What a failed coup in Philly politics looks like in graph form
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Ori Feibush's takeover of the 36th Ward got slapped down like a Dikembe Mutombo blocked shot.
We've run a lot of coverage of the recent ward fight in Point Breeze's 36th Ward, where developer Ori Feibush tried to pull a coup on political grand dame Anna Verna to help with his 2015 run for City Council. Anna Verna, who's 83 and was a Councilwoman for seven more years than the 30-year-old Feibush has been alive, didn't seem particularly concerned about the challenge to her seat as ward leader in the run-up to the primary election. She made few comments about it to the press, and the few things she did say reeked of eye-roll.
It looks like she was right not to worry, because nearly all of Feibush's challengers were slapped to the ground like a Dikembe Mutombo blocked shot.
Feibush said around 70 candidates he informally endorsed submitted petitions to be on the ballot for the 36th Ward's 82 City Committee seats, and nearly all were approved. On Election Day, though, only five of them actually won a seat, and all of them were in races in which there were two candidates for two seats on the ballot. The Democratic Party candidates won the vast majority of Committee seats in the 36th — four Party-endorsed candidates whose names didn't even appear on the ballot because of Feibush-funded legal challenges managed to win as write-ins, and several others came very close.
Why focus on this single ward so much? The 36th Ward is a really interesting microcosm of two dynamics that will be more and more at odds in Philly's future: the idea that gentrification rescues neighborhoods vs. the idea that gentrification destroys neighborhoods, and new-school political idealists vs. old-school political realists.
On Tuesday, most voters in Point Breeze indicated that they fell on the old-school, anti-gentrification quadrant, and that they liked things just fine the way they were, thank you very much.
Some of the data from the returns was pretty striking. Since we've already devoted, like, several thousand words to the 36th, for our wrap-up, we're going to try to show the results with graphs.
So: This is what it looks like when (mostly) newcomers to a neighborhood mount a challenge to the political establishment.
We initially had candidates Jennifer Devor in 36-37 and Jen Norwood in 36-29 listed as having been endorsed by Feibush, because their names were on his list of endorsements, neither had run for committee before, both appeared to have moved to the neighborhood comparatively recently and the Democratic Party didn't have an official list of its endorsed candidates available. Devor emailed to say that she had been endorsed by both Feibush and the Democratic Party, and that: "This is a neighborhood that I love, that I have invested in, that I am raising my daughter in and this is why I ran. Point Breeze "ran me," not one single person. Being exclusively affiliated with Ori is misleading and nonfactual."
Norwood wrote: "I too was doubly endorsed (I was on both Ori and Kenyatta's campaign materials and list of endorsed candidates). ... both of them were in touch with me at the start of the campaign and I did not realize what being in touch with them entailed- turns out it meant "endorsement" and being included on campaign materials. I echo [Jen's] sentiments ... that I simply want to serve my community and empathize with both "sides"."
We've updated the article text and graphs to reflect that, and apologize for assuming. Devor and Norwood, both of whom won their seats, are now denoted by the color green.
It's been noted by a candidate that these numbers are based on the returns, not the certified count. If the official numbers on Friday are different, we'll update the graphs. (EDIT: They weren't much different, but we updated the graphs anyway.) We've also gotten notes (also from candidates) that the situation is more complicated than a couple of graphs. This is absolutely true! These graphs are meant to give people who know nothing about the situation a simpified idea of what happened. If you didn't catch our earlier, longer piece on the 36th Ward fight, give it a read — it gives these numbers a lot more detailed context.
