Harris campaign spat with Bob Brady echoes longstanding gripes

Recriminations are well under way among Democratic party officials over who is to blame for their sweeping losses in last week's election.

Locally, Kamala Harris' relatively poor showing in Philly led to tit-for-tat accusations between Bob Brady, chair of the city party, and Brendan McPhillips, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania.

"Chairman Brady should do what is best for his party, and his city, and step aside for a new generation of leadership, or he should be voted out of power by members of the Democratic City Committee if he is unwilling to relinquish his post," McPhillips wrote in the Inquirer Monday.

McPhillips attacked Brady for insisting on "extorting campaigns for 'street money' to fund his party operations" while still doing too little to get the vote out at election time.

Brady has disclaimed responsibility for Harris' poor performance, and he called her campaign staff " elitist " and out of touch with local party officials. He complained that they "didn't show us any respect," didn't provide needed funds, and never arranged for Harris to meet local ward leaders, among other gripes.

While the exchange was largely about what happened in the weeks and months preceding Nov. 5, it also followed a long history of tensions among different wings of the local Democratic party over how to motivate voters, particularly between party leaders and more progressive activists.

Here's some background on the current dispute and the players involved.

Who is Bob Brady?

Brady has been Philly's Democratic party chairman since 1986 and represented the city in Congress from 1998 to 2019. Initially a carpenter and union official, he's also been a longtime ward leader in Overbrook, and he ran unsuccessfully for council in the 1980s and for mayor in 2007.

A big part of Brady's job as chair is to unify party support for its candidates and channel resources to their campaigns. He oversees the sprawling system of neighborhood wards, whose leaders oversee their ward committees and together make up the main Democratic City Committee.

The ward leaders select candidates to endorse, and the committee members knock on voters' doors, hand out campaign literature, and serve as poll workers, among other tasks.

In 2018 Politico described Brady as an "old-school politician and party boss — known in Congress as a fixer and backroom dealmaker."

He's been praised for being likable and having good relationships with many politicians, running a powerful political machine, keeping the peace between warring factions, and reliably producing thousands of Democratic votes at every election.

But when the party's candidates lose, he also gets blamed for not running a tighter ship. A critical Philadelphia Magazine profile of Brady from 2017 notes that, "If Hillary Clinton had gotten just 27 more votes in each polling place in Philadelphia, she would have won Pennsylvania's 20 electors."

He's been accused of tolerating corrupt or incompetent party officials and candidates, and of participating in a pay-to-play culture where judge candidates and others essentially get ward leader endorsements in exchange for paying them " street money ," in part to compensate party members who stand outside polls on Election Day.

Progressive incumbents didn't get endorsements, cried foul

In recent years critics have also argued that Brady and other party leaders have not been sufficiently welcoming to various groups — newcomers to politics, progressives, people of color, and others — and they say that has contributed to flagging support for the party and interest in politics generally.

In 2012, there were nearly 856,000 registered Democrats in Philadelphia, according to state records; now there are 792,000. That includes more than 100,000 described as inactive, which means they haven't voted in 5 years and haven't responded to voter registration notices.

This criticism of the party has repeatedly surfaced in relation to endorsements. For example, in 2022, the City Committee took the somewhat unusual step of endorsing primary challengers to two elected Democrats, after those challengers were endorsed by the ward committees in their districts.

Instead of supporting state Rep. Liz Fiedler, a progressive who is not originally from Philadelphia, the committee endorsed Michael Giangiordano, the son of a longtime Democratic committeeperson, who emphasized his deep roots in the district. The committee also endorsed a challenger to state Rep. Rick Krajewski, another progressive.

"It feels like many of us are being told that we are not welcome, that the door is being closed on us," Fiedler said at the time. (She and Krajewski were both reelected.)

Brady threatened Working Families Party supporters

In 2019 and 2023, Brady took aim at local committeepeople who were working to elect City Council candidates Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O'Rourke.

The two former Democrats had switched to the Working Families Party in an effort to oust Republicans from council seats reserved for nonmajority parties. They were supported by a number of Democratic politicians, such as Sen. John Fetterman, mayoral candidate Helen Gym, and Gov. Josh Shapiro (who endorsed Brooks).

There was little chance the WFP challengers could take votes from Democrats. But some Democratic candidates and ward leaders were worried nonetheless, and pressured the City Committee to punish the committeepeople who supported Brooks and O'Rourke. Brady threatened to oust several from their positions.

"Faced with two possible outcomes — letting Republicans gain power in City Council or electing third-party candidates with Democratic values — Bob Brady is siding with Republicans," the WFP-supporting Dems wrote in a letter last year. "He is endangering Democratic turnout by removing the very people who do the most work to engage Philly voters."

Brooks won on her first run and O'Rourke won last fall. Meanwhile, the party ended up expelling at least 16 ward committeepeople who had supported them.

"Most of them said, vote for these two [WFP candidates] first and vote for three Democrats, but then [some] also said, cut Jimmy Harrity and cut Nina Ahmad," Brady told Billy Penn in March, referring to two Democratic council candidates. "What am I supposed to do? Just let that happen? We just can't kind of let that happen. That ain't right."

Some critics said that progressive ward divisions have high turnout rates, and the party should tap into those activists' energy rather than boot them. In his Inquirer piece, McPhillips echoed those arguments.

"The last few years of the Brady era have been plagued by petty personal fights, forcing out committee members for backing candidates the establishment opposed, and completely ignoring its responsibility to register and engage new voters to expand the party's coalition," he wrote.

Turnout machine, or a "club for political has-beens"?

It's not the first time McPhillips has been at odds with Brady and the party establishment.

In addition to working for Harris' campaign in Pa. this year and Biden's in 2020, he managed Fetterman's successful U.S. Senate campaign — and Gym's mayoral bid last year.

Brady and the city's ward leaders did not officially endorse anyone in last year's mayoral election, but they made it clear they favored Cherelle Parker , who went on to win. They did not show enthusiasm for Gym, a former councilmember who is perhaps the city's most prominent progressive politician of recent years.

In his attack on Brady, McPhillips didn't mention Gym, who came in third place after Parker and Rebecca Rhynhart.

The gist of his is the claim that Brady's complaints "are all about him — his power, his access, and frankly, his failure of leadership that has relegated the Philadelphia Democratic Party to resemble more of a social club for political has-beens than a functioning organization designed to grow and build power for working people."

Rather than have Brady take "an exorbitant amount of money" from national campaigns and pass it along to his "his preferred committee people and ward leaders ... [who] do extremely little to turn out voters," the local party should pick a new leader who can fundraise and hire a strong professional staff, he wrote.

McPhillips is hardly the first Democratic insider to call for the chairman to step down . Among voters who follow party politics, there's some vocal support for his removal and broader reform of the City Committee.

But the 79-year-old Brady says he has no plans to quit. And there's no sign that other top party officials want to replace him — or at least that any feel strongly enough to publicly criticize him and suffer the possible repercussions, such as expulsion from their position.

In addition, it's unclear who would succeed him — perhaps perhaps Harrity , a close Brady ally? — or if they would do anything differently.

"Brady needs to go, but that alone will not break the city's machine politics," one critic wrote on Reddit. "He'll just be replaced by some other machine crony who will continue to perpetuate the system as it currently exists because a handful of people have been benefiting from the status quo for decades."