I have not had time yet to look through the election results fully, but there are a couple of cases worth noting:

* Retention of Judge Deni
A number of progressive orgs called for a "NO" vote on Judge Deni, yet looking at the numbers, it does not seem like she won by much lower of a percent than anyone else on the Municipal Court.

* Jesse Brown
18% is a pretty respectable number for an Independent challenger in a Democratic city in a General. However, Jesse Brown did not even come close to winning. Again, a number of progressives around town were supporting Jesse and I am curious what analysis they might offer of time and money spent on this race.

* David Oh
Wow. I am still in Kentucky (where we won big) but I imagine this race is far from decided yet. He's putting up a good fight, but it's worth noting that Oh did NOT get the support of a lot of progressives. Anyone want to speculate on why he has done so well?

* Montco
We lost a great woman's seat and replaced it with a man a lot of us like, Joe Hoeffel, but a man nonetheless in the minority. I think this race is the greatest tragedy of all (as it was really the best opportunity for progressives) and my sympathy to Lauren and Hannah and others who worked on the race as well.

* The Courts
We won two seats on the Supreme Court. Amazing! We won one Superior Court seat, and even better, it was won by the best candidate- Christine Donahue (congrats Lauren!) yet we did not get the other two. Why do you think we could win Supreme Court seats but not take all three Superior?

* Nutter
Two historic election victories in a row. Despite a comment made by Karen, I can't recall from my memory of Philadelphia history a Mayor who has gone into office with so much resounding support from such a diverse base. Now what?

Just some quick food for thought...Generally, I think progressives in Philadelphia still have a long way to go. I want to quote Marc Stier:

The question for progressives, then, is how to build an organization that not only has a mass base—which we are very far from right now—but that is also unified enough to actually rule—and we are a long way from that—without adopting the tools of patronage and money.

Those are the two challenges I see for the progressive movement.

Marc wrote the above in another post, and Tim, Short Schrift, made a really insightful reply:

I'm a progressive blogger, which is different thing from being a progressive politician, or a progressive political operative. It doesn't mean we don't share many of the same interests (with healthy disagreements too), but we have very different degrees of freedom, tools at our disposal, and intermediate goals. Ultimately, I'm more invested in supporting and being a part of a new group of young citizen/professional journalists than a new group of young (or not-so-young) politicians.

I guess I have a foot in both camps, but I feel much better about the health of the latter one Tim describes. (As an aside: this may seem semantic, but I don't think of myself as political operative or a politician. I am a political organizer who believes that everyday, busy people with solid and seperate professional identities have a key role to play in politics by volunteering their time.)

Progressive blogging are a much better fit for people who don't need politics for livelihood purposes in the most material way that patronage jobs provide.

Clearly we all need politics to serve use better, but the overwhelming need for change is much more manageable for a lot of us as opposed to putting our feet on the street or dollars collected.

Which, going back to this election, and echoing Marc's thoughts, is clearly something we need to see real electoral success. That said, it's not gonna happen just because we want it to.