PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The oldest of the half-dozen Democrats angling to be Philadelphia’s next mayor danced into a recent youth summit to the bass-thumping beat of 50 Cent’s hip-hop classic “In da Club.”
A day after fainting at a televised debate, 74-year-old Lynne Abraham shook off stamina concerns and showed she can hang with the all-important millennial set, too.
Candidates in the nation’s fifth-largest city are playing to the under-35 age bracket like never before ahead of a May 19 primary.
They’re embracing progressive positions like pay equity and immigrant rights. Jim Kenney, for one, wants universal pre-kindergarten and an end to the police stop-and-frisk policy and, as a longtime city councilman, successfully backed marijuana decriminalization.
They’re campaigning at hip bars and co-working spaces, and they’re giving the occasional shout out, like state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, who told a recent forum: “I’m down with millennials.”
And for good reason.
More than a quarter of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million people are between 20 and 35 years old, up 6 percent from a decade ago, and much of the city’s growth over that span — a population spike of more than 70,000 since 2006 — has been attributed to millennials who’ve moved to the city for work or stayed after college.
They’re filling up apartments in increasingly gentrified neighborhoods and fueling construction of thousands of new ones. Bars, restaurants, yoga studios and coffee shops, too. The Old City and Northern Liberties sections that were once the bailiwick of the Founding Fathers now resemble Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Park Slope.
“Philadelphia is a cool place to be,” St. Joseph’s University professor Randall Miller said. “There’s a sense of positivity and possibility. In one sense, that’s an issue as well. Who is the candidate that will continue to make Philadelphia cool and hip?”
For all the energy and disposable dollars these millennials bring, they also pose two important questions for the men and women — average age around 60 — who would be mayor: Will Philadelphia’s broken school system chase them to the suburbs after marriage and kids. And, more immediately, will they vote?
Just 7.8 percent of Philadelphia voters under 30 cast a ballot in the last mayoral primary in 2011, when T. Milton Street, brother of former Mayor John Street, challenged current mayor Michael Nutter. Street, a former state senator, is running again this year after a court rejected allegations that he actually lives in New Jersey.
A year later, with President Barack Obama up for re-election, 64 percent of younger voters in the heavily Democratic city turned out.
The party has a 7-to-1 registration edge over Republicans in Philadelphia. Barring a strong performance in the fall from the only declared Republican in the race, 36-year-old Melissa Murray Bailey, or an independent candidate, the May 19 primary will decide the election.
Lily Goodspeed, a politically active, Ivy League-educated millennial, compared young voters’ lack of interest in city elections to the fabled whale, Moby Dick.
“One day we will catch it,” the 24-year-old tweeted. “Call me Ishmael.”
Goodspeed moved to Philadelphia from her native New York last September. She coordinates community partnerships at a south Philadelphia public school where some parents start volunteering long before their children are enrolled — “They want the neighborhood school to be good enough that they can stay in the city,” she said — and is a member of a group pushing for more bike lanes and public spaces.
“It’s frustrating because people think their vote doesn’t count,” Goodspeed said of her millennial peers.
Millennial itself is a term describing only an age bracket, not wealth or education. Despite the focus on trendy transplants in and around the city’s downtown, there are tens of thousands of millennials who grew up in Philadelphia’s outlying neighborhoods and are now struggling to survive neighborhoods plagued by joblessness, crime and a distrust of the police.
“That’s my community,” the youngest Democrat in the race, Doug Oliver, said.
The 40-year-old grew up in North Philadelphia and attended a high school for economically disadvantaged youth before earning two master’s degrees, serving as a Nutter spokesman and a senior vice president at the city-owned gas company. He said he has a tougher time figuring out the life experience of a 20-year-old in the city’s trendy Manayunk neighborhood than an unemployed black man living in North Philadelphia.
“I already understand that one,” he said.
Another candidate, former Judge Nelson Diaz, 63, said young voters of all economic backgrounds who opt to stay in the city share common goals, like education.
“I want the millennials to stay and the only way they’re going to stay is if they have good schools,” he said.
What Philadelphia’s mayoral race lacks in booming national personalities — think Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel or ex-New York City mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg — it makes up for with a stable of quirky characters.
There’s Kenney, the councilman who lashed out on Twitter at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s love for the Dallas Cowboys; Abraham, the ex-district attorney dubbed the “Queen of Death” by a one-time opponent for her capital punishment proclivity; and Street, who spent 30 months in prison after claiming the government had no legal authority to collect taxes.
But it’s the issues — as Goodspeed put it, making Philadelphia safer and more livable — that should drive voters.
“If every single person who’s a millennial cast a vote, it could decide the election,” she said.
