• Introducing Aaron Rosenbaum, Committee Person Candidate

February 15th, 2026

I am creating this blog as I begin my campaign to run for committee person in the 23rd division of the 8th ward of the Philadelphia Democratic Party. My quest for this role began in 2024 as I volunteered with Cass Green’s campaign for State Representative of the 10th district in Pennsylvania. It was disappointing to lose the primary to the incumbent, Amen Brown by 44 votes. But coming so close to unseating an incumbent with a grass roots campaign did leave me hopeful for the future.

I spent the day of the primary at my polling place at 23rd and Race Streets asking my neighbors to vote for Cass Green. A couple things I noticed that day started me on the path to choose to run for committee person. The first is before that day, I had no idea who my committee people were despite living here for four years. I’m not even sure I knew what a division of a ward is. It seems that a political party with iron clad control of city politics since longer than I have been alive should have better outreach than this. Since then, I have asked numerous people who live in Philadelphia and are registered as Democrats if they know who their committee person is. Not a single person has been able to name one.

The second is that the committee people and their volunteers were supporting the incumbent. I wondered how and why the decision to do so was made. Why would the Democratic Party even make an endorsement in a Democratic primary? Just eight years earlier, there was a huge scandal when it became public that the DNC was secretly, actively promoting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton over her challenger. Yet here the city and state party were doing the exact same thing, but out in the open. A staff member of the state caucus spent some time at my polling site passing out literature supporting the incumbent. He literally said to me that it does not matter one bit from his point of view which of the three candidates win. Each is a Democrat who will vote the exact same way in Harrisburg. When I asked why, then, he was actively campaigning for one of the three, he answered that supporting the incumbent is what we do as staff of the party.

Shortly after the primary, a fellow political activist recommended a book called Green Shoots of Democracy in the Philadelphia Democratic Party by Karen Bojar. It only took me about 60 pages to inspire me to run for committee person in my division. My goal is to work with like minded committee people to transform the party into a truly democratic organization that actively encourages and promotes participation in the democratic process at the grass roots level. I intend to campaign on the slogan, “Bringing Democracy Back to the Democratic Party.”

This blog is not just intended to document my campaign for committee person. I hope it will become a vehicle to keep my neighbors informed of what is going on in the committee as well as my thoughts on local, state, and national politics. But first, I have an election to win!