Oliver Seeks ‘Disenfranchised’ Nonvoters In Mayoral Race

by Tony West

Doug Oliver wants voters who don’t vote, to vote for him this year.

Although this city has 1 million registered voters, observers expect only about 300,000 will cast their vote in the most-important election it knows: the quadrennial race for Mayor that likely set the direction of crucial everyday government services in their lives.

That leaves 700,000 who didn’t vote and who seldom vote. Oliver calls them “disenfranchised voters” and he wants to lead them back into the system.

“Our current government does not represent them and will not represent them,” said Oliver. “I am trying to reconnect them to government.”

In his race for Mayor in the Democratic primary, Oliver is not competing with other candidates for the existing pool of reliable supervoters. Instead he is targeting groups that are prominent among dropout voters: the young, the poor, and people whose focus is on making a living.

It would make for an unusual, and perhaps improbable, coalition. But Oliver believes he can connect with all three.

At age 40, the former Philadelphia Gas Works VP is the youngest candidate in the race. To tap millennials, Oliver is running a campaign heavy on social media. He is reaching out to organizations that are heavy with young Philadelphians, with leaders of their own generation. And he says this dynamic, self-confident age group’s primary need from their government is to stay out of their way and let them create their own opportunities.

Oliver believes in private enterprise. After graduating from Lock Haven University with a journalism degree, he went to work for Beach Advertising, the premier African American-owned communications shop in Philadelphia. (He has since picked up a communications MA from LaSalle and an MBA from St. Joe’s.) He enjoys the energy industry and the challenges of revenue generation. He is philosophically averse to taxation, saying if he were faced with solving the city’s problems, “increasing taxes would be the last thing on the table.”

Communicating with poor Philadelphians, Oliver says, is easy for him. That’s how he grew up.

Oliver was raised by a single mother in Germantown. A troubled youngster – “I never got arrested, but that was because I never got caught,” he said – he bounced around five different elementary and middle schools as his mother searched for a system that could harness his energies in a positive direction.

Finally she succeeded, by getting him into Milton Hershey School, the well-endowed free boarding school for orphans in Dutch Country. It turned Doug around and made him the man he is today.

Most poor Philadelphians haven’t been so lucky. But Oliver trusts that he can speak their language. “We spend a significant amount of time knocking on doors, shaking hands in subways,” he recounted. “We begin by asking them if the political structure has benefited them. Almost 100% say it hasn’t. Then I tell them, ‘If you want something different, you must DO something different.’” (DO conveniently stands for “Doug Oliver” as well.) “Doing means voting.

“Then I introduce a potential solution: ‘Are you willing to vote?’ If they’re listening and paying attention, then I like my odds.”

Oliver’s campaign is lightly funded. But he doesn’t think lavish funding will help him reach his target voters anyway. They are the ones well-heeled campaigns routinely miss, after all.

When candidates spend six hours a day dialing for dollars, Oliver maintains, the inevitable result is they will serve the interests of their donors after being elected. Oliver’s goal is to work for the people who can’t give him a nickel, he says.

 “We as a city face fiscal challenges because our officials serve the interests of the minority who vote,” Oliver insisted.

Oliver doesn’t have to convert all the disaffected Democrats – just 15% of them, he reckons. In what may turn out to be a seven-way race, 100,000 new voters could be enough to top the pack.

Oliver’s interest in government started with a bang when he was eight. Eager to connect him with strong African American male role models, his mother wangled a meeting for him with then-Managing Dir. Wilson Goode, Sr. Goode asked the boy what he wanted to be. Doug said maybe a policeman. So Goode picked up the phone and had a policeman come into his office to talk to Doug. Then Doug said, maybe a fireman. Goode picked up the phone and put a firefighter on the line with the boy.

“By this point, I was getting curious about who this man (Goode) was,” Oliver recalled. I saw what a Managing Director could do and it was mind-boggling.” Government service became a lifelong process for me.”

Oliver has never held elective office before. He takes this as a plus: “if my main competitors have all been in office for 20 years or more, yet most voters still don’t have what they wanted from them – why vote for them?” he argued.

But he is familiar with government service, having worked as press secretary under Estelle Richman and Gov. Ed Rendell in the Dept. of Public Welfare. When Michael Nutter won the mayoralty, Oliver became his press secretary for three years, giving him “a front-row seat while the City faced the worst recession in a lifetime,” as he put it.

 Oliver is circumspect about his former boss’s record – “Some things I agreed with, some things I disagreed with. I am glad my name wasn’t on the door.”

 But Oliver has dealt with politicians who impressed him. At Beach Advertising he became close to one of its clients, City Councilman John White, whom he still regards as a mentor.

 A good education changed Oliver’s life and good education is the key to Philadelphia’s future, he states. The city is attracting serious young talent who can put it at the forefront of the national economy. But they won’t stay in town, raise children, pay taxes and invest here if they don’t have good schools. As for poor children, who now make up 40% of the school population, he knows it’s impossible to send them all to Milton Hershey. “We have to bring Milton Hershey to them here,” he said.

 Step one for Oliver is to reengage the disengaged voter. “My message for them is somebody in City Hall understands your frustration, understands how to gameplan for you. But I need your help! The first thing I’ve got to do is get in the door. I need you to believe.”

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