Terry Gillen courts the Tindr generation in her mayoral bid

Former Redevelopment Authority Director Terry Gillen was the first to announce her candidacy for mayor and now she's the first to publicly target the city's fastest-growing demographic, millennials.

At a "Millennial happy hour" at Smokin' Betty's on Wednesday night, Gillen spoke to about 25 young professionals over drinks and appetizers, highlighting her experience working for Ed Rendell and Michael Nutter and promising to deliver on improved city schools and more jobs — two high-priority issues with this age.

Approaching millennials early makes sense for Gillen, who announced her candidacy as a battle between "old Philadelphia and new Philadelphia." But whether railing against Lincoln Steffen's timeworn notion of Philadelphia as "corrupt and contented" will inspire them to the polls remains to be seen.

Millennials (and immigrants) reversed Philadelphia's decades of population decline, and the millennials' percentage of the city's population has jumped from 20 percent to 26 percent since 2006. In the 2012 presidential election, 63 percent of millennials turned out to vote, outperforming older voters by a percentage point.

That said, the voting record among millennials looks considerably worse in non-presidential years — just 7 percent voted in Philly's 2011 primary (compared to 28 percent for Philly's older residents). If mobilized to vote, millennials could easily sway the election, but that's a mighty big if.

Even though Gillen was the first candidate to start running, she sometimes sounded as though she was already playing catch-up, comparing her run to Nutter's 2007 come-from-behind campaign.

But perhaps Gillen was simply facing reality. Earlier on Wednesday, two other candidates stepped up to the mayoral race starting line, and a third actually started running.

In the morning, former city solicitor Ken Trujillo formally announced his candidacy. Incredibly enough, Gillen and Trujillo are respectively Philadelphia's first serious female and Latino candidates for mayor, but they won't be the only ones for long.
On Wednesday afternoon, former District Attorney Lynne Abraham unofficially announced her intention to run, and former Common Pleas Judge and City Solicitor Nelson Diaz released a 90-second commercial on YouTube that signaled his own mayoral designs.

A veritable slew of other candidates are said to be considering runs in the primary next May.

In a brief interview, Gillen explained why she was targeting younger voters first: "This campaign is about the future."

"I've been in Philly for a long time, and the change in the atmosphere is palpable. I think a lot of that is because millennials are here, they have a lot of energy, and they want to get involved," she said. "So, if we can figure out how to get them engaged in city politics, it literally will transform how we do things in Philadelphia."

While a small crowd stood in rapt attention during Gillen's speech, the rest of the Center City bar caroused on, blithely unaware of the candidate's grand designs for their demographic. When Gillen's oration ended, I spoke to a nearby table of particularly loud twenty-somethings.

Did they know what was going on in the room over? No. Did they know who Terry Gillen is? No. Only one of the five — at 28, the oldest at the table — seemed attuned to the mayoral race at all, but not enough for the relatively unknown Gillen. "She announced today, right?" He asked, "the former DA?"

Maybe Gillen has some catching up to do, after all.