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1. ‘We may help more Rs than Ds’: Texts show Delco Dems’ strategic concerns during 2024 voting

By Todd Shepherd
 

On October 19, 2024, in Delaware County, where deep Democratic turnout had helped boost Biden in 2020, the elections board was preparing to open up three “voter service centers” in addition to one at the county seat in Media, where a voter could request and receive a mail-in ballot, or get help with a ballot that needed to be replaced. Drop boxes were conveniently located less than 100 feet away from two of the four locations.

Late that afternoon, Colleen Guiney, chair of the county Democratic party texted County Councilwoman Christine Reuther, also a Democrat, and said, “Do you think there’s any point in trying to have volunteers outside the media voter service center to help when the lines get long? I don’t know if it’s a bad idea interfere [sic] with voting or if it might be helpful.”

“We may wind up helping more Rs than Ds,” Reuther texted back, exposing a sharp partisan lens. “I am not sure there is much to help with.”

Why It Matters. The text is one of a handful of messages from county officials obtained by Broad + Liberty showing select members of an all-Democratic council feeling at ease mingling their official jobs with their more partisan selves, blurring the ethical lines of a duty to administer the election in a nonpartisan way.

The complaints naturally suggest the question of how long councilwoman Reuther has felt these concerns, given that she has been one of the biggest advocates for expanding various methods of voting. She was one of the leaders, if not the top leader, in 2020 for the county’s acceptance and use of the controversial grants doled out by the Chicago nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL.

Quotable. “One party controlling all facets of government is not what was ever intended by our forefathers. This is precisely what we have in Delaware County, and my sense is very few people, regardless of party, see this as in the best interest of our citizenry,” Delco GOP Chairman Frank Agovino told Broad + Liberty after reviewing the texts and documents.

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2. Why Philly has clean water to drink

By Richard Koenig
 

Suppose you have just availed yourself of a restroom at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Flush! All is quickly gone, and not for an instant do you give thought to where your discrete deposit is headed. You’re hurrying off to see the Renoirs. 

Yet you have initiated a long passage that is the more remarkable for being blessedly out of sight and out of mind: from the museum’s plumbing to a sewer heading south to where the current, now grown with contributions from Center City and South Philly, is siphoned under the Schuylkill River to the west bank; and then south again, taking feeds from West Philly and University City, and on to its destination: the Southwest Water Pollution Control Plant.

Why It Matters. It’s a modern marvel that we all mostly take for granted.

Today the sewers and water mains that run under Philadelphia streets would, if lined up end to end, stretch for something like 6,000 miles — from Philly to Los Angeles and back. The volume coursing through these ramifying networks exceeds half a billion gallons a day. Sustaining this underground transit within sewers as well as water mains is a city Water Department that employs some 2,500 people, among them chemists and biologists, engineers and plumbers.

A fair fraction of the world’s population would see what Philadelphians have as an astonishing gift. It is estimated that well more than a billion people still rely on drinking water fouled by feces, and half a billion defecate in the open.

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3. Lightning Round

• Vince Fenerty: Larry Krasner sides with criminals — now he’s calling for violence against Republicans

• Josue Sierra: When progressives turn their backs on women

• Beth Ann Rosica: Scouting provides strong, positive, male role models for boys

• Seth Higgins: Larry Krasner breaks Godwin’s Law

• Thom Nickels: Andy Warhol — the contrarian artist who redefined fame

• HUD Secretary Turner visits opportunity zones enabled by tax reform

• Harvie to run for Fitzpatrick’s U.S. House seat

• Upper Darby set to make third try on earned income tax

• Guy Ciarrocchi: Making smiles, making a difference

• Beth Ann Rosica: National policy debates create issues for local school districts

4. What we're reading

Crashing markets and uncertainty about tariffs are a drag on Republicans and could offer Democrats a way back to the majority — if only they could get out of their own way. But instead of focusing on the economy and the border — issues that voters say, time and again, are most important to them — Democrats seem eternally fixated on transgenderism and defending the worst of the student-activist rioters. “It’s a time for a massive, wholescale reevaluation” of how Democrats got here, Philadelphia’s Rep. Brendan Boyle told Holly Otterbein at POLITICO. Until they do, and unless Republicans make themselves more popular, the 2026 election will be, like 2024’s, a contest between two parties doing their best to alienate the average voter.