Good morning everyone!
It’s Tuesday, May 19, and welcome to another edition of the Keystone Labor Report. You can find our previous editions here.
And yes, I meant good morning because it is primary day in Pennsylvania and the polls opened at 7 a.m. and are open until 8 p.m.
This past Friday, I traveled to Philadelphia to watch US House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rally for State Rep. Chris Rabb (D-Philadelphia), and then drove to the Lehigh Valley on Sunday where Gov. Josh Shapiro spent the day campaigning for Democratic congressional hopeful Bob Brooks.
More on that below.
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(Sean Kitchen / The Keystone)
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Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, campaigned for Bob Brooks, a retired 20-year firefighter and union leader, in Emmaus on Sunday and made their final pitch to voters as to why Brooks should be the Democrat facing off against US House Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Lehigh) this fall.
Throughout the campaign, we covered how Brooks built a wide coalition from different factions of the Democratic Party, including e moderate-leaning Blue Dog Democrats and the progressive Working Families Party.
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Republicans have poured more than $1 million into the race to run negative ads against Brooks in the closing weeks of the primary in an attempt to derail his campaign.
“The reason why the Working Families Party is fighting so hard to make sure that Bob Brooks could come to Congress is that we believe more than ever that we need fighters, working families champions, that will hold the line and make sure that we could afford our communities, that we could afford healthcare, childcare, in the richest country in the history of the planet and send that money into our communities,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party.
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Jeffrey Yass never lets a disaster go to waste.
Yass, a long-time proponent of privatizing public education, announced last week that he’s launching a scholarship program to help fund private school tuition for 500 Philadelphia school students as a way to exploit the School District of Philadelphia’s decision to close 17 schools.
“This is the disaster capitalism playbook exactly,” Aly Shaw, senior research analyst at the LittleSis Public Accountability Initiative, told Chalkbeat. She said that Yass is “taking advantage of a disaster that he created to promote private schools.”
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Will Pennsylvania Senate Republicans successfully fend off primary challenges from insurgent conservatives on Tuesday? The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette takes a look.
- Voting in Philadelphia? Axios has your voter guide.
- Gov. Josh Shapiro criticized President Donald Trump’s recent remarks about not caring about Americans’ struggles due to higher gas prices amid the Iran War. You can watch it here.
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(Sean Kitchen / The Keystone)
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What type of Democrat does Philadelphia want representing them?
That’s the question AOC posed in front of hundreds of State Rep. Chris Rabb’s supporters at the Garden of Prayer church in North Philadelphia on Friday.
With the implosion of Ala Stanford’s campaign, the Democartic primary in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional district appears to be down to Rabb and State Sen. Sharif Street (D-Philadelphia).
The race is a tale as old as time in Democratic circles.
Street has the backing of the entirety of Philadelphia’s Democratic Party machine and countered the AOC appearance by holding an event with US Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on Monday. Meanwhile, Rabb has gotten the support of progressive organizations and lawmakers from across the city and country.
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