By Chris Satullo

“Bad things happen in Philadelphia.” – Donald J. Trump

Let me fix that for you, Donald: “Bad things happen to bad guys in Philadelphia.” They get defeated. And fired.

As a friend texted my wife and me Saturday morning, “From here on in when people ask me where I’m from, I’m going to say: Philly … and you’re welcome.”

So much to talk about after Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ exquisitely slow-motion defeat of Trump, clinched by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in late-arriving results driven by Philly and its burbs.

Have to start, though, with ALL-CAPS PROPS to the people who above all won this election for Biden/Harris:

Black women, led by the “Black Greeks,” the sorority sisters epitomized by Stacey Abrams, but comprising so many more than her, who organized the hell out of this thing and delivered the winning margins from Atlanta Metro, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

And with them the “red, wine and blue” suburban women who did the same in places such as Montgomery County, PA, and Oakland County, MI.

Also want to prescribe a moment of reflective silence for all the woke progressives who need to understand that, while their votes were indispensable, their noisy self-righteousness almost cost Biden the win and may have cost Senate Dems the majority. (More on that next time.)

But, for now, I want to linger on the role my home, the birthplace of American democracy, played in this saving deed for the Republic. Philadelphia – that glorious, gritty, authentic, cranky, unmanageable, unsinkable, historic, delicious, impoverished and too-often self-defeating city that I love.

Philadelphia, plus its complex, blue-shifting suburbs, where my wife and I long lived and raised our kids. (BTW: Can we get the national media to stop calling the Philly burbs “collar counties”? That’s a Chicago thing.)

Because, be clear, while it was Philly proper that got most of the TV attention as Pennsylvania’s mail-in returns nibbled away at Trump’s early, “red mirage” lead, it was actually the astonishing margins the Biden ticket posted in the once-Republican counties of Montgomery, Delaware and Chester that sealed the deal.  (Philly’s margin for Biden, while huge, was actually smaller than what it gave Hillary Clinton.)

Why call those margins astonishing? Well, here’s how it once was out in those ‘burbs:

I used to live in Lafayette Hill, in Montco. In the early ‘90s my youngest sister-in-law, the ink drying on her law degree, lived with us for a while as she tried to launch her career while paying off a mountain of loans. One day she answered a knock on the door: a kindly volunteer offering to register the new arrival to vote. “Thanks,” Kathy said. But she noticed the form she was handed was pre-marked Republican.  “But I’m a Democrat,” she told the woman. “Oh, no, dear,” came the reply. “Around here, you have to register Republican. Vote how you want, dear, but if you aren’t registered Republican, you’ll never get your road paved.”

Here’s how Montco voted this time: a 26 percentage point lead for Biden, up 5 points from 2016.

And Delco….I ran suburban coverage for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the ‘90s. One time a delightful curmudgeon named Wallace Nunn actually cast  a dissenting vote on the Delaware County Council, on which every seat, including Wally’s, was filled by a Republican. I asked a reporter to dig up the last time the Council saw a dissenting vote. The answer came back: Never. Not once since Delco had gone to home rule, setting up the Council form of government, in 1975.  A perfect red wall spanning decades.

Here’s how Delco voted this time: also a 26 percentage point margin for Biden-Harris, up 4 from last time.

So what happened out there in the Philly burbs? What’s changed on the ritzy Main Line? Or in what, back in the day at the Inky, we used to call the “beanbag boroughs” of Delco (working-class towns so small and tightly packed you could toss, well, a bean-bag across each one)? Or out among the Toll Brothers subdivisions of Montco and Bucks?

Two things, I think.

One: The chronic woes of the Philly schools in the ‘90s and the Aughts sent a steady stream of young, middle-class couples –- white and black, and deeply blue in politics – out to the inner-ring suburbs in search of better options for their kids and shorter commutes to the office parks dotted around the suburbs. As the promotions and raises piled up, they hopscotched out to the more affluent precincts of Chester County and upper Montgomery and Bucks.  At every stop, they bumped into – and battled – the anti-tax habits of the established local governments. Thus a host of activist suburban Democrats was born.

Second, even though they had some machine politics tendencies, most suburban Republican politicians were of the moderate school that Pennsylvania has always exemplified on the national stage (Hugh Scott, Arlen Specter, Tom Ridge).  Their regional leaders were people I knew personally to be sensible public servants – such as Jim Greenwood, Jim Gerlach, Stewart Greenleaf, Mark Schweiker and Ted Erickson. They were suspicious of liberal overreach and preferred lower taxes, to be sure, but they were not allergic to compromise; they disdained the race card and actually cared about curbing corruption and protecting the environment.

Such politicians today struggle to find a home in the GOP of Donald Trump – and so do the voters who supported them. Many of those suburbanites still vote for the memory of that moderate GOP in statehouse races, but they can’t talk themselves into pulling the GOP lever in national elections with tickets topped by Trump. 

Now, back to Philadelphia.

For anyone who’s honest and knows anything about Philly politics, the national spotlight before this Election Day on Philly politics and vote-counting was a little awkward. It is simply not possible to defend my beloved city as Ivory Soap pure. It’s one of the few places where courts have actually tossed out an election result due to absentee-ballot fraud widespread enough to flip the result. Sure, that was way back in ’93 and just in a state Senate rate, but still. 

The countervailing point was – and it took too many sentences to explain it to people frothing at the mouth about “bad things in Philly” – fraud may happen here, but only on a penny-ante scale intended to flip a ward leader race or the like. Ramp it up even to the state Senate level and it gets to involve too many people; the cheaters get caught. It’s unimaginable that anyone would attempt to get away with shenanigans at the level needed to tilt a statewide presidential tally.

Besides, look at the results: Trump did better in Philly than he did in 2016. That 80-20 split for Biden that had Steve Kornacki and John King going ga-ga at the big boards is actually a little worse than how Democrats win most citywide elections. If this was fraud, it was of a singularly incompetent sort.

That said, it was still critical, for the sake of credibility, that Philly not turn into the Broward County, Fla. of 2020, with slap-your-forward blunders by local election officials leading to endless partisan chaos. If you’ve followed our City Commissioners, the elected (how bad an idea is that?) board in charge of vote tallies in Philly, you know they have a long history of clownish and/or absentee management.

So there was cause for worry, accentuated by the knowledge that this pandemic-time election, with entirely new mail-in ballot rules, was a recipe for catastrophe. 

But the current three commissioners – Lisa Deeley, Omar Sabir and Al Schmidt – form a better group than some in the past, with a strong, hands-on minority-party (i.e. GOP) member in Schmidt. They knew from the moment they were elected in 2019 that the national spotlight, turned up to scorching by Trump’s frantic fantasies of fraud, would be on them. So they got to work.

They also had a lot of help.

The city’s civic, nonprofit sector – not wanting democracy to flop at this vital moment in the city where it was born, their city – stepped up. 

Nonprofits and volunteer groups worked tirelessly and creatively (Zooms, so many Zooms) to educate voters about the mysteries of “secrecy envelopes” and “naked ballots,” the subtle voter suppression moves that the Republican legislative majority in Harrisburg tucked into the 2019 election reform law. They also helped recruit and train the thousands of younger poll workers needed to make Election Day voting work, in the absence of the legion of retirees who normally work the polls but couldn’t this time due to COVID-19.

Chief among these civics were the League of Women Voters and the Committee of Seventy, the city’s quaintly, Biblically named good government group. “We decided early on that the effort to have a safe and secure election had to be the responsibility of the whole community,” said Seventy’s CEO, David Thornburgh. “This was not a time to sit back and criticize. Everyone into the pool.”

Working with 70-plus partners, Seventy’s WeVote program helped educate thousands upon thousands of voters about the new voting rules while helping the city recruit and train more than 8,000 new poll workers.

I do some consulting work with Seventy, but I had next to nothing to do with this aerobic public service. It was the work of David, leading Seventy’s staff and volunteers. Let me thank some by name: Lauren Cristella, Pat Christmas, Ashley Sessions, Dan Bright, Justin Villere and uber-volunteer Paul Droesch. They each own a piece of this story, too.

It all worked, reversing expectation. Philadelphia managed to handle the turnout, then deliver a righteous, on-time count, under pressure and legal harassment, without major blunders or made-for-YouTube scenes of chaos, which in turn delivered the nation from the nightmare of four more years of the Orange One.

Call it the Philly Special, Part II.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.