Inside Cherelle Parker’s winning campaign for Philly’s Democratic mayoral primary

In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus took hold and society came to a standstill, Cherelle Parker’s history-making campaign for mayor started making its first moves.

Parker, who had recently been elected City Council majority leader, held weekly Zoom meetings on Sundays that spring with three trusted political hands: Tonyelle Cook-Artis, her former chief of staff and one of her best friends; Obra Kernodle IV, who had been deputy chief of staff to Gov. Tom Wolf; and Aren Platt, a top aide to the CEO of La Colombe and former political consultant.

“She was very confident, and she laid out the plan,” Cook-Artis said. “She laid out what her vision would be, and that’s her platform — safer, greener, cleaner — and she ran on that. ... Her message has been that same message from the very beginning.”

» READ MORE: Cherelle Parker is proud of her West Oak Lane roots. As mayor, could she save Philly’s ‘middle neighborhoods’?

Parker prides herself on her meticulous planning. She insists on extensive preparation for everything from a brief interview for a daily news story to a major policy push, and the most important campaign of her career was no exception.

Platt began crunching numbers and introducing Parker to wealthy donors. Kernodle worked his connections with blue-chip political consultants. And Cook-Artis guided the big picture.

Later that year, Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris made her first in-person stop of the general election with a panel on women in politics in Parker’s literal backyard, at her home in Mount Airy, during a swing through Philly aimed at activating Black and Latino voters.

At the time, Sinceré Harris, who is unrelated, was the executive director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and a senior adviser for Pennsylvania on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. She knew Kernodle well and Parker in passing. They worked together closely for the first time while organizing the campaign stop.

Two years later, in late 2022, Sinceré Harris left a White House job to become Parker’s campaign manager, and the team that would effectively elect Philadelphia’s 100th and first female mayor was in place.

From that moment on, Parker’s campaign became an Uptown affair. Many of her key advisers, including Harris and Platt, are from the belt of neighborhoods just south of the city line in North and Northwest Philadelphia — Parker’s base.

For Harris, it mattered that Parker was a lifelong Philadelphian while all of her top rivals came from elsewhere and lived in Center City.

“I’m from Philly, born and raised here, product of Philadelphia public schools, Temple grad, and I will say that knowing Cherelle is the only one who lives in the community, I just felt like Cherelle was the right person,” Harris said. “I was doing something I really loved in [the White House] at a pinnacle of my career. ... I just couldn’t sit in D.C. for this race and this moment.”

Parker knew getting her message in front of Philly voters would require money. And in recent Philadelphia elections, that often means money from organized labor and a super PAC.

In 2022, Kernodle, who never held an official role with Parker’s campaign, encouraged Jeff Sheridan, who managed Wolf’s 2017 reelection campaign, to take the lead on setting up an independent expenditure committee to boost Parker’s candidacy. The result was Philadelphians for Our Future, a super PAC that would go on to raise $2.6 million, topping the $2.2 million raised by her campaign.

About $2 million of the PAC’s funds came from unions in the Building and Construction Trades Council, which are led by longtime Parker ally Ryan Boyer and which endorsed her campaign in February. Sheridan said Boyer, who also leads the Laborers District Council, went all out to push the other trades to cut checks for the PAC.

“It truly was a turning point when the building trades announced their endorsement, and Ryan Boyer was awesome to work with,” Sheridan said. “He was a huge advocate for us and understood that if Cherelle was going to win, it was going to be because of the program we put together.”

Boyer said it was easy to convince other union leaders to back Parker because of her long history supporting their causes, such as a tough vote she took as a state representative in favor of a major transportation bill. It didn’t hurt that Parker’s ex-husband, Ben Mullins, with whom she amicably co-parents their 10-year-old son, Langston, is on the board of the operating engineers union.

“We had a relationship, and we had a trust,” he said. “Her ex-husband was a tradesman. He was an operating engineer. She understood the dirty boots at the door.”

Boyer put an immense amount of political capital on the line. He already wielded considerable clout, but Parker’s win cements his status as the worthy heir to John J. Dougherty, the electricians union leader known as “Johnny Doc” who transformed the building trades into a political powerhouse before being convicted on federal corruption charges in 2021.

Boyer did for Parker what Dougherty did for Mayor Jim Kenney in 2015, and the trades now appear to be in the middle of a 16-year run with a firm grip on the mayor’s office.

Boyer said Parker prevailed because her long track record in government resonated more than flashy campaign promises from her opponents, almost all of whom were relatively new to politics. She began serving in the state House in 2005.

“Her record did the talking,” he said. “Are we going to go with the shiny new car or the reliable car that we had that’s been running really well?”

Parker’s campaign launched TV ads in early March, making her the third candidate on the air after the super-wealthy Allan Domb and Jeff Brown.

Campaigns typically wait to begin buying TV ads until they are confident they have enough money to stay on air through the election. That wasn’t the case for Parker’s campaign at the time, but Harris said they made the jump because they couldn’t afford to let the race unfold without voters knowing Parker was an option.

“We knew it was a gamble because the conventional wisdom was to save it,” she said. “We knew that if people knew that Cherelle was in the race, that that would change the dynamic.”

The first ad was a mix of biography and messaging on public safety, with Parker saying, in part, “I’m running for mayor to end this sense of lawlessness and bring order back to our city.”

Parker was often criticized on the campaign trail for tough-on-crime policies such as her embrace of the controversial policing tactic known as “stop and frisk.” But for Parker and her campaign team, those critics misunderstood where voters stood on police and public safety issues. She dominated in Black and brown neighborhoods, including the areas that are the most affected by gun violence.

“In certain progressive circles, everything is a binary thing,” said Platt, a senior adviser to the campaign. “It is either you are for police reform or you want Frank Rizzo to come back to life and run the Police Department. And they tried to paint Cherelle with that brush.”

Harris added: “It is enraging and infuriating that people who live nowhere near these neighborhoods feel that they can speak for a lot of the folks who do live here. ... We were much more in touch with the average person being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

In the final week of the campaign, Parker’s campaign doubled down on ad featuring her son, in which she says, “As mayor and the mother of a black boy, I’ll hold bad cops accountable, but I refuse to allow crime and violence to take over our city.”

That strategy was championed internally by Will Dunbar, an informal adviser to Parker during the campaign who wanted to emphasize Parker’s role as a mother and the idea that she had a vested interest in preventing police misconduct while cracking down on crime.

Sheridan said the super PAC crafted its messaging to highlight the tangible impact of Parker’s signature community policing plan by mentioning planks such as fixing street lights, not just the 300 new foot patrol cops she hopes to hire.

“The No. 1 concern was always gun violence and crime, but it was a nuanced way that voters cared about it,” he said. “It wasn’t just, ‘Hire more cops.’ Voters needed to know that any candidate was thinking about crime in a smart way and a realistic way, and there were actual things they could get done as mayor right away.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, the super PAC also unleashed the most significant negative advertising blitz of the race. One ad contrasted Brown’s and Domb’s wealth with that of Parker, “the only real choice for mayor.” Another criticized candidate Rebecca Rhynhart for working on Wall Street before joining city government.

Campaigns and super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating their strategies, and Harris said she was initially skeptical of the wisdom of the Rhynhart ad. Attacking Brown and Domb made sense, she said, because polling showed their supporters could be persuaded to back Parker. That was less likely for Rhynhart, meaning that attacking her could benefit Helen Gym.

Sheridan said it was simply a matter of taking Rhynhart down a notch because she appeared to be on the rise.

“Our decisions were not made without risk. The Rhynhart one in particular — it was questioned by a lot of people,” he said. “We had to stop her momentum.”

Rhynhart’s second-place finish — ahead of Gym, who was viewed by many as the favorite in the final days — appears to vindicate Sheridan’s calculus.

Both Parker’s campaign and the super PAC used Black-owned polling firms that tout their expertise in accurately surveying voters in Black communities. They projected that about half of the electorate would be Black, while the public polls released during the campaign assumed it would be closer to 40% and never showed Parker in the lead.

It’s not possible to determine the exact demographics of the electorate, but ballots from majority-Black precincts made up about 45% of the total, according to an Inquirer analysis.

A number of factors big and small broke Parker’s way during the campaign.

Derek Green, the only other Black candidate seen as a viable contender, dropped out in April and endorsed Parker. Meanwhile, Brown, who appeared to be making major inroads with Black voters, saw his campaign implode amid a series of controversies and a Board of Ethics investigation.

In addition, the two unions that represent non-uniformed city workers — District Councils 33 and 47 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — passed on Parker, but each endorsed a different candidate. AFSCME’s national office stays neutral when its locals split on an election, which kept its money out of the race, Harris said.

But one crucial factor in Parker’s win was no accident: the unending stream of endorsements she secured from local elected officials and Democratic ward leaders, a vast majority of whom backed her.

U.S. Reps. Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle; State Sens. Sharif Street, Vincent Hughes, Art Haywood, and Tina Tartaglione; City Council President Darrell L. Clarke and five other Council members; and at least nine state representatives all backed her. Toward the end of the campaign, Democratic City Committee Chairman Bob Brady promoted her candidacy without officially endorsing her, and Kenney said he voted for her by mail.

For critics, those endorsements were a sign that Parker, who is the 50th Ward leader, was merely a cog in the Democratic machine and that her administration would be a continuance of the status quo. Harris said that narrative has it backward: Parker wasn’t hand-picked to run by the machine; she cajoled the machine into backing her run.

“It’s a little lazy to say she was the establishment. I get it. We’re not going to say she’s not. But we built it,” Harris said. “This actually was building a coalition.”

By election day, everything seemed to have lined up. Parker won the labor endorsements she needed to compete financially. She performed well in debates. She was the only major Black candidate on the ballot. Party leaders were breaking for her. The carpenters union had funded a major door-knocking program through the super PAC. And she was the only contender never subjected to attack ads.

But polls released late in the race showed her rivals leading, and Platt arrived at the campaign’s election night party at the laborers union hall thinking they had lost.

“I was 100% convinced we lost, and I’m telling myself like, ‘Put on a brave face,’” he said. “It was like this crushing anxiety.”

Parker spent election night in the hospital due to a dental emergency while her supporters gathered. In her first interview since winning the mayor’s race, she told The Inquirer that although she wasn’t where she wanted to be on election night, she was confident in her chances.

“I have a team of people running my campaign who are as meticulous and methodical, data-driven, and research-based as I am,” Parker said. “Those polls did not deter our strategy and plan. They were laser-focused.”

“So once you’re waiting for results, you’re just saying, ‘We’re about to see the fruits of our labor.’”

Staff writers Anna Orso and Aseem Shukla contributed to this article.