One local race a narrow win

While most major races in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia were won with at least comfortable margins, one local race proved to be more interesting.

In a surprisingly close race, Democrat Joseph Hoeffel won a third term in the 13th Congressional District, holding off Melissa Brown.

With nearly all precincts reporting, Hoeffel led Brown, 51 to 47 percent. Constitutional party candidate John McDermott received 2 percent of the vote.

The race was in the controversial new 13th District, created through the state's recent redistricting, which contains portions of Montgomery County and Northeast Philadelphia.

"We knew it was going to be a close race, and it's lived up to that expectation," Brown press secretary Matt Archbold told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

When the district was first created after the 2000 census, longtime Northeast Philadelphia representative Bob Borski was expected to challenge Hoeffel, a Flourtown, Pa., resident, for the Democratic nomination. A hotly-contested primary could have left the winner bruised, leaving Brown expected to have a chance to nab the election.

But Borski decided to retire, making Hoeffel the clear favorite at the start of the election. Brown, also from Flourtown, was able to come back with a campaign centered on Section 8 housing, a form of subsidized housing for low-income families and was able to woo away many Northeast voters.

The two campaigns battled back and forth, with Hoeffel citing his opponent's involvement in a failed medical insurance plan. Brown, a former Penn professor, scored the most points with voters with her stance on Section 8 housing and absentee landlords, which many Northeast residents believe attracts crime into the area. She accused Hoeffel of being weak on the issue.

The district is almost evenly split, with 341,000 residents in Montgomery county and 306,000 in the Northeast section of the city.

A Hoeffel representative told the Inquirer that the candidate led Brown by about 2,500 votes in the city section of the district.

Still, Brown's campaign will probably be considered a success, considering how much she trailed when the race began.

"We created the blueprint that every election [in Northeast Philadelphia] is going to be run on in the next 10 years," Brown's campaign manager, Steve Elena, told the Inquirer last night.

In a race contained entirely in Philadelphia, Democrat Chaka Fattah defeated Republican Thomas Dougherty for the 2nd Congressional District post in a landslide, garnering 88 percent of the vote to Thomas's 12 percent.

Democratic candidate Robert Brady won the 1st District with 87 percent of the vote, outdistancing Republican Marie Delaney, who had 13 percent of the vote, and Green Party candidate Mike Ewall, who garnered one percent.

Election turnout in Philadelphia was reported to be brisk throughout the afternoon, spurred by former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell's run for governor of Pennsylvania.

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