U. alum, 23, eyes Pa. House

Daniel Sansoni, a 1997 Penn graduate, stands in the living room of his family's Northeast Philadelphia house, repeating the words that got him on tomorrow's ballot for the 173rd District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. "Hi, I'm Dan Sansoni, and I'd like to be your state representative." It is a mantra he repeated enough times to collect 430 signatures -- well over the 300 needed to appear on the primary ballot and win the Republican slot in November. And they are the same words he's been using all summer, attempting to convince voters to give him a chance. Problem is, he's a Republican in a a district where registered Democrats outnumber the Grand Old Party by a 63 to 34 percent margin. And he's running against four-term incumbent Michael McGeehan, a Democrat and a union endorsee in a district where that means everything. It was McGeehan who gave Sansoni, 23, his first taste of "just how corrupt politics is." The incumbent found a Republican voter who lives in the district to challenge the signature sheets of both Sansoni and his Republican primary opponent. The challenge succeeded on April 2, and Sansoni was left without a ballot spot. So he did the irrational. It had taken him six days to get the 430 signatures needed to get on the ballot. Now he set out to get 300 people to write his name in during the May 19 primary election. And damned if they didn't: 420 of them, all told, despite an attempt by his Democratic opponent to convince Republican voters to write his name in instead. "I didn't think that I did it, until the call came in at 10 o'clock at night," Sansoni recalled. "I was sort of shocked." He held his breath until a challenge left 326 of them standing, and then he got excited. McGeehan, 37, is described in the Guidebook to the Pennsylvania Legislature as "tough on crime, tough on spending, hard-working and hard-talking? young, popular at home, and has the backing of Philadelphia's political machine." That is a formidable combination, one that almost inevitably spells defeat for Sansoni. But he has continued to fight on, walking door to door, handing out pamphlets, struggling to get media attention. Career on Hold Only a half-hour car ride separates Sansoni and McGeehan's alma mater -- the private-parochial Father Judge High School -- from Penn. It is the rare Father Judge graduate who makes the trip, he said. Sansoni was a standout in high school, cleaning up on awards at graduation. Even so, the odds were no better than even that the class salutatorian would go to college, since Sansoni wanted to be a Marine. Nonetheless, in 1993 he entered the School of Engineering and Applied Science with a full scholarship, headed for a technical career. All that changed with a legal studies class Sansoni took sophomore year. Hooked on the law, he finished his bachelor's degree in engineering and headed for Temple Law School. After his first year, Sansoni decided to take a leave of absence to run for a state house seat he has no chance of winning because he believes he can do for his district what no one can or will at present. Section Eight -- the federal regulation that provides low-rent housing in city neighborhoods -- has become Sansoni's major focus. He says the number of "section eight" buildings in his district has gone from zero to 200 in the last 10 years. And he wants legislation that will allow people to decide for themselves whether they want the program in their neighborhoods. Sansoni thinks in the mathematical terms of an engineer, detailing his battle plan to reach the district's voters block by block. Maps of the area's streets have lines dividing them into mail-drop areas, numbers to show how many times he's placed a leaflet under each door, colors to show where he's been when and which hands have been shaken, which babies kissed. And he thinks in the terms of the idealist: He says that if -- when -- he loses this election, he won't let it discourage him. He plans to run again in 2000.