PHILADELPHIA – Pennsylvania matters in this historic election cycle to Vice President Kamala Harris, who in her bid to succeed favorite son Joe Biden of Scranton needs the keystone state as part of a strategic rust belt slog to 270 votes, which includes Michigan and Wisconsin. At today’s “Pizza with the Chairman” gathering downtown at party headquarters in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia Democratic Party Chairman Robert Brady – former congressman – gathered ward leaders for a weekly drill-down on the national campaign.

All the old city divides come together, a party with fractured family ambitions, underscored by the fact that more than a few people here have wanted to be mayor, and run for the office, sometimes against each other, only to now find themselves in the same foxhole with time ticking down to Nov. 5^th and the eyes of the nation upon them.

The city that won Pennsylvania for Biden in 2020 can no longer advance that accomplishment with any immediate relevance, where some South Philly blacks only half kiddingly – and maybe a little grimly – say the Northeast whites need to wrassle a few more votes from the building trades white guys. The whites only half-jokingly – and maybe a little grimly – say those guys aren’t coming back, and they need the South to generate more to make up for what the party lacks without Scranton Joe at the top of the ticket.

The campaign talk partly reflects the usual back-against-the-wall angst expressed by veteran escape artists who make you think they won’t get out this time, just before they flash grins on the other side when they stick the landing. But there’s also some ambiguity in the room. “We’re pinned down. But we’re going to win. She doesn’t appreciate. But she’s a tough prosecutor. Casey’s in trouble. But he’ll pull through. The city doesn’t feel right. But it’s going to turn out big for Harris. Trump’s crazy. Some of my friends are posing with Trump signs.”

Have you been through an election like this, InsiderNJ asked Mike Youngblood.

“Never,” he said. “And I’ve been involved in these since 1980.

“This is the first one like this,” he added with a grin.

“I’m worried,” admitted ward leader Kevin Price.

Retired Judge Jimmy DeLeon backed him. “We need more material,” he said. “We have the energy. We’re in overdrive internally but we have no way to show it. You can see it here today, but we need to get it out there. Signs, sure. Everything.”

It’s a good thing they have Brady here, someone else says. The Harris Campaign wasn’t getting the signs delivered to Philly, so Brady got on the horn to President Joe Biden, who got on the horn to Harris, who got on the horn to her campaign, who delivered the signs to Philly.

“We’ve got those signs,” Brady at the front of the room told someone, who replied, “Good,” just as the chairman told someone else to grab a piece of peach cobbler before it was too late.

But signs – more than a few other ward leaders pointed out – don’t vote.

They need bodies, people, going door to door. Energy transferred into action. It’s one thing to get the regulars engaged. But they need people who don’t ordinarily engage.

Councilman Jimmy Harrity sat outside in a corner of sunlight slanting shadows, smoking a stogie amid the ingress and egress. “We’re going to need a plurality of close to 500k,” the councilman said, referring to what Philadelphia needs to hit to offset Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rural support. “We do that – and she gets there.” Biden had a 445K-vote plurality in Philadelphia in 2020, or 81% of the vote to Trump’s 18% (a smaller spread than Hillary Clinton’s 82%-15% margin in 2016).

While Democrats are banking on big turnout numbers from suburban women voters incensed by the Trump-appointed Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade, a Politico story last week made the point that Harris can’t easily corral some of those Catholic Scranton Biden voters who now probably tilt Trump, clumps of supposedly unconventionally educated white males determined to see the Democratic Party as too wimpy for membership.

They ought to know Brady, those guys.

Catholic?

Check.

In 2015, during Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, the St. Thomas More High School graduate supposedly made a point to drink from the Pope’s glass.

Blue collar?

He never went to college. The Carpenter by trade rose through the leadership ranks of Carpenters Local 8.

Tough?

He runs Philly.

The guys back in the burbs yelling at their TV sets, exorcised over Fox News’ latest spoon-fed propaganda probably don’t want to deal with this guy.

Sitting at the table at the front of the room of his fellow political leaders, Brady hears the grumbling about white males going rogue from the Democratic Party – some of them jumping ship 20 and 30 years ago, let’s face it – and the former congressman and sitting chair of the party picks up the slack. This is, of course, his wheelhouse. “I’m going on a labor walk on Saturday, going door to door,” he told InsiderNJ. “Some of these guys think he’s [Trump’s] representing them and he’s not, of course.” He wants to drive the argument that the Biden-Harris Administration poured $400 billion into domestic infrastructure, including the reopening of Interstate 95 right here in Philadelphia.

“It’s the gateway,” Brady said, like it should be an easy case to make but…”

“…A lot of guys [including white and black working-class guys] think the Democratic Party is going too far in the direction of women’s interests,” admitted political consultant Steven Jamison, in the interest of a positive discussion about how the party can maintain broad support.

“Let ‘em run on protecting reproductive freedom,” said Youngblood, convinced of the pro-choice message in this environment to galvanize the support of women. “Plaster it out there. That’s the message.”

But they need the economic argument, too, said Jamison. “I worked out of Pittsburgh a long time ago, and picked up West Virgina too, and the issues a lot of those West Virgina guys had were the same exact issues as the people of South Philadelphia, frankly, and those issues came down to jobs. Economics,” he said. “Black and white men feel they are losing on the blue-collar jobs. They are feeling disenfranchised, and reproductive issues alone – that might seem kind of shallow from the male point of view. When you think about the males, you have to look at it and understand that from a certain level you kind of lose sight of what people are really going through when you look at this new economy and how people are being affected. It takes a little more time to make the case.”

Jamison is prepared.

So is Youngblood.

So is John Brady, political director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, a whirlwind of energy in the room.

As the Southside leaders seek to mobilize strong numbers for the history-seeking Harris – she would not just be the first woman, but the first Black woman to be president – Harrity joins Brady in trying to bump the same worker base they argue should go for the 2024 Democratic nominee the same way they went for Biden.

A day after showing his support for striking ILA workers at the Packer Marine Terminal, Harrity jumped out of his chair on Wednesday afternoon. “I’m going over to the docks right now,” he told InsiderNJ, this time to lend his voice to the labor movement at the Tioga Marine Terminal – and to remind them of who to vote for on Nov. 5^th.

More than a few Democrats downtown at Pizza with the Chairman took a good-natured crack at Tim Walz, who underwhelmed with his vice-presidential performance last night against Republican contender J.D. Vance. At least one debate watcher didn’t mind the Minnesotan’s self-described knuckleheaded Tiananmen Square history. “It was still going on when he was there, they had cleared the square by that time, but he was there,” Judge DeLeon told InsiderNJ, and DeLeon knows, because he was there at Tiananmen Square. “I was on an island two miles off the coast with the nationalist Chinese military.”

But Walz otherwise last night didn’t impress any of his fellow Democrats, who would have preferred more combativeness. This is Philadelphia, after all, home to the late great Smokin’ Joe Frazier, who fought out of a crouch and threw a left hook that could take your head off. The ward heelers and leaders didn’t see that kind of mindset with Walz, and it left some of the older timers feeling like they had personally taken the steady pileup of Vance’s slippery punishment.  But they didn’t linger on it. Sometimes, the attitude seemed to be here this afternoon, you keep throwing if you want to land, or in this case you keep knocking on doors to get Harris – and Walz – elected.

“Are you registered to vote?” called Denise Lloyd to midday pedestrians hustling through the porticos of City Hall.

“Excuse me, are you registered?” asked Cyndraia Coleman.

Backing Harris, they wore lanyards with the words printed on them, “Pennsylvania Matters.”