WILLIAM BENDER & BOB STEWART, Daily News Staff Writers benderw@phillynews.com, 215-854-5255 Posted: Wednesday, March 25, 2015, 12:16 AM
STRANGE DAY at the polls in the Far Northeast.
For 13 hours yesterday, labor unions accustomed to working shoulder-to-shoulder found themselves eye-to-eye on the battlefield, getting out the vote for two political novices in a low-profile special election on the fringe of the city.
It was quite civil on the surface. But a civil war was raging underneath.
Organized labor split apart and provided troops to both candidates. Some took up arms for the Republican. Orders are orders.
The result: Democrats lost a state House seat in a district in which President Obama got 57 percent of the vote in 2012 and where Democrats outnumber Republicans, 2-to-1.
Republican Martina White, 26, a financial adviser, was elected state representative in the 170th District, which covers the Bustleton-Somerton-Parkwood area of Northeast Philadelphia.
White easily defeated Democrat Sarah Del Ricci, 34, a horse trainer and director of the Parkwood Therapeutic Riding Center, in the special election to fill the vacancy left by former Democratic state Rep. Brendan Boyle, who was elected to Congress last year.
By most accounts, it was a self-imposed Democratic bloodbath.
Boyle, who in 2008 became the first Democrat to win the seat in the former Republican stronghold, was fuming last night.
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GOP takes Boyle's seat in Dem district