The Philly mayor’s race ends Tuesday. Here’s what’s happened so far and where things stand.

While campaigning in Overbrook on Saturday, Democratic mayoral nominee Cherelle Parker knocked on the door of a man who worked for Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and whose wife worked for the city Office of Homeless Services.

The couple had grown tired of the city’s poor schools and high crime, he told her, but hadn’t moved out yet because city employees are required to live in Philadelphia. The man asked her to change the residency requirement so they could leave without his wife giving up her job.

“You’re not going to like my response. I want anybody earning their living from the city to live in the city,” Parker told the man. “You’ve got to let me try to make things better.”

Parker met the man during a get-out-the-vote motorcade she led on Saturday afternoon, with dozens of cars snaking through West Philadelphia, honking their horns, and making periodic stops for Parker and other Democratic candidates to fan out and knock on doors.

Parker is heavily favored to win Tuesday’s election against Republican David Oh thanks to Philly’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, and her conversations with voters have become focused on what she will do if she prevails and takes office in January as the city’s 100th mayor.

The Jefferson employee was exactly the type of resident Parker is hoping will hear her message. She has long championed the interests of diverse “middle neighborhoods” — those that are neither impoverished nor wealthy. Those neighborhoods have been shrinking across the country, and Parker has made it her goal to bolster the ones on the brink in Philadelphia.

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

The man inadvertently brought up one of Parker’s main frustrations with government, that working-class families often make too much money to qualify for programs designed to help the poor but are still struggling to get by.

“I said, ‘We want to make programs available to you so you can fix up your house, basic systems, give you closing costs and downpayment assistance if you want to move,’” Parker recounted while walking to the next door. “Well, guess what the first thing he said was? ‘Well, we make too much money.’ They live here. That’s not wealthy.”

As she left, she implored him to hang on a little longer, saying, “You haven’t given me a chance yet.”

There has been no polling in the general election for the mayor’s race, but there are few outside Oh’s most loyal supporters who believe he has a chance of pulling off a shocking upset over Parker. It’s been two decades since a Republican has run a competitive campaign for mayor and 76 years since the GOP nominee won. Democrats hold a 7-1 voter registration edge in the city.

Oh trails badly in fundraising and has not been able to conjure the type of headlines or viral moments that would give him the visibility needed to counter Democrats’ advantages.

But Oh is not giving up, and he has been sticking to his signature campaign strategy of courting various niche communities and immigrant groups.

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

Just in the last week, he met with members of the Brazilian American community “to talk about a better future for our city and all the people of Philadelphia,” made an appearance on a Spanish-language radio station to discuss how “to achieve public safety and economic growth here in Philadelphia,” and attended a flag-raising ceremony at City Hall “to commemorate 100 years of Turkish democracy,” according to his social media accounts.

“When I started this, I said I was going to run a very different kind of race,” he posted on social media about a week ago. “One that would include those who had been left out and ignored. One City, one People. We need all of us to come together to turn this city around.”

Oh did not respond to requests for comment.

In some ways, the candidates have a lot in common. Both are former City Council members, both come from humble beginnings, both still live in the same parts of the city where they grew up.

And both would make history if they won. Parker would be the first woman to become mayor, and Oh the first Asian American.

Parker, 51, is a product of Northwest Philadelphia. She grew up in West Oak Lane and now lives in East Mount Airy. She has an 11-year-old son whom she co-parents with her ex-husband, Ben Mullins, who is on the board of the operating engineers union.

» READ MORE: David Oh and Cherelle Parker: Two underdogs battle to win city’s top spot

Parker attended Lincoln University and briefly taught English in New Jersey before starting her political career as a staffer to her mentor, former Councilmember Marian Tasco.

She went on to become a state representative for 10 years and served as chair of the Philadelphia delegation to the state House before being elected to Council in 2015.

Oh, 63, lives in Kingsessing, where he is from, with his wife and four children. A child of Korean immigrants, Oh is an Army veteran and a lawyer who served on Council from 2012 until this year. He won three hotly contested Council races despite not having the backing of the GOP establishment.

Politically, the candidates are both moderates within their own parties, and they agree on what the primary solution should be for the city’s public safety crisis: hiring more cops, and having them do a better job of building relationships with the communities they police.

From there, Parker arguably takes a more conservative approach to crime issues. She has embraced the controversial policing tactic known as stop-and-frisk and has called for the National Guard to be deployed in Kensington — two heavy-handed strategies Oh opposes.

On fiscal and education issues, however, they are on more familiar partisan grounds.

Parker believes struggling Philadelphia neighborhoods need substantial investments from all levels of government. She is open to small tax cuts but not at the cost of needed programs. She wants to establish a year-round schooling system.

Oh believes that Philadelphia should aggressively cut the wage and business taxes to make it more competitive with other cities and the suburbs. He supports school choice, including being open to private school vouchers, but has said Philadelphia already has enough charter schools.

Parker became one of the first candidates to enter the mayor’s race when she simultaneously resigned from Council and launched her campaign shortly after Labor Day 2022.

She got in early because she knew she had to raise a considerable amount of money last year if she wanted to be seen as viable in the crowded and competitive Democratic primary election eight months later.

“I’m gonna be the fixer, the doer, the get-it-done Cherelle. That’s who I’ve always been,” Parker said at the time. “The city right now, it needs bold leadership.”

With key endorsements from labor unions and strong support from the Democratic establishment, Parker won the May 16 primary by a significant margin despite running in a crowded field that included as many as eight candidates who appeared viable at different points. She took only 32% of the vote, but won by almost 10 percentage points over her nearest rival, former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart.

Oh, on the other hand, faced no opposition for the GOP nomination, and he was able to wait until February of this year before resigning from Council and launching his mayoral bid.

“In the past few years, we’ve fallen on hard times and headed down the wrong path,” Oh said then. “This is a great city full of amazing people, but not if we don’t take action now.”

Any Republican running in a citywide race faces long odds in Philadelphia, but at the time there was reason to believe Oh could shake things up. As a three-term Council member who had won tough elections, Oh appeared to be the most serious mayoral contender the GOP had put forward since Sam Katz’s runs in 1999 and 2003.

Additionally, unpredictability on the other side of the aisle made it seem like the door might be open for the GOP if a vulnerable Democratic nominee emerged.

Oh believed that would most likely be the case if Democrats picked a candidate from the far left. When he entered the race, he acknowledged that his best chance of winning would be if he faced former Councilmember Helen Gym, a champion of the city’s progressive movement.

“Fundraising is more difficult for me because the perception is that a Republican cannot win,” Oh said in February. “When it comes to Helen Gym [winning the nomination], there are groups of Democrats that would be happy to give me money, so they say.”

But that’s not what happened. Gym finished third in the primary, and Parker, a moderate Democrat with a tough-on-crime platform, has shown little sign of weakness in the general election.

In the early days of the primary, Parker and her campaign team had to fight for every dollar in a hyper-competitive fundraising environment. This past summer and fall, donors and special interests have been falling over themselves to contribute to the campaign of the likely next mayor.

Parker’s campaign took in $497,000 from mid-September through Friday, according to campaign finance reports filed as of last week. That’s on top of the $2.2 million she raised during the primary, and the almost $900,000 she collected over the summer.

Her campaign spent $260,000 from Sept. 19 to Oct. 23, and she finished that period with $569,000 in the bank.

Oh’s fundraising struggles, meanwhile, appear to have worsened. His campaign had raised about $467,000 as of mid-September, but collected only about $62,000 from Sept. 19 to Friday.

He spent over $158,000 over the last month and a half, and had $277,000 available as of Oct. 23.

This fall, Oh called for a series of debates, while Parker for weeks avoided committing to one. Candidates with easy paths to victory often try to avoid debates, which conventional wisdom holds can give their underdog opponents opportunities to gain visibility.

Parker eventually committed to one debate, at 8 a.m. on KYW Newsradio. In retrospect, it appears she had little to fear in giving Oh a platform. The candidates gave similar answers on several major policy issues, and Oh at one point called her “a good candidate.”

With little interaction between the candidates, the general election campaign has played out on parallel tracks.

Parker largely stayed out of the public spotlight over the summer. She spent time recovering from a dental emergency that caused her to miss her own victory party on the night of the primary, she went on vacation, and she held private meetings to thank supporters and begin scouting potential candidates to fill out her administration if she wins.

In the fall, she ramped up her public schedule with a series of media interviews, get-out-the-vote events, and notable appearances with labor unions. Her campaign raked in cash, and President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed her last week.

» READ MORE: Mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker ‘pissed and angry’ after her team made ‘dismissive’ comments about local journalists

But it hasn’t all been smooth for Parker. Her campaign committed an unforced error when a staffer accidentally forwarded to a journalist internal emails with dismissive comments about a reporter who had said the campaign was “ignoring Black women journalists and truly independent media.”

Parker was not copied on any of the exchanges, but she said she took responsibility and was “pissed and angry” about the episode.

Oh, meanwhile, has campaigned primarily by popping up at scores of events hosted by neighborhood groups or immigrant communities, as he has done throughout his political career.

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

Oh has long had strong ties to immigrant communities across the city and in his Council campaigns has won votes in diverse neighborhoods, including overwhelming support in some majority-Asian precincts.

While it’s unlikely Oh will come out on top Tuesday, there’s still a possibility he does better than any recent Republican. And his unique political coalition, which is largely separate from the traditional GOP strongholds in the Northeast and South Philly, is why.

No GOP mayoral nominee has won more than a quarter of the vote in a general election since Katz, who got more than 40% in both of his unsuccessful campaigns against former Mayor John F. Street. The city has become more Democratic since then, and getting even a third of the vote could be seen as an accomplishment this year.

But Oh has maintained throughout the campaign that he has a shot at winning more than a moral victory on Tuesday.

“I don’t expect to win by a huge margin,” Oh posted online recently, “but I expect to win.”

Staff writer Ximena Conde contributed to this article.