After winning the Democratic primary for mayor of Philadelphia on Tuesday, Cherelle Parker—a Democrat with a long political experience in Pennsylvania—is poised to become the city’s 100th mayor and the first woman to hold the position.
Progressives who supported Helen Gym, backed by Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were disappointed by her victory.
The 50-year-old Parker, who represented northwest Philadelphia as a state representative for ten years before being elected to the city council in 2015, positioned herself as a strong leader whose background in politics would enable her to address serious issues with public safety and quality of life in the country’s sixth-largest city.
In the Nov. 7 election, she will face Republican David Oh.
In the heated race to succeed term-limited Democrat Jim Kenney, Parker emerged from a group of five front-runners.
She defeated a state legislator, a former city controller, a political outsider businessman, and other former city council members who left their posts to enter the race.
The Philadelphia race is the most recent indicator of how people in some of the biggest cities in the country want to recover from the pandemic, which has increased worries about inequality, poverty, and violence.
In other regions of the country, the outcomes have occasionally been turbulent, leading to the defeat of Chicago’s incumbent mayor in February and the removal of San Francisco’s district attorney the previous year.
To engage in community policing, Parker promised to “stop the sense of lawlessness plaguing our city” by stationing hundreds more cops on the streets. Parker urged law enforcement to employ all available means, including detaining a person when they have “just cause and reasonable suspicion.”
Members of Congress and the Philadelphia delegation to the House of Representatives backed her. Kenney claimed he had voted for her because she had the support of several city wards and labor groups.
In a different race on Tuesday, residents of Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, the state’s second-largest city, chose Sara Innamorato, a serving state senator, as their candidate on the Democratic side to take on Joseph Rockey on the Republican side in the general election in November. Contrary to the Philadelphia mayoral election, the county executive’s seat will not go to the primary winner.
She stated at a campaign rally on Tuesday, “Allegheny County, I’m going to make one promise to you: I will build a team of leaders who will usher in the future of this region and build a more equitable and just county,” urging supporters to celebrate the win and take a break. We have a lot of work to do, so we better prepare.
Even though it lost the mayoral primary, the movement Our Revolution, founded out of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and now among the most prominent progressive organizations in the nation, had endorsed Innamorato.
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