Today is an exciting day for Northeast Philadelphia's political cliques. Sometime after 9 PM tonight, they'll find out whether Ed Neilson or Tim Dailey won the 174th District seat in the Pennsylvania House, and the right to distribute the jobs and walking-around money that go with it.
But for 174th District voters, today isn't exciting at all. They must choose, literally, between two losers.
Neilson, a former member of City Council, lost in the Democratic primary in May. After this defeat, the lame-duck councilman resigned to run for the 174th District seat vacated in May by John Sabatina, who had just won a special election to fill the State Senate seat vacated in January by now-Lieutenant Governor Mike Stack. Dailey lost to Sabatina in that election.
Voters in the 174th District ought to take note of the contempt the parties have shown for them in nominating Neilson and Dailey. Rather than choose fresh candidates, the parties both ran warmed-over losers. In the Neilson-Dailey race, voters are being asked to choose between two men both of whom they may already have rejected within the last six months. One reject or the other will inevitably be selected.
For anyone who's as serious about democracy as Americans ought to be, that is cause for concern. Did the parties assume that people in the 174th District are too stupid to notice that their choice is between two candidates only recently rejected by voters? Did they figure that turnout for a special election date in the middle of the summer would be so low that it didn't matter what most voters might think of the candidates?
I think that the parties regard special elections in Philadelphia as chances to impose bad candidates on unwilling voters. A few ward leaders essentially handpick candidates from among very narrow groups of party hacks; the narrow time frame involved in holding special elections denies voters in each party the chance to influence their party's choice of candidate through a primary. Then, in the general election, voters choose between two undesirable toadies of the ward leaders. In the case of the 174th District, both toadies also happen to be losers of elections this year.
Right now, two small groups of hangers-on of the two candidates are gearing up for a big day of making phone calls and driving aged, disabled, and unmotivated supporters of their party to the polls. One group will get easy jobs on taxpayers' dime; the other will be disappointed. I don't disparage anyone who wants to better their lot in life by taking up a new occupation. But the process by which these political lackeys are getting their opportunity-- a process in which one of two losers will be forced on voters on short notice-- is a total failure.
No wonder voters don't bother to show up. The recent comments of Mayor Michael Nutter and leaders of the Urban League and Committee of Seventy about the low turnout in recent elections in Philadelphia did not seem to take account of the uninspiring choices facing those who do vote. In the 174th District, voters who didn't like Neilson or Dailey in elections just a few months ago were simply ignored by party leaders, so it's hard to blame the voters for ignoring this race.
