harris said. “I feel like we’re the best city, hands down.”

Platt’s parents met when his father was an attorney with Community Legal Services and his mother was a social worker, and he said they gave him a sense of “civic responsibility.” He attended Germantown Friends School, went to Drexel University, and worked in advertising.

Platt got his first job in politics, on former Gov. Ed Rendell’s 2006 reelection campaign, through a family friend, attorney Justin Klein. He went on to work on state and congressional campaigns with a specialty in fundraising.

“I maybe have a comfort with aggressively pursuing fundraising dollars that not everybody has,” Platt said. The key, he said, is “the insight to know if somebody’s like, ‘Well, here’s $100,’ but they could do $1,000, to say, ‘I’m not taking $100.’”

In 2014, Platt was invited to a fundraiser at the Union League for Parker, then a state representative he didn’t know well. The host committee was an impressive lineup of Philly Democratic leaders, and it caught Platt’s attention.

He got coffee with Parker, who shared her ambitions of running for Council in 2015. Platt said he was “blown away by her intuition and intelligence” and has been an adviser, formally or informally, ever since.

Around then, he helped her navigate the aftermath of her 2011 arrest for driving under the influence. When they met, Parker was pursuing an appeal, which she eventually lost.

“The toughest time that I have ever had in my professional and personal life — and I had to deal with it publicly back in 2011 — and that was the DUI,” Parker said during her victory speech. “It was Aren Platt who was the adviser who helped me through those difficult times.”

Platt also worked with the state Senate Democratic caucus and former State. Sen. Daylin Leach. He managed Leach’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 2014. Three years later, The Inquirer reported Leach had a history of inappropriate touching and sexualized comments, and the controversy sank his political career. In a recent interview Platt declined to comment on Leach.

Platt then took a career detour to work for the founder and CEO of La Colombe, Todd Carmichael, who said he was in awe of Platt’s work ethic.

“He’s a rare breed,” Carmichael said. “There’s not a lot of guys with that kind of stamina and that kind of heart. He doesn’t eat! He doesn’t sleep! … And you can’t get him off topic.”

Carmichael wanted to make La Colombe a force for good, and Platt led those efforts, including a program that paid off kids’ school lunch debts. It aligned perfectly with Platt’s politics.

“I believe in business. I believe in capitalism,” he said. “If I go to Washington, D.C., or Harrisburg, I’m very liberal. In Philadelphia, I’m a centrist.”

Platt lives in Center City. He has one child from a previous marriage and one with his wife, Jessica Cosmé, a Philadelphia political operative and lobbyist. (Cosmé plans to pivot from lobbying to public affairs to avoid conflicts of interest with the Parker administration.)

With thick-frame glasses, a beard, and opinions on coffee and music, Platt is the hipster dad of political consultants. His children, he said, are his primary motivation.

“If I’m successful here, the city that I love will be a better place for them,” he said.

Harris, who is Black and Puerto Rican, has achieved a meteoric rise in politics that one mentor credited to her desire to learn new skills. She avoids the spotlight, preferring behind-the-scenes work, calls herself “old school,” and loves studying history — from ancient Egypt to the Philly mob.

She attended Philly public schools and Temple University. Her mother worked in health care administration, and her father, a mechanical engineer, raised her with lessons on politics and social justice.

Those lessons clicked when she was in high school and the state took control of the city’s school district.

“I just had a sense that Philadelphia typically gets the short end of the stick, and I learned about the dynamics with Harrisburg and Democratic politics,” she said. “That’s really when I started to feel like politics was a way to make change.”

Starting in college, Harris volunteered for campaigns, and after working for Verizon for a few years, took a job with former Mayor Michael A. Nutter’s 2011 reelection effort.

She then worked on former President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign in Pennsylvania, and former Gov. Tom Wolf’s 2014 win.

She served in Wolf’s administration as a liaison to the legislature, working under Mary Isenhour, who said Harris is a constant learner and “takes what she’s doing very seriously.”

“You don’t mess around with her and you don’t underestimate her,” Isenhour said. (Isenhour now co-owns a Harrisburg lobbying firm that Parker has been working for part-time since she resigned from Council last year to run for mayor.)

Harris was executive director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party from late 2015 through 2020. Former President Donald Trump’s 2016 win, she said, was “a shock to the system, to put it mildly.” When 2020 came, “we were ready to actually take on Trump,” Harris said.

She ascended to a job in President Joe Biden’s White House working with local governments on environmental issues when she was offered the opportunity to run Parker’s campaign.

It was a difficult choice. She felt strongly that Parker would be a good mayor and “just as strongly” that other candidates would not. And she was aching for her city amid record-setting levels of gun violence.

“If any one of those variables hadn’t been there, I don’t know that I would have upended my life,” Harris said.

Harris, who lives in Northern Liberties, was the only woman to run a major mayoral campaign in Philly this year. She and Parker “just clicked,” she said.

“I thought I saw me in her,” Harris said. “She’s old school in her way of thinking, but I think in all the good ways about being old school. The loyalty and respect for folks who did it before you and always acknowledging that. Making the personal touch, little things.”

Parker hasn’t yet decided what titles Platt or Harris will have in her administration, but they will be at the top, potentially as chief of staff and deputy mayor. Because neither has significant City Hall experience, Parker will likely bring in another top aide.

While inexperience with City Hall may become a hurdle, it was sometimes a blessing on the campaign trail. Platt was able to raise money from donors who don’t often get involved in Philly politics. And Harris’ relationships helped Parker win endorsements from politicians in almost every faction of Philadelphia’s Democratic machine.

“I really do pride myself in having relationships across the city and across the state,” she said. “I avoided the muck of coming from a political camp and therefore having all these vendettas against you, and believe it or not, that’s a big thing.”

Both aides said they work well together, in part because the tasks that come before them usually play to the strengths of one or the other. Media inquiries, for instance, go to Platt. If an elected official is upset, it’s usually Harris’ job to smooth things over.

But neither has led a large bureaucracy. Mayors typically enjoy enormous political clout early in their administrations before becoming mired in fights with Council, difficulties in forcing change on city agencies, or no-win scenarios caused by forces beyond their control, such as a financial crisis.

Harris said the Parker team is going in eyes open.

“Anytime you’re going into government, bureaucracy is a good thing and it’s a bad thing. There are a lot of regulations and checks and balances for a reason,” she said. “But whenever big change is needed, the wheels naturally move slow or slower. And that’s where leaning on the team and the folks who have experience, who have been there before and know the mechanisms and understand the way City Hall works — that’s going to be key.”