On April 14, eight days before the Pennsylvania primary, the 69 ward leaders of Philadelphia will gather at the state party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner to hear from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton will arrive at the big tent next to the Sheet Metal Workers Union at 6 p.m. and make her presentation at 6:15. Obama will arrive at 7 p.m. and make his at 7:15. You’ve heard the old Will Rogers line “I am not a member of any organized party; I’m a Democrat.” Well, the Philadelphia Democratic Party is an organized political party.
Organized into wards, the local party is further broken down into hundreds of voting divisions. Each division is overseen by two committee persons whose job it is to get their neighbors to vote for the endorsed candidate for every office. My grandfather Charles Patrick Shields was a Democratic committeeman in the 43rd Ward. As you might figure by his name, he was an Irish-American classic. He lived with Grandmom in a row house in Nicetown, on 15th Street, a short walk from the busy corner of Broad Street and Hunting Park. Every night when he was working the night shift, he’d head off to the plant wearing a peacoat and a cap. He could have been leaving for an evening in County Cork.
Grandpop took seriously his committeeman role. “I brought in the best division in the city,” he would tell us, an insistent pride in his declaration. We grandkids would say that was chiefly because the old neighborhood had become almost entirely African American, already at that point the party’s most reliable base. The exceptions were Grandpop and the guy next door, whom he described as “Nice fella … Polish.”
What still unites the city’s ethnic groups is the goal of a big Democratic win in November. Ward leaders like old Mike Stack of the 58th up in Somerton, where my parents moved us to, still boast of the fact that Jack Kennedy was elected by guys like them. Philadelphia gave Kennedy a 330,000-vote plurality in 1960, enough to swamp the rest of the state. Back then, Pennsylvania had as many electoral votes as California, a state Kennedy lost to native son Richard Nixon.

time.com