She joined forces with parents and the teachers union and railed against efforts to privatize Philadelphia’s underfunded, dilapidated public school system, which spent years being starved under state control. For years, before her first campaign in 2015, Gym did her political work in the streets and with hyper-local issue groups. Gym’s journey, from public school teacher to advocacy work and then lawmaker, also mirrors the evolution of progressives’ relationship with electoral politics. Most observers expect the contest to be decided by the narrowest of margins, with Gym banking on a loyal base and strong turnout powered by her field operation. But in former City Council members Cherelle Parker and Allan Domb, along with Rebecca Rhynhart, a former city controller, she also faces a deep field of strong candidates with robust support across the city’s overlapping power centers. Outside spending financed by a conservative billionaire is targeting Gym’s campaign. Which also means that there is tough opposition in front of her. And especially at the municipal level, where the odds are set against us.” There needs to be a real transformation of what politics can do right now. “I want political change to be more than just a change of faces,” Gym said, when asked about the historic nature of her campaign. She is campaigning on a platform that includes a jobs guarantee for adults younger than 30 and the promise to declare a state of emergency on gun violence on her first day in office, along with robust funding for schools and a “holistic” public safety project. And I have to bring it to scale.”ĭuring her time on the city council, where she was the leading at-large vote-getter in the 20 elections, Gym helped pass legislation to protect tenants from eviction and to guarantee a range of upgrades to city schools, including the guarantee of full-time nurses and clean water in buildings, as well as a “Fair Workweek” ordinance that promises wage workers fair notice of schedule changes. That’s got to be felt by people themselves. “And that has to be felt by the people themselves, not by an ideology, not by a quote-unquote abstract movement. “I’m running for office to change the way people actually live in this city,” Gym said during an interview with CNN at her campaign headquarters last week. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and its national ambitions, that is now more uniformly focused on remaking the Democratic Party from the bottom up. The left’s focus on local races is a departure for a movement, supercharged by Sen. Progressive champions have been elected to run some of the largest American cities, from Los Angeles and Boston, which elected Karen Bass and Michelle Wu, respectively, and, most recently, in Chicago, where former union organizer and relative political unknown Brandon Johnson‘s election shocked the Windy City establishment. It would also be an exclamation point for many on the left who, after so many recent disappointments, are on a remarkable winning streak in municipal elections. Victory for Gym in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, a field of a dozen now slimmed to nine, would put her on a path to becoming the city’s 100th mayor - and the first woman and Asian American to hold the office. Gym’s dynamism, decadeslong history of activism and more recent successes grinding through legislation as a city council member make the 55-year-old daughter of Korean immigrants an ideal candidate, they believe, to lead Philadelphia - and also to highlight the movement’s strategic reset and recent successes at the local level. But for many allies and supporters, in the city and across the country, that view has become increasingly welcome.
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