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Pittsburgh’s mayoral race had to start some time, obviously, but a lot of Democrats wouldn’t have minded putting it off a little longer.
“I’m dreading next year,” is how one party activist put it to me when it became clear Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor would challenge Mayor Ed Gainey next year.
Democrats across the country are still nursing their wounds after Donald Trump’s presidential election win, after all. And the potential for division in next year’s mayoral contest seems especially high.
Gainey is the city’s first Black mayor, and his 2021 win over Bill Peduto marked the first of the three highest-profile wins for the region’s then-emerging progressive movement. (It was followed by Summer Lee’s successful run for Congress in 2022 and Sara Innamorato’s election to county executive last year.) The outcome of his race with O’Connor will likely be regarded, rightly or not, as a referendum on the movement.
Strangely, though, while Democrats may not be looking forward to the game, many find it hard to dislike either of the players.
“We don’t have bad people running against each other,” is how longtime police-accountability activist Brandi Fisher put it. She has long backed Gainey and believes his reelection is key to creating a more equitable city. But while “I don’t want to go back to the older guard,” she said, “Corey is a decent human.”
If his campaign didn’t appear sold on some variant of “Pittsburgh deserves better” — a phrase I’ve heard roughly 167 times this week — “Corey is a decent human” might be an apt election slogan.
As he made a series of campaign stops Tuesday, O’Connor appeared poised to draw both old-school Pittsburghers and some of the reformers who tried to replace them. I saw at least one Costa, for example, and a couple of refugees from the Peduto administration.
Such a coalition might seem unlikely, but then, successful coalitions often are. (Progressives like Bethany Hallam, for example, made common cause with old-school Democrats like former Treasurer John Weinstein to assume control of the Allegheny County Council.) This one may already be paying off.
An old political saw says Pittsburgh can be divided into three parts — north of the rivers, south of the rivers, and between the rivers — and being elected mayor requires winning two of them. O’Connor would appear to have a jump start in one of them: All three city councilors representing the southern third appeared with him Tuesday evening
“This city needs you at this time,” Councilor Anthony Coghill of Beechview told him before the admiring West End crowd. “We appreciate you stepping up.”
O’Connor may even be some Republicans’ idea of what a Democrat should sound like — though while on city council he backed a paid sick-leave requirement for many Pittsburgh employers, and proposed gun reforms opposed by Second Amendment absolutists.
You can’t be all things to all people in a contentious election, and O’Connor has never had to slug it out in a contentious high-profile race. (He was appointed county controller to fill a vacancy and won a full term easily.) But if his aggressive campaign-launch speech is any indication, he’s not going to shy away from criticizing the mayor. High on the list of targets will be Gainey’s decision to hire a police chief, Larry Scirotto, who ultimately proved more interested in policing college basketball courts than in city streets.
Gainey took the high road in response by welcoming O’Connor’s entrance in the race. And as scandals go, the Scirotto affair may not be the stuff of Watergate. (Having your basketball-loving police chief get caught for traveling, so to speak, isn’t great. But it’s not like Scirotto is headed to federal prison, as did one recent police chief.) But politicos I speak to — including some sympathetic to the mayor — think Gainey has his work cut out for him next year. His biggest challenge may be not some purported act of wrongdoing, but the belief that he’s left too much undone.
Problems such as faltering police recruitment extend far beyond Pittsburgh city limits (and it remains to be seen what solutions O’Connor will offer for them). Election results in other cities suggest that voters may have lost confidence in how progressive leaders handle crime, even after rates have ebbed from COVID-era highs. And Gainey hasn’t delivered on some key agenda items: His pledge to extract more revenue from big tax-exempt nonprofits was a staple of his 2021 campaign, for example, but he’s made little discernible progress while in office.
For her part, Fisher has disagreed with some Gainey moves. (“I did not care for Larry Scirotto in any way, shape or form,” she said.) But she said she was “10 toes down” for the mayor: “Making sure everyone is truly a part of the economy and the community and the decision-making process — that to me is Ed Gainey.”
She praised his efforts to assign social workers to police calls involving behavioral health or other crises, and for firing police officer Keith Edmonds after the death of Jim Rogers: “We’ve had uprisings in this city because of the lack of police accountability. This administration has taken a strong stance that they have zero tolerance for that.”
The fervor behind those protests arguably helped Gainey get elected: Fisher’s Alliance for Police Accountability sponsored a pair of ballot questions — including one to prevent the use of “no-knock” warrants by city police — that arguably helped bolster turnout among Gainey’s base.
A key question next year will be how activists mobilize this time, at a moment when they are as tired as everyone else and bracing for another Trump administration.
There may be only one consolation for them, or for any Democrat who isn’t ready to do this again so soon: You may be exhausted well before the May 20 primary. But you won’t be bored.
2024-12-13 10:32:00
