PHILADELPHIA – Kicking it in now in this riverside American city, home to the Liberty Bell and a tough-fibered blue-collar pride, organizers convened this afternoon for “Pizza with the Chairman” downtown just prior to Kamala Harris landing to thank them and other campaign volunteers at the Famous Fourth Street Deli with time ticking down to Nov. 5th, Election Day.

As part of her rustbelt blue wall strategy, which would include wins in Wisconsin and Michigan, Harris seeks big vote totals here to offset Donald Trump’s rural advantage and score Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes.

Amid the strewn pizza boxes, cokes, apple cobbler and an elongated Knights of the Round Table

crammed with ward heelers, Philly tough guys, concerned citizens, and political hard cases, with pictures of LBJ and JFK on the walls, Philadelphia Democratic Party Chairman Robert Brady, the former congressman, worked the room.

AFL-CIO voter outreach ballot chaser Kyle Hanahan (pictured, top) took a break from working the phones to share a recharge opportunity with his fellow Harris backers. The Philly-based organizer and stagehand at IATSE Local 8, said he makes a simple case to his brothers and sisters in the Labor movement for Harris over Trump. “When filming ‘The Apprentice,’ Donald Trump crossed our picket line,” Hanahan told InsiderNJ. “For Labor, that’s a cardinal sin. When he was president, Donald Trump appointed a series of judges for the sole purpose of ruling against labor.”

In addition, Trump:

• Undermined the AFL-CIO’s merit-based civil service system, granting managers a license to freely discriminate and retaliate against workers.

• Restricted union representatives’ ability to advocate for their members on the job.

• Targeted workers’ freedom to negotiate on workplace issues, including reasonable accommodations for those with disabilities, employee training, overtime, telework and flexible work schedules.

• Revoked the Department of Education’s previously negotiated union contract and illegally imposed an anti-union directive, stripping 3,900 workers of all previously negotiated rights and protections.

• Stripped away protections for rank-and-file workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, prompting a 60% rise in firings in the second half of 2017 alone.

• Repeatedly turned a blind eye to misclassifying up to 30% of workers as independent contractors.

For the motivated Hanahan, Harris is the obvious choice in this presidential election. The Biden-Harris Administration not only invested over $400 billion in domestic infrastructure projects, Biden used executive orders to improve conditions for work on federal projects, including the use of project labor agreements for federal construction projects, which requires the hiring of unionized workers. His administration also created new rules around pay equity for federal workers. In 2023, Biden became the first president to walk a picket line, which happened during the most effective United Auto Workers strike in decades.

Harris, moreover, pledges to double the federal minimum wage, from $7.25 to $15 an hour. This contrasts with Trump, whose fry job stunt at McDonald’s backfired brutally when he couldn’t handle a question about the federal minimum wage. “Well, I think this. These people work hard. They’re great. And I just saw something… a process that’s beautiful,” Trump said in response to the question.

John Walker, a criminal defense attorney from Northeast Philly, recounted that anecdote and shook his head here at Democratic headquarters. “He’s the saddest, most woe-is-me candidate I’ve ever seen,” said Walker, who described Northeast Philadelphia as pretty energized in advance of the election.

Mike Youngblood reveled in 11th hour crunch time angst. “There’s no way Trump should be as close as he is right now,” he said.

For his part, Brady said he aims to take the paranoia setting in over the final days of the campaign cycle and turn it to Democrats’ advantage. Their backs are against the wall. They look like they like that here, and maybe even require that urgent atmosphere. The usual campaign collisions, in this case progressives in the Harris Campaign and old school machine Philly organizers – don’t cause hurt feelings – at least on this end – so much as twitching facial muscles. Sometimes, they get the sense here of too many out-of-control progressive Twitter feeds arrogantly trying to infiltrate the streets. “They’ve got to trust the chairman,” said Judge James DeLeon, referring to the national campaign and money. “What Chairman Brady says goes.”

“Ultimately,” said Councilman James Harrity, “We’re going to do what we do.”

He cracked a Philly-style smile.

A few blocks away, cops blocked off the streets around the Famous Fourth Street Deli. A crowd gathered outside behind police tape.

An Olivia Newton John-lookalike sat atop a road construction barricade.

It turns out she actually is an Australian.

“You Americans,” she laughed. “The rest of the world is laughing at you.”

“Why is that, lady?”

“The politicians on the right in my country are more to the left than the Democrats here,” she said. “They believe in socialized medicine, for example. Here, politicians – both Democrats [many of them] and Republicans, oppose it. Maybe that’s why this is even perceived to be a fight at all.”

What did she think of Trump?

She made a face and said something about the end of civilization as we know it if he wins.

Harris’ entourage lurched in and moments later she alighted inside in a crowd that included Harrity, Brady, and Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker. A man stood in the center of the road a few blocks away holding aloft a cardboard sign with scrawled words that read, “Need money to fix my spaceship.” Apparently, he wanted out of town, but the Philly diehards in the Democratic Party – and in the Labor Movement, up against the muck of Trump’s public comments and policies shafting Labor and looking to close hard on the case for Harris – appeared in gear, as if loving the drama, and the rough and tumble of hometown politics, ward heelers and labor people at their trade, pulling voters, with the rest of the world watching.

A few blocks from the statue of the Tenderloin Doughboy (above, right), a few blocks from the Liberty Bell, a few blocks from Independence Hall, steps away from the mighty Delaware River, Rick Lombardo of the 62nd Ward, Northeast, said, “This election is important. They’re all important. But this one’s really important. I’m 71. My father fought in World War II so we wouldn’t speak German here on the east coast and so they wouldn’t speak Japanese on the West Coast. He fought for our right to vote. People don’t realize that. The hardcore voters will vote. We need to get the casual voter out. This isn’t a casual situation.”