“Today Reclaim Philadelphia officially announced its first round of endorsements ahead of the city’s 2023 municipal primary election. By a near-unanimous vote, members have chosen to endorse two progressive champions: Helen Gym for Mayor and Amanda McIllmurray for City Council At-Large. “

“If you talk to your average voter, they don’t know who their committeepeople are or what the role is,” said Cea, 36. “I always tell people that that is not their fault. This is a disinvestment in voters from the local Democratic Party.”

“Hopefully we get the most progressive candidate to win so that folks are motivated to come out and vote in the fall,” said Sergio Cea of the Senate Race. To Cea, a 37-year-old community organizer, and son of Chilean immigrants, this could either be Lt. Gov. John Fetterman or State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta. “I’m going to throw down for whoever wins.” Read more here

"We've seen Biden really hesitate and flounder" on critical issues for liberal voters, said Amanda McIllmurray, the political director for Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group. Fetterman's win proved "the way to get people excited and out to the polls is to talk about the issues that really matter to them, like housing, student loan forgiveness, and taking climate change seriously." Read more here

Katia Pérez, mass liberation organizer with the progressive group Reclaim Philadelphia, said the deal didn’t do enough to bring change to a scandal-plagued agency. Her group and other activist organizations have called for stricter disciplinary measures, reducing the size of the force, and reallocating police spending toward other services.

“I see the small wins, but there’s a lot more work to do,” she said.

Read more here

“There’s definitely been pushback from the Democratic establishment,” Perez said. “There is a lot of [pressure] to continue to do politics the same way they’ve been done in Philly … but the problem with that is that the system prioritizes ‘How many favors have been done?’ and ‘When do I get my payback for the favors that I’ve done?’”

We know whether or not we have a progressive DA like Larry Krasner doesn’t matter much when judges block many of the reforms our movement is calling for. That’s why since 2017, we started working to not only identify leftist judges but also educate voters about the stakes in these much ignored local elections.

The Sixty-Six Wars blog recently did a deep dive into the Common Pleas elections from the last primary. What the data shows is YES it’s worth it, we are changing how voters look at these races, and we are building a movement that understands justice must be built around community care not the status quo of incarceration.

"Since 2013, only 2% of community member formal complaints against Philly police have resulted in a guilty finding, and 70% of those guilty verdicts were reduced or overturned after binding arbitration." It's about time arbitrators heard from community members. "We cannot allow the FOP to dictate our future. Let this be the moment where our city negotiates for us. We deserve it, and our lives depend on it."

“There was a lot of anger, people were actively grieving,” A’Brianna Morgan, a 26-year-old mass liberation organizer with Reclaim Philadelphia, tells Refinery29. Morgan, who had been participating in direct actions for months before last summer’s racial justice movement, was focused on getting people released from jails as the COVID-19 pandemic surged nationwide. When the summer of civil unrest began, there was, she said, a surge of energy around the work she had already been doing.

The show is profiling Reclaim Philadelphia, the progressive group that emerged from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Reclaim has put up a series of impressive wins, starting with Krasner in 2017.

Conover’s crew filmed a Reclaim get-out-the-vote rally Sunday at a South Philly rec center, where Krasner and several judicial candidates spoke. Conover told Clout he expects the episode to air in 2022.