PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Cherelle Parker’s path to the Democratic nomination for Philadelphia mayor was years in the making.
Political consultant and campaign senior adviser Aren Platt sat at Parker’s kitchen table every Sunday for three years, helping her plot her race.
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“Crunching the numbers, figuring out the strategy, figuring out where our fundraising opportunities were going to be,” said Platt. “We’ve had a long arc on this campaign that we really were able to hit all the points along the way.”
Parker exceeded expectations on election night. The first batch of mail-in ballots that came in put her near the top — another part of the strategy. Platt said they made an effort to increase mail-in voting in Parker’s ward.
“The city needs a superhero,” he said, “and when we think about a superhero, most people can’t name a Black woman superhero. So we’re going to have to define Cherelle as something people don’t normally see.”
Parker claimed a third of the vote in a nine-way race with five strong contenders.
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Campaign manager Sincere Harris said another strategy emphasized Parker as a mother.
“We knew that that would strike the right balance between needing to, as she says, restore order to the streets, but from a background and a lived experience where that was going to be done with compassion,” she said.
Harris left a job at the White House to become Parker’s campaign manager. Although it was her first time running a campaign, she had overseen dozens of them as executive director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. She knew fundraising for a Black female candidate would be a challenge, but labor endorsements could get her in the game.
“Just to show we could be competitive,” she said. “We were never going to hit the Allan Domb resources, but marrying that with building out a coalition — people think Cherelle just sprang up from the machine, but she was not everyone’s first choice [in] January, February, March. We had to go make the case. We had to earn those endorsements.”
Listen to more from Parker’s campaign team in the KYW Newsradio original podcast Who’s Running for Philly Mayor?
Listen below, on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.