Notes on an Election in Philadelphia

Words by Sarah Jaffe / Photos by Michael Whitney

I woke up on election day to the sound of helicopters overhead. Even after weeks of such sounds this spring, the sound doesn’t get less disconcerting. It’s hard to think of anything else other than the helicopters — are they police? Press? Medical copters bringing Covid-19 patients in?

Anyway, deep failed state vibes.

And so, election day in Philadelphia. Despite the endless, endless fetishization of the suburbs, Philly has always, will always be ground zero for the power swing in Pennsylvania. It is and will be Black voters in Philly coming out strong for Democrats who mostly treat them with contempt that will, if it happens, swing the state for Biden and Harris, and for their trouble they will continue to be ignored in favor of this ongoing desire for suburban moms to be better than they are.

Coming back to Philadelphia once again in time for another presidential race meant coming back to a city once again under curfew, as the Philly police had shot Walter Wallace, Jr. the week before and the city once again had rebelled. Philadelphia is of course the city of Frank Rizzo and of the MOVE bombing and of, this spring, tanks rolling down 52nd Street in West Philly shooting teargas that seeped through windows and cracked doors into residential homes. And after Wallace was killed the city withheld body camera footage and the names of the officers until the day after the election — why? Out of fear that protests would disrupt the vote? Out of fear that the footage, which showed a young man in distress never getting closer than 10 feet to the two armed officers who shot him, would spark more frustration, cynicism, rage in a city controlled by Democrats yet still deeply unequal and prone to police overreaction, violence, rage?

I don’t know why. I just know that the boarded-up stores and the National Guard humvees and the men in camouflage with guns by City Hall did not leave me feeling cheerful about democracy.

Election day often feels like the calm before the storm and never moreso than this week. You get fired up and ready to go, as the chant goes, and then the actual day involves a lot of sitting around and waiting. In my earlier days of campaign volunteering I remember filling up on Dunkin Donuts and knocking doors all day long at homes where the residents were obviously off at work, or sitting outside a polling place side-eyeing the other party’s volunteers and cheerily greeting everyone who walked up, even when their comments raised my eyebrows. I recall a confrontation, in 2004 somewhere in those notorious Philly suburbs (Ed Rendell, former PA governor, 2016: “For every one of those blue-collar Democrats [Trump] picks up, he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that.”) with two burly men who were hovering close to the door with George W. Bush gear on, mean-mugging nice old ladies.

But this year the possibility of some of those conflicts had actually dropped even though the anticipation of blood in the streets was much higher, simply because the pandemic had meant expanded early and mail-in voting; I dropped my ballot three days before the election in a box set up in a riverside park in center city and got an email the next day telling me it had been received. No fuss.

So: we hopped from polling place to polling place, waving hello and asking how things were going and in one case petting some goats and laughing at a grumpy voter who muttered “Liberals, all they’re good for is gimmicks” as he walked by.

It’s not that Philly’s all Democratic; I remember plenty of angry McCain voters in 2008 berating chipper Obama canvassers, and the man mad at goats wasn’t the only one bearing Trump/Pence gear. We won’t know what the numbers are until the count is finished, and election-day anecdotes from a few minutes at each polling place mean little.

So there are polling places where conflict might happen, and others where the biggest goal is just driving up the voter count high enough to outweigh those other parts of the state. The ones where the Democrats focused what little energy they put into Pennsylvania. You know, the suburbs.

The only person I’ve ever seen pull off a “No Malarkey” piece of swag was outside a gorgeous church in North Philly a few blocks from the Temple campus, at a polling place that I wanted to stay at because the atmosphere was celebratory, joyful — and it was the only one we found that way. First these two women, then others joined them for a posed photo; a truck and trailer parked around the corner featured a DJ and a setup for a live band. A food truck offered free snacks to “Feed the Polls.”

We chased a “Joy to the Polls” truck around the city but never actually found it; but the attempt at least to make voting on this grimmest of election days — pandemic, police violence, the dispiriting choices on offer, the specter of more violence to come — pleasurable is worthwhile, I think. The chant — a bit shopworn — at so many protests is “this is what democracy looks like” and it is true that even in better election cycles (OK — I don’t actually remember one that wasn’t its own type of grim, even 2008) I prefer the solidarity of crowds to the overhyped dutiful obeisance of standing in line to vote. But democracy, if it is to ever be real, will involve many things and some of them will be boring. (God, I hope more of them are boring soon.) Yet they should still, too, be things we can consider making more fun.

We knew ahead of time that there would be no results on election night, or at least, no final results. We knew that votes would be challenged, not just because something something Trump norms something, but because this is America, it is built on a constitution that says some people are worth more than others, and a patchwork of laws that conditionally expanded the definition of mattering over the decades. Because Jim Crow never really died, did it? Because even in Democratic-controlled states and cities election shenanigans are familiar and because some of us are old enough to remember 2000 and the Supreme Court deciding to stop counting votes. “Count Every Vote” shouldn’t be a radical demand but I mean, it’s not new that it is one, either, and to pretend that this is some unique province of Trumpism that will go away once Joe Biden hits the magic number of electoral votes is to misunderstand American history.

So the “Count Every Vote” rallies were a thing we knew would come, we knew since 2000 at least that part of the process of this election in fact would be people in the streets. We knew that voting wasn’t going to be enough (like it ever had been) and that people would have to vote and then get out in the streets to defend that vote’s validity and we knew, as Jane McAlevey wrote, “And if we don’t seriously prepare, in ways the Democrats refused to do in 2000 — and appear to be refusing to do now — the answers will be very ugly.”

And so in Philly the Trumpists came first, with the announcement of a press conference by the campaign which was then suddenly moved when the Count Every Vote march came through. Because elections in America have never been uncontested and clean despite our proud hawking of our peaceful transfers of power, organizers knew what to expect and so people were ready to show up with a simple demand: count every vote.

It’s also why people did show up on election day to vote in person even though the pandemic still looms and the numbers are spiking; because they knew the legal challenges would come (and the word du jour from the Trump side seems to be calling for counting “legal votes” — implying, of course, that some people’s votes are illegal, and lest you think people being arrested for illegal voting is a thing of the past I would like to introduce you to Jalil Muntaquim).

So here we are, two days after the election and back in the streets. The city released the bodycam footage of Walter Wallace’s death and so the marches merged, “Count every vote” mingled with “Black lives matter” and simple, direct calls for justice that will not happen this election or in any election but in the slow, deliberate work done in between and then sometimes in bursts, leaps, flames.

The Trumpists were outnumbered (even if at least two of them seemed to come bent on violence) by a big, joyous dance party outside the convention center, complete with DJ and musicians and line dancing (if you can organize a line dance you can organize anything). Thinking ahead to this kind of contention, longtime organizers like the Working Families Party’s Nelini Stamp planned not just for protests but for deescalation; for ways to literally bring joy to the polls and the aftermath.

Because we have spent so much of this year in isolation, or locked down with tiny groups of people, each march, rally, and protest has contained something special. It has felt good to be with other people, even outside and masked, holding space together. The weather in Philly turned just in time for everyone to be outdoors, the sun shining as people danced to “Show Me Love” under bobbing banners reading “All Eyes On PA” and “Count Every Vote.”

Togetherness with a purpose — the performance of solidarity — brings something special with it now when we cannot take being together for granted. I thought of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets, of the way carnivals of old were days when the power structures could be turned upside down, where the common people were in charge. After so much grimness and misery and an election season marked with little joy or excitement or exhilaration, being in the streets again felt like the beginning of something new.

“Count Every Vote” is such a little demand, or it should be if it were one that had ever been taken seriously in this country. But it was a space for the demand to not simply be about a President Biden, or any one person at all.

The rally — like the spaces at Occupy Wall Street where I first met Nelini, her voice hoarse from the people’s mic — created in miniature the world that it wants to draw into being. That world is not one that Joe Biden even understands it is his job to help create, but something so much bigger and better.

A world where we are fed and cared for, where masks and food and water and hand sanitizer are handed out and the music is ongoing, where the banners are passed from hand to hand so the holders can join in the dance. Where people have dressed for the occasion and their painted banners are beautiful.

Philly will go on struggling after the national news cameras have gone. Just today organizers were trying to be heard through the hot take machine to ask for people to call on the City Council to extend an eviction moratorium as cases of Covid increase. A march will go off on Saturday demanding an end to police violence. The workers who have unionized in the pandemic and those who are fighting to keep their jobs will still be fighting in a week when the Tweets expressing gratitude have calmed down. Walter Wallace’s family and friends and neighbors will keep up their call for justice.

There is, as always, more work to be done.

Words by Sarah Jaffe / Photos by Michael Whitney