This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by Chris Potter providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. Sign up here to get it every Thursday afternoon.
For the ancient Greeks, spring marked the time when the goddess Persephone was freed from Hades and allowed to walk the earth, bringing forth life in all its richness.
But when the spring political season truly gets underway in Pittsburgh this weekend, the process will be more like the reverse. Union officials and Democratic Party leaders will wall themselves up indoors for two critical endorsements in advance of the May 16 primary … and some will be lucky if they see the sun at all.
Friday marks an all-day ritual for the region’s labor leadership: the endorsement meeting of the Allegheny-Fayette County Labor Council. Members of the council — which represents every sector of the local labor movement — will gather for a grueling series of candidate interviews beginning at 8 a.m. and likely to continue past dinnertime.
“We have close to 100 candidates coming in, from Supreme Court to district magistrate seats,” said labor council head Darrin Kelly.
Earning the council’s approval is a high bar: Questioning can be heated, and a candidate must receive a two-thirds vote to receive the council’s endorsement.
That won’t be easy in this year’s marquee Allegheny County Executive race. Several candidates are running, and some already can boast of union support. Allegheny County Treasurer John Weinstein has touted his ties to the building trades, state Rep. Sara Innamorato is the choice of many progressive service workers, and City Controller Michael Lamb has fans in organized labor as well. Meanwhile some unions — including a few that have been politically active in other cycles — appear to be keeping to the sidelines.
“We have multiple candidates that each will have friends in the room,” said Kelly. Can any of them consolidate enough support to win the endorsement? “Time will tell.”
It will be easier to get a winner in this weekend’s second ritual of spring: The gathering Sunday of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee. Party leaders chosen from each voting precinct will gather to make the committee’s own recommendation to voters this spring. The bar here is lower: Party bylaws simply give the endorsement of the committee to the top vote-getter. And with four county executive candidates seeking the party’s backing — attorney Dave Fawcett along with Innamorato, Lamb, and Weinstein — the winner may not get an outright majority.
The endorsement is a stamp of approval, not a choice that is binding on the voters themselves — assuming they are even aware of it. Some candidates, in fact, can win by losing: Progressive Democrats such as Summer Lee used the committee snub as a rallying cry — look how an aging white male power structure is seeking to marginalize our movement!
In fact, some people aren’t waiting until the endorsement is held to make that argument. After this newsletter goes out, the Black Political Empowerment Project is set to hold a press conference objecting to the practice of charging fees to candidates who seek endorsement. In a release, B-PEP has characterized the fee “as a form of ‘POLL TAX’ [and] ‘CANDIDATE SUPPRESSION,’ primarily affecting women, Black, brown and marginalized people.’”
The complaint isn’t new: Grousing about the fees is almost a rite of spring in itself. And while the fees for some top-tier races were reduced slightly this year, those for more grassroots positions, such as city school board, have gone up.
Still, this is the first press conference I can recall about the issue, and the timing is odd.
For starters, the committee has tried to make this year’s process more equitable for candidates — by offering something to everyone, including those who don’t get endorsed. As reported here in January, fees this year are being used to issue a voter guide that contains information about all the candidates who sought the endorsement, not just the winner. Sam Hens-Greco, who chairs the county’s Democratic party, says it expects to mail the guide to some 100,000 Democratic households.
Hens-Greco notes, too, that while the endorsement process has sometimes been tough on candidates of color and women, the committee had an influx of new blood in elections last year.
“I think a lot of them were not happy with previous endorsements,” Hens-Greco said.
This will be the first test of the impact those committee people will have. It may also be the last endorsement process of its kind.
Hens-Greco said the party had a couple of lawyers reviewing rules, and that the committee could hold a “bylaws convention” later in the year to discuss potential changes. Those could include alterations such as granting the endorsement to only candidates who receive an outright majority — or supermajority — of the vote. Or the committee could dispense with holding endorsement votes at all.
Which means that Sunday won’t just mark the first test of a newly constituted committee, and of the first competitive county executive endorsement fight in years. It also may be the last endorsement vote to proceed under the rules so many have complained about.
To be honest, endorsement votes count for less than they once did, and I don’t know anyone who thinks this weekend’s endorsements will be the final work in this election. But even if the outcome tells us little about where the candidates stand, we may learn something new about the direction some key Democratic forces are moving.
