Republican David Oh actually may win in Philadelphia
Salena Zito
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PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — Republican mayoral candidate David Oh went into Tuesday’s general election race with several things in his favor. The party in power, the Democrats, had squandered all of the goodwill and faith that voters gave it in the past few years as crime hit historic rates, homelessness and open-air drug markets overtook several neighborhoods, and the city’s school system degraded further into ineptitude.
However, Oh also went into the race with an equal number of things working against him: He has an “R” after his name, the least progressive activist Democrat won the primary, the local and state Republican Party are offering only weak support, and the press corps already declared his Democratic rival Cherelle Parker, on the very day she won the Democratic primary, as the city’s almost-certain first female mayor.
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Philadelphia-based media consultant and Democrat Larry Ceisler explains that perhaps if any of the other nine Democratic candidates won that primary race in May, Oh would have stood a fighting chance in Tuesday’s general election. Instead, he predicts Parker will win.
“Parker was successful in a very contentious, tied-up race because of two things,” he said. “She and her supporters hit the streets to talk to voters face to face, and she addressed the biggest issues in the city, in particular, public safety, in a meaningful, thoughtful way.”
The city is still recovering from a 2021 gun violence crisis, which led to a record year for homicides. And while the violent crime numbers have lessened in the past 18 months, property crime has risen a whopping 24%, according to data collected by the police.
Data also show retail thefts — the images of the lootings over the summer are still fresh in residents’ psyches — are up a whopping 34%, and the public school system is racked with asbestos situations, as well as attendance problems. A staggering 46% of all district schools are chronically absent, placing Philadelphia students at risk not just of further falling behind but not even graduating.
Ceisler admits Oh is an impressive candidate for the job.
“Unfortunately, he is in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 7-to-1 margin in a year when Democrats picked a candidate in Parker who met the moment,” he said.
Oh, who served as an at-large councilman for over a decade, meaning he has name recognition and experience successfully running citywide, is a charismatic but non-fire-and-brimstone Republican, and he deeply cares about the city.
He told the local PBS station Monday that people in the city didn’t elect him to run on national politics: “They elected me to take care of the problems here in our city, and that’s what I’m going to be focused on.”
Oh also said he has no interest in being pulled into the national political debate.
“I am not interested in it, and whatever other mayors want to do to get involved in all kinds of things, that’s fine, but I am really kind of opposed to it,” he said.
Oh said if there are three words that describe the skill set he would have as mayor, they would be “visionary, objective, and purposeful.”
Ceisler said it is not impossible for a Republican to win Philly and that Oh is a very good candidate.
“For a Republican to win in Philadelphia, a Democratic candidate would have to come out of a very contentious primary and be a nonstarter for many voters,” he said. “That [type of weakened] person did not emerge from the Democratic primary.”
Ceisler said that for a Republican to win, he would have to be able to fund his campaign to a competitive degree and distance himself in a credible way from the Republican brand, as demonstrated in Washington.
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“It is unfair to David Oh’s chances because he has Cherelle Parker as an opponent. David did not run to run against Cherelle Parker,” Ceisler said. “There was a calculation that David thought that a progressive was going to be nominated, and that didn’t happen. Instead, he gets a centrist black woman who will become the first female mayor.”
Ceisler added that Philly has never had a female black mayor. “So he’s also fighting against history. Now, he could argue, because he’s Korean and he would have been the first mayor of Korean descent, right? But he’s in a fight that he didn’t pick, and that’s not his fault.”