Why is Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment so afraid of strong women?

On Apr 14, 2022

Even though South Philadelphia State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler — working mom of two young kids, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America — took on the Democratic Party establishment to win a four-way primary in 2018 en route to Harrisburg, that didn’t stop some of the old guard from trying to give a new House member some friendly advice.

“When I first came into office, I was advised to sit quietly in the back of the room, and to not ask any questions — but that’s not who I am,” said Fiedler, already known for grilling elected officials and business leaders in her pre-politics life as a journalist for Philadelphia’s WHYY. Instead, the 41-year-old lawmaker, now seeking her third term, stayed an outspoken advocate for progressive causes like Medicare for All.

There were repercussions.

This week, the decrepit Philadelphia Democratic Party — often accused of working an incumbent protection racket — shunned this particular outspoken incumbent. Instead, the bosses endorsed a 28-year-old novice, South Philadelphia real-estate broker Michael Giangiordano — with a now-controversial history of Twitter activity aligned with Donald Trump and his allies — in the May 17 primary.

But Fiedler’s rejection by her party’s establishment — in a process driven by the old-school leaders of the three wards in her 184th Legislative District — isn’t just a local political soap opera. Instead, it’s just the latest in a larger trend across Pennsylvania of Democratic leaders — sometimes in concert with predominantly white and predominantly male trade unions — actively working against young incumbents associated with the party’s progressive left flank. Most of these party-backed challenges have targeted women.

What’s more, these fights in South Philly and across other Democratic strongholds in Pennsylvania seem a dark foreboding for a party already facing huge challenges ahead of November’s midterms, not just statewide but nationally. Democrats retook the U.S. House in 2018 and the Senate and the White House in 2020 with an anti-Trump resistance that was heavily female and with above-average turnout from young voters.

But the party’s internecine warfare on the streets of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh mirrors a bigger fight over whether Democrats now need to reconnect with their older working-class roots, amid voter panic over high gas prices and crime — even as those younger, left-leaning voters are growing mad over the failures of President Biden and Congress to address issues like climate change and student debt.

“The bottom line is that [Pennsylvania] Dems have a huge problem sitting in front of them, and to remedy it, there should be an all-hands-on-deck effort to register and genuinely engage urban core voters across the state,” Lara Putnam, the University of Pittsburgh history professor who chronicled the role of women in the anti-Trump resistance in the late 2010s, told me this week.

“And the key local party networks that should be taking the lead on this in Pittsburgh and Philly are instead consumed with ousting or elbowing out of the way young women [and] people of color,” she continued, “turning into opponents some of the young political leaders who could have been crucial allies in the urgent mission of expanding the urban electorate.”

Putnam qualified her remarks by noting she’d volunteered in the past for State Rep. Jessica Benham, a 31-year-old gay disability-rights activist and one of the three left-wing young female incumbents rejected this year by the Democratic organization in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County. In addition to endorsing opponents of Benham and State Rep. Emily Kinkead, 34, Pittsburgh’s party insiders continued their jihad against arguably the state’s highest-profile democratic socialist, State Rep. Summer Lee.

The Allegheny bosses continue to back challengers for Lee’s state House seat, and when Lee declared for the open congressional seat in Western Pennsylvania’s 12th District, the party endorsed attorney Steve Irwin, even after Payday Report linked Irwin’s firm to a union-busting effort. A poll shows Lee beating him in the primary by 25 points.

That’s the thing. So far, these challenges by the party establishment to young urban progressives have failed across the board, and 2022 is likely to see more of the same. Clearly a lot of these moves are personal and petty, backed by acolytes of old-timers like South Philly’s notorious 78-year-old operative Ozzie Myers, still on the scene despite his 1980 conviction as a U.S. congressman during the FBI sting operation known as Abscam and his current indictment for alleged vote tampering. That means trying to ignore demographic trends in districts like the one now repped by Fiedler, where one veteran city Democrat told me there’s “more yoga instructors than longshoremen.”

Emphasis on the word men. Although it’s worth noting that Philly Dems are also backing a challenger to one male democratic socialist (West Philadelphia State Rep. Rick Krajewski, 30), the effort to drive out mostly women incumbents is a particularly bad look for a state party that’s had more than its share of scandal over misogyny in the #MeToo era.

The then-state party chair, Marcel Groen, resigned in 2018 after I wrote in this space about the party’s tepid response to sexual-misconduct concerns and allegations that would help end the careers of two former Democratic lawmakers, State Sen. Daylin Leach and State Rep. Thomas Caltagirone. This in a state that has never once elected a woman as governor or to the U.S. Senate, and where the only Democratic woman who entered the current high-profile Senate race, Montgomery County Commissioner Val Arkoosh, quickly left for lack of support.

Fiedler touched on this when I asked her this week why her local ward leaders rejected her after two terms with a heavy emphasis on community outreach that has connected her office with 13,000 constituents so far. “I’m a working mom raising a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old, and a strong, independent, thoughtful person,” she said. “I’m a woman, and I advocate hard for the community.”

One could certainly argue that in shunning Fiedler for the newcomer Giangiordano — who also has backing from a few traditional trade unions like Local 420 of the Steamfitters — the party’s old hands are seeking to steer away from the younger, college-educated left flank and back toward its traditional blue-collar base. But that doesn’t explain why the endorsement went to a young man with a social-media trail of oddly kind moves toward Trump — the scourge of most rank-and-file Democrats — and Trump’s broader movement.

The older posts of Giangiordano, a 2016 Drexel grad, were spotlighted on Twitter by George Donnelly, an aide to left-wing Philadelphia State Sen. Nikil Saval, hours after the city Democrats endorsed him — beginning with a 2016 retweet of Trump himself appearing on Fox News with Sean Hannity to rip Democratic protesters at a canceled Chicago rally.

Donnelly later said that most of the tweets that he screenshot — a retweet of daughter-in-law Lara Trump, a retort to CNN’s Van Jones the day after the 2016 election that Trump is “OUR president now,” calling GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina “a true American patriot,” and more — are now deleted.

In a phone interview Thursday, Giangiordano assured me that he’s a lifelong South Philadelphia Democrat and said he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for Biden in 2020. He refused to engage, though, on questions about his old tweets or whether and why any of them have been deleted, only insisting that the Twitter flap “is an effort to distract from the real issues in this district.”

For challenger Giangiordano, his issues — what he sees as a lack of urgency about rising carjackings and other crimes, or hitting the climate-change stances of Fiedler as “more concerned about rising global temperatures than about rising heating bills that are hitting our poorest residents” — sound more like what’s coming from right-wing talk-radio stations like WPHT than from the neighborhood’s newer residents, often young professionals.

That makes this South Philadelphia race something of a microcosm of the bigger fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — a battle that may not end well in November. Polls are already showing that Biden’s biggest drop-off among any voting bloc that backed him in 2020 is with young voters under 30, who see only broken promises on student loan relief and climate. And alienated 20- and 30-somethings in Democratic bastions like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh could tip close statewide races for Senate and governor to the GOP.

“There’s a lot of people in my district who do not feel connected,” Fiedler told me of the frequent neighborhood…