Last week, 29-year-old political newcomer Joe Picozzi unseated Democratic incumbent Jimmy Dillon in Northeast Philadelphia’s 5th Senatorial district, becoming the first Republican state Senatorial candidate to win a Philly seat in two decades. The upset has shaken city Democrats, with some begrudging their party for not working to defend Dillon sooner.
Picozzi established himself early on as an energetic, fresh face and a canvassing machine — his campaign knocked on 70,000 doors by the season’s end. He quickly wooed the Senate Republican Campaign Committee (the leadership PAC run by Pa.’s Republican state Senators) and received plenty of financial support from them. Notably absent from his support, though, was the Philadelphia GOP; the local party never endorsed Picozzi.
Two Democratic party insiders told Billy Penn that the reason for that was a quiet agreement between the Philly GOP and Democratic parties to refrain from challenging two of each other’s state-level incumbents in the Northeast: Philly Republicans would not seek a candidate to challenge Dillon, and their Democratic counterparts would not look to challenge Republican state House Representative Martina White (whose district overlaps with Dillon’s).
“There was some effort to protect Representative White,” one insider said about the agreement, adding that the deal was likely made in January 2024, prior to any primary races. “I think there was some effort to — ‘We won’t poke you if you don’t poke us’ … and I guess my understanding was the Senate Republicans encouraged Joe Picozzi to run. I think they were seeing numbers that they saw were positive.”
When asked about the Philadelphia GOP’s decisions regarding the race, Picozzi’s only comment was “I believe all Republicans need to stick together.”
“I don’t have any comment on any of that,” Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward said, when asked about the alleged agreement. “I will just say that, you know, when [Picozzi] started out, there were very few people that thought he could actually win that seat.”
Ward said that she had been hoping to run a candidate against Dillon, but hadn’t found any willing contenders until Picozzi came on her radar. The 5th District tilts conservative, for Philadelphia, and its voters — including a large population of firefighters and police officers — have backed unsuccessful Republican candidates for other offices in the past.
“There were some bumps in the road,” Ward added. “You know, some people trying to get him not to run and didn’t want him to run. But, you know, he just stays focused. It’s what he wanted.”
Democratic Councilmember and Ward Leader Michael Driscoll, for his part, said that the level of financial support the SRCC gave Picozzi was “unexpected.” The Inquirer reported that figure to be at least $750,000 total, but it could tick up further after the release of post-election campaign finance reports later this month.
Dillon declined to speak with Billy Penn.
Looking back
Northeast Democrats are still mourning Dillon’s loss. The state Senator, who runs a series of basketball academies across Philly, won the seat during a special election in 2022. Driscoll praised Dillon’s ability to procure discretionary funds for the district, highlighting his focus on law enforcement and small businesses affected by the I-95 collapse.
There’s one thing Democrats and Republicans in the Northeast agree on: Picozzi ran a relentless campaign.
“I don’t know of anybody else, ever, in my whole time in politics, that has knocked on that many doors and gone through that many pairs of tennis shoes,” Ward said. “He wanted it so bad.”
“In my district, he would come to events and just was very eager, and had nice young men and women around him,” Driscoll said. “So I don’t want to take anything away from how hard he worked.”
Picozzi’s win was narrow — there were 50,515 total votes, and he cinched the seat with just 829 more ballots than Dillon, according to ballot counts as of Tuesday, Nov. 12. In a race that close, Picozzi argued, “a week on the calendar” of door-knocking could have made the difference for his win.
The Inquirer reported that some Democratic operatives and elected officials consider the loss an “embarrassing” oversight and believe that state and city party officials did not take the threat of a Picozzi victory seriously, or begin seriously campaigning against him, until the upstart had already gained a strong foothold in the district.
But Driscoll argued that the “red wave” seen in this election is ultimately to blame for Dillon’s demise, given that Trump also won the majority of the district.
“I think in every campaign I’ve ever worked, you know, I revisit every aspect of the campaign. And sure, things can always be done better. But I don’t think that’s unique to this particular race,” Driscoll said. “I just think things towards the end really broke, you know, to the [Republicans].”
Picozzi won in the 57th and 64th wards, where Harris won the majority of votes, indicating that the Republican picked up some Democratic support.
Ward said that the campaign, which launched in March, purposefully kept itself under the radar for as long as possible.
“We did this very stealthily. Joe knocked on doors. We didn’t draw attention to him,” Ward said, adding that they opted for ads targeted towards specific audiences on YouTube and Hulu rather than wide-reaching cable commercials. “We stayed on the down low until probably, for the most part, the beginning of October. And still, I didn’t see them do anything for another week or so.”
Picozzi was savvy on social media, too, especially Tik Tok, and kept his messaging largely focused on hyperlocal neighborhood issues. He said his campaign paid special attention to immigrant populations and placed an emphasis on voter registration — focuses that mirror the GOP’s strategy in swing states across the nation.
“We reached out to a lot of first generation immigrants. I learned to speak a bit of Russian, I learned sort of elementary Spanish,” Picozzi said, adding that he made sure he was a presence at community events like the opening of a new Albanian cultural center. “It meant a lot to people.”
“We did do a lot of voter [registration], particularly in the Eurasian community,” he added. “I’d like to do more of that and get more people engaged civically.”
Democratic Ward Leader Brian Edis, echoing one of the calls made by Democrats nationwide in response to the Republican sweep, emphasized that his party needed a recommitment to moderate messaging. He also argued for more constituent outreach.
“We need to go back out there,” Edis said. “We gotta talk to voters that live in the Northeast and see what issues matter to them most, and not allow things to get lost in translation that we really stand for. And it’s safety, right, we care about safe neighborhoods, you know, supporting the police, supporting our first responders. That’s the Northeast. We care about our neighborhoods, we care about people being safe, we care about good jobs.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
