Even before anyone casts a vote in this year’s primary election, the Democratic City Committee is guaranteed to welcome at least 1,018 newly-elected committee people into their ranks. That’s about 30 percent of all 3,406 ward committee seats.

The committee person races are the smallest elections that matter in city politics, and all across the city right now, hundreds of people are running to represent the Democratic and Republican parties in each of these 1,703 tiny voting divisions. The committee people elected on May 19 will go on to select the party’s ward leaders in June; ward leaders in turn elect the party chair (currently former Democratic Congressman Bob Brady and Republican Representative Martina White). And this group will be involved in endorsing candidates in elections over the next four years.

Apart from the official duties, people who’ve run for and won these seats in past cycles, sometimes as a first foray into local politics, have since become ward leaders, City Council and state rep staffers, and neighborhood civic leaders. Anyone interested in adding a little extra oomph to their other community or issue advocacy goals might find this to be a useful platform.

With party registration so lopsided in Philly, and almost all the interesting action happening on the Democratic side, the Dems are the sole focus of this article.

To measure turnover, I compared the 2022 committee person election results to the unofficial 2026 candidate filings recently released by the City Commissioners. The results show significant turnover of committee people from four years ago, for a total of 982 open seats. That includes 642 seats in divisions where nobody filed at all, and 340 seats in divisions where only one candidate filed.

For a sense of the scale of the change this represents, every single City Council district will see committee person turnover greater than 60 percent, with some seeing much higher turnover. The lowest is Council District 4, represented by Curtis Jones, Jr., at 61 percent. The highest is Council District 6, represented by Mike Driscoll, at 75 percent. Now, about half the Democratic organizations in the Lower Northeast will be made up of new people.

The scale of the turnover everywhere turned out to be even greater than I previously predicted. Most of the change will come from new committee people who got on the ballot in two-way races, where they’re guaranteed to win the election.

The share of competitive races with three or more candidates is slightly greater in 2026 — 11 percent, up from 9 percent in 2022 — but on the whole these races are still overwhelmingly uncompetitive across the city. Now that all the petition challenges have been resolved, there are only 149 divisions with 3 or more candidates.

To see who filed to run in your division, visit 5th Square’s map, and use the ‘Scan Wards’ tool to see the full candidate breakdown in wards across the city. If there’s an open seat, you or a neighbor could run as a write-in candidate. Write-in winners typically win with a median of 5 votes, but — according to Democratic City Committee rules — you need at least 10 voters in your division to write in your name to become a committee person.

What’s happening in the six most competitive wards

It would be difficult to summarize the dynamics of dozens of ward-level elections throughout the city, so this is not meant to be a comprehensive report on everything everywhere, but the dynamics in the six most competitive wards offer some generalizable insights about local politics.

A quick note on the process: Ward leaders are elected by the committee people across all of a ward’s divisions. In some wards, a high share of competitive divisions could indicate that some kind of organized challenge to the incumbent ward leader is afoot.

As mentioned earlier, the main vector for change in this election is going to be through new people getting elected in uncompetitive two-person races. In these specific wards, that’s happening, but there are also a lot of contested divisions with three or more candidates.

• That is the situation in the 46th Ward in West Philly, which is the most contested by far. The 46th features pieces of University City and the Baltimore Avenue corridor neighborhoods, but also reaches far west with a few divisions in Cobbs Creek. Sixteen out of 23 divisions (70 percent) have three or more candidates filed to run.

In 2022, there was an effort by the progressive organization Reclaim Philadelphia to elect one of their leaders, Sergio Cea, as 46th ward leader, and defeat incumbent ward leader and former 3rd District Council member Jannie Blackwell. Blackwell lost her Council seat in 2019 to current Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, but is still active in the top leadership of Democratic City Committee. She’s on the confusingly-named Policy Committee, which endorses candidates and is not involved in public policy.

Depending on who you ask, the Reclaim-aligned faction may have technically elected a majority of committee people last time in 2022. But at the post-election ward reorganization meeting, where the elected committee people choose their ward leader, Blackwell allies appear to have created an atmosphere of chaos in which Blackwell got reelected anyway. This year, the same cohort is trying again, and they’ve got the wind of four more years of demographic change at their back. The odds seem good they’ll increase their vote totals over last time.

• The next-most competitive ward is the 5th ward, covering eastern Center City, Society Hill, Old City, Chinatown and Northern Liberties. It’s a gigantic ward with 37 divisions, each with two committee people. Its bigness makes it challenging for any organized group to mount a viable ward leader challenge to incumbent ward leader Mike Boyle, an attorney who is sort of an inoffensive liberal guy, but not a terribly exciting choice for the leader for one of the city’s most reliably liberal wealthy areas. That part of the city has been riven by divisions over the Sixers arena proposal and the lawsuit over the Spruce and Pine bike lanes and loading zones, some of which is being relitigated via the ward power struggle.
• Another competitive area is the 31st ward covering parts of East Kensington and Fishtown. In 2022, artist and now-Rue Landau staffer Lauren Rinaldi won the ward leader race for the 18th ward, which covers the core areas of Fishtown and South Kensington. The 31st ward includes areas that have been more on the edges of the Fishtown area’s demographic changes.The ward leader is former Bob Brady staffer Peg Rzepski, who was one of a few ward leaders who kicked out a few committee people in 2022 for attending an event featuring the Working Families Party Council candidates.
• Next door in Port Richmond, the zaniest storyline of this election is playing out. The 25th ward organization will see 100 percent turnover due to an error by current ward leader Tommy Johnson. Johnson dropped off his own petition, and the petitions for several other incumbent committee people, at the wrong location. The petitions were late and therefore inadmissible, so Johnson and his compatriots are all out. Meanwhile, several new candidates filed to run in several of the divisions, and many other seats are open. A brand new committee person will be running the 25th ward Democratic organization no matter what happens.
• The 36th ward leader is Council President and 2nd District Councilman Kenyatta Johnson. That ward is also gigantic, with 41 divisions and 82 committee people. The reason this is potentially competitive has more to do with observed turnover, with 30 new committee people guaranteed to win, and 8 competitive races. That’s unlikely to add up to a credible challenge to Johnson, especially because there’s no a priori reason to believe newness equates to hostility to Johnson’s leadership of the ward. The local politics rumor mill hasn’t been very active on the 36th ward, but the filings suggest there could be a story there.
• In the 38th ward covering East Falls, long-time ward leader Mark Green has allegedly told committee people he is not seeking reelection. According to sources, Green has said this in prior years too, only to be convinced by DCC Chair Bob Brady to do one last tour of duty. Share Food Program Executive Director and one-time At-Large Council candidate George Matysik is running for ward leader, after previously running against Green unsuccessfully in 2022. State Representative Roni Green is rumored to be a potential candidate for 38th ward leader as well.
• The 16th ward in North Philly features a challenge to former sheriff and current ward leader Jewell Williams from Kenneth Walker, also a candidate for the 195th state House district this season. Walker briefly sought the nomination for outgoing Representative Donna Bullock’s state rep seat when she stepped down to run Project HOME in 2024, but ward leaders in the district chose 28th ward leader and current Representative Keith Harris for the open position.

It’s not in the top six, but there’s also a three-way race for ward leader underway in the 32nd ward worth watching, which could have consequences for the 5th District Council primary next year. The 32nd is a very large ward in North Philly covering neighborhoods between Strawberry Mansion and North Broad. It used to be the highest-turnout ward in the 90s, but turnout has since fallen quite a bit.

32nd Ward leader Reverend Darnell Deans is being challenged by neighborhood organizer David Evans, affiliated with Reclaim Philadelphia, as well as Bernard Lopez, a current 32nd ward committeeperson and long-time Strawberry Mansion resident. Whoever wins could sway the sample ballot recommendations for Council in next year’s primary.

Young’s controversial first-term record on issues like the Cecil B. Moore library, arena opposition, and his non-stop parade of bills aimed at suppressing new housing construction has sparked interest in a 2027 primary challenge from multiple directions. If Deans stays on as 32nd ward leader, Young is still likely to be endorsed for reelection by the 32nd ward organization. If Evans or Lopez are elected ward leader, that’s less likely.

Without knowing the shape of that election yet, the 5th District fundamentals suggest that a challenger who could consolidate support from Rebecca Rhynhart and Helen Gym’s 2023 voters in the southern end of the district would be slightly favored in a two-way race. Together, those candidates won about 51 percent of the vote inside the 5th District in 2023.

If ward leaders in the 29th and 32nd wards were to endorse a challenger, that could be a game-changer in the primary.

Information about these micro elections will be pretty scant through the spring until Election Day in May, when we’ll have another update on the results. These are the most accessible elections around though in terms of connecting with the candidates—they’re literally your neighbors—and they’ll continue to be a better resource on what’s happening on the ground.

For more ward-level statistics and filing information, or to learn more about running as a write-in candidate, visit 5th Square’s committee person election hub.

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