There is already intense recrimination among Democratic Party officials about who is to blame for their massive losses in last week’s election.
Locally, Kamala Harris’ relatively destitute performance in Philadelphia led to direct accusations between Bob Brady, the city party chairman, and Brendan McPhillips, a senior adviser to Harris’ campaign in Pennsylvania.
“Chairman Brady should do what’s best for his party and his city and step down in favor of a new generation of leadership, or the Democratic City Committee members should put him out of power if he’s not willing to relinquish his position,” McPhillips – wrote in the Inquirer Monday.
McPhillips attacked Brady for insisting on “extorting ‘street money’ from the campaign to fund his party’s activities” while doing too little to get the vote passed at election time.
Brady denied responsibility for Harris’ destitute performance and called her campaign staff “elitist” and we have no contact with local party activists. He he complained among other things, they showed us no respect, failed to provide needed funding, and never arranged for Harris to meet with local district leaders.
While the exchange mostly focused on what happened in the weeks and months leading up to November 5, it also touched upon a long history of tensions between different wings of the local Democratic Party over voter motivation, especially between party leaders and more progressive activists.
Here’s some information about the current feud and the players involved.
Who is Bob Brady?
Brady has been chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic Party since 1986 and represented the city in Congress from 1998 to 2019. He was originally a carpenter and union official, but was also a long-time district leader in Overbrook. In the 1980s, he ran unsuccessfully for city council and for mayor in 2007.
A substantial part of Brady’s job as chairman is to unify the party’s support for its candidates and direct resources to their campaigns. He oversees an extensive system of neighborhood districts, whose leaders oversee their district committees and together constitute the main Democratic City Committee.
District leaders select candidates to endorse, and committee members knock on voters’ doors, hand out campaign literature and, among other things, serve as election board workers.
In 2018 Policy described Brady as “an old-school politician and party boss – known in Congress as a handyman and backroom dealmaker.”
He was praised for being likeable and on good terms with many politicians, running a powerful political machine, keeping the peace between warring factions, and reliably generating thousands of Democratic votes in every election.
But when the party’s candidates lose, he too is accused of failing to follow stricter rules. Critical Philadelphia magazine profile Brady’s 2017 study notes that “if Hillary Clinton had won just 27 more votes at each polling place in Philadelphia, she would have won 20 electors in Pennsylvania.”
He was accused of tolerating corrupt or incompetent party officials and candidates and of participating in a “pay-to-play” culture in which judicial candidates and others essentially receive the endorsement of district leaders in exchange for paying them.street money”, partly to compensate party members who will stand outside the polls on Election Day.
Progressive officials failed to gain support and shouted foul
In recent years, critics have also argued that Brady and other party leaders have not been welcoming enough to various groups – newcomers to politics, progressives, people of color and others – and they believe this has contributed to weakening support for the party and interest in its policies. politics in general.
According to state data, there were nearly 856,000 registered Democrats in Philadelphia in 2012; currently there are 792 thousand of them. This includes more than 100,000 people identified as inactive, meaning they have not voted in 5 years and have not responded to voter registration notifications.
This criticism of the party has come up repeatedly regarding its support. For example, in 2022, the City Committee took a rather unusual step supporting the main contenders to two elected Democrats, after those challengers are approved by the precinct committees in their districts.
Instead of supporting state Rep. Liz Fiedler, a non-Philadelphia progressive, the committee endorsed Michael Giangiordano, the son of a longtime Democratic committee member who emphasized his deep roots in the district. The committee also endorsed challenger for state assemblyman Rick Krajewski, another progressive.
“I have the impression that many of us are told that we are not welcome, that doors are closing on us,” Fiedler said at the time. (She and Krajewski were re-elected.)
Brady threatened supporters of the Working Families Party
In 2019 and 2023, Brady targeted local committee members who worked to elect City Council candidates Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke.
Two former Democrats have defected to the Working Families Party in an attempt to oust Republicans from council seats reserved for non-majority parties. They were supported by many Democratic politicians, such as Senator John Fetterman, mayoral candidate Helen Gym, and Governor Josh Shapiro (who endorsed Brooks).
There was little chance that WFP challengers could take votes away from Democrats. But some Democratic candidates and precinct leaders were nonetheless concerned and pressed the City Committee to punish committee members who supported Brooks and O’Rourke. Brady threatened several people in his positions.
“Faced with two possible outcomes – allowing Republicans to gain power on the City Council or electing third-party candidates with democratic values - Bob Brady sides with the Republicans,” WFP-supporting Democrats wrote last year. “He threatens Democratic turnout by removing the very people who are doing the most work to engage voters in Philadelphia.”
Brooks won in her first run, and O’Rourke won last fall. Meanwhile, the party ended up expelling at least 16 district committee members who supported it.
“Most of them said, vote for these two [WFP candidates] first and vote for three Democrats, but then [some] he also said “cut out Jimmy Harrity and cut out Nina Ahmad,” Brady told Billy Penn in March, referring to the two Democratic Council candidates. “What should I do? Just let it happen? We simply cannot allow this to happen. It’s not right.”
Some critics argued that progressive districts were characterized by high turnout and the party should draw on the energy of these activists rather than kick them. In his Inquirer article, McPhillips repeated these arguments.
“The last few years of the Brady era were plagued by petty personal fights, pushing out committee members for supporting candidates opposed by the establishment and completely ignoring his responsibility to register and engage new voters to expand the party’s coalition,” he wrote.
Turnout machine or “ex-political club”?
This isn’t the first time McPhillips has clashed with Brady and the party establishment.
In addition to working for Harris’ Pennsylvania campaign this year and Biden’s 2020 campaign, he managed Fetterman’s successful U.S. Senate campaign and last year’s Gym mayoral bid.
Brady and city district leaders did not officially endorse anyone in last year’s mayoral election, but they made it clear that they favored Cherelle Parkerwho won. They showed little enthusiasm for Gym, a former councilor who is perhaps the city’s most prominent progressive politician in recent years.
In his attack on Brady, McPhillips made no mention of Gym, who finished third behind Parker and Rebecca Rhynhart.
The gist of his article is that Brady’s complaints “are all about him – his power, his access and, frankly, his failures in leadership that have relegated the Philadelphia Democratic Party to more of a social club for former politicians than a functioning organization designed to advance and build the power of working people.”
Instead of allowing Brady to take “exorbitant sums of money” from national campaigns and give it to “preferred committee members and district leaders… [who] does not do much to win voters,” he wrote, the local party should choose a modern leader who will be able to raise funds and employ mighty, professional staff.
McPhillips is not the first Democratic whistleblower to call out the chairman for this descend. There are voters who follow party politics some vocal support for its removal and broader reform of the City Committee.
But Brady, 79, says he has no plans to quit his job. And there is no indication that other top party officials want to replace him – or at least that anyone feels mighty enough to publicly criticize him and face possible consequences such as expulsion from office.
Moreover, it is not clear who – perhaps – will be his successor maybe Harrisclose ally of Brady? – or if they had done something differently.
“Brady has to go, but that alone won’t break the city’s machine politics,” wrote one critic on Reddit. “He will simply be replaced by another machine buddy who will continue to perpetuate the system as it is as a few people have benefited from the status quo for decades.”
