Daily News | All voters deserve a say in who gets to run Philadelphia | Editorial
That’s because a crowded field of qualified candidates in the Democratic primary will invariably split the vote, and the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she may be, is virtually assured of a win in November.
It wasn’t always this way. While Philadelphia hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since the Harry Truman administration, the general election was at least competitive. Arlen Specter, Thacher Longstreth, Frank Rizzo, and Katz himself all came relatively close to winning office as GOP candidates. Each of their elections featured hundreds of thousands of votes cast on each side. Since Katz’s last run in 2003, however, Republican nominees have only once garnered over 20% of the vote.
While some progressives may rue the inclusion of the city’s Republicans and independents into the political process, nonpartisan elections haven’t prevented left-leaning Democrats from winning office, as Chicago’s Brandon Johnson and Boston’s Michelle Wu have proved. Nonpartisan primaries do, however, require that any candidate, progressive or not, hold some appeal to a majority of the city’s electorate. That’s a much better mandate for change than less than a stadium’s worth of partisan primary votes.
Still, while the nonpartisan runoff system is a step in the right direction, it also has its pitfalls. Runoffs can become highly combative, driving wedges into existing fault lines in city politics. Any election between two candidates increases the temptation to engage in negative campaigning, which is
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