It’s a summer of uncertainty in the capital city.

Since his stunning landslide defeat in the city’s May Democratic primary, Steve Reed, Harrisburg’s so-called “mayor for life” has been uncharacteristically silent about his next political move. First elected in 1981, Reed is finishing his seventh term and was seeking an eighth when he ran into a wall. Reed, who in his long mayoral tenure has been confident, even cocky, about what is best for his beloved city, is in a personal quandary about what to do next. It’s a political purgatory that Reed supporters are finding hard to endure.

Steve Reed

The only thing known is that Reed has not offered a concession to primary winner, Linda Thompson, currently city council president, and an outspoken critic of the mayor. She won the May primary by roughly 3,500 votes to 2,500 for Reed.

Worsening the situation is that the city has entered an early summer wave of violence and the usually outspoken mayor has been strangely silent and unavailable to the media. As of Thursday, June 25, there have been 11 shooting incidents in 18 days, several of them resulting in killings, including some that appear to be execution-style.

The local print and broadcast media, which has been mostly kind to Reed over the years, is befuddled and irritated by his unavailability.

Under a headline that reads, “For city’s sake, Reed must stop sulking,” Patriot-News columnist Laura Vecsey argued that the mayor is not doing justice to his legacy of single-handedly reviving the city from distressed status in 1982 when he took office to a thriving metropolis that often makes national most livable cities’ lists.

Reed broke his silence Thursday night with an appearance on the local ABC affiliate in which he denied he was sulking but just busy with city work seven days a week.

In response to the rash of violence, Reed ordered all police on 12-hour shifts to deal with the problem. That, he said, will increase by 50 percent the number of officers on the street, but will cost the city considerable overtime.

He said he was not hiding from the media. “We’re not going to stand up there before cameras every five hours and give blow-by-blow updates on active police investigations,” he explained. “We’ll give updates after we make arrests.”

Despite the mayor’s denials, some of his supporters told the newspaper columnist he went into seclusion with a depressive funk after the election loss. But his supporters hope to give him some polling information that might boost his spirits and even induce him to try and get that one more four-year term he wants to serve.

So after taking a primary victory too much for granted in the spring, does the mayor or his team have a secret plan that he will enact before the fall general election?

Speculation has settled on two possibilities, one of which sounds plausible but would be hard to implement on Election Day – a write-in campaign in the November election. Reed said on the Thursday night newscast that he will make that decision later this summer.

(Editor’s note: Under state law, Reed is not eligible to run an independent candidacy because that would have to have been declared and filed before the major party primaries.)

Even Reed’s most ardent supporters acknowledge the difficulty in getting thousands of voters to master the complicated process of doing a write-in in the age of modern electronic voting.

“We remain hopeful that the mayor will favorably consider a write-in bid,” said Randy King, the former mayoral spokesman who has been organizing efforts by “three or four groups” throughout the city to fund such a campaign. King noted that phone calls and e-mails continue to come in daily urging Reed to fight on.

The other option is if Reed could somehow become the Republican candidate. The obstacle there is that the mayor lost the Republican primary too.

While his name was only on the Democratic ballot, Reed did mount a write-in campaign for the GOP nod. But it went to Nevin Mindlin, a former legislative staffer and currently a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Bar Association.

Reed got about 325 write in votes but Mindlin, who was listed on the GOP ballot, captured the nomination with 423 votes.

For Reed to have the Republican nomination, Mindlin would have to resign from it – something he is adamant he will not do.

He reportedly has told Reed supporters who have approached him that if they are so shaky about Thompson’s leadership of the city, they should support him instead. Reed supporters are unlikely to do that. Most of them are Democrats and well aware of the city’s overwhelming Democratic registration. At the same time, they are unlikely to move their support to Thompson until they are certain Reed is out of it. Thompson has made moves to close Democratic ranks. She held a post-primary fund-raiser at $1,000 a person and solicited many of the mayor’s supporters and large donors.

Linda Thompson

Republican leaders in Dauphin County, in which Harrisburg is located, are also not prone to intervene and nudge Mindlin out of the race.

At stake are two of the three countywide Common Pleas Court seats to be decided in November. While one of the three endorsed judicial candidates won both parties’ nominations and is a shoo-in for election, two candidates won only the GOP nod while their non-endorsed Republican rivals won the Democratic nomination because cross-over filing is allowed in judicial races.

Republicans are reluctant to “gin up” voter turnout in the Democratic city, lest if upset its two vulnerable judicial candidates who only have the GOP nomination. While the courthouse is still solidly Republican, voter registration flipped last year to a very narrow edge to Democrats so the concern has some validity.

The wave of new Democratic registrants was prompted by the fierce primary battle in April 2008 between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. While Clinton won the county, Obama overwhelmingly won the city, whose population is majority African-American.

It was that font of new African-American voters that Thompson’s campaign skillfully tapped with a targeted Get-Out-The-Vote effort. Thompson is African-American.

Although the city has been majority minority for two decades or longer, Reed, who is white, has been able in the past to count on a core base of white voters and educated middle-class blacks who supported his candidacy over any African-American rival.

While the city has about 2,500 strong Republican voters and 2,000 independents that Reed has been able to count on in past elections, the newly energized black vote in the city may be too powerful to overcome. That may be giving Reed pause about a second potential election embarrassment in the fall.

So what would become of Reed if he did decide to step aside and graciously transition to Thompson?

He could find a place in the private sector. His mostly smooth and effective operation of the city for nearly three decades is a skill that he brings to any private enterprise.

He also could end up being a cabinet member in state government in the lame-duck Rendell administration or he could transition to Washington, D.C., where he would be ideal as a deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

(Until recently, Reed has been infamous for showing up at every emergency, major fire, police situation or other calamity in his city. He also led the city through at least two major floods caused by the Susquehanna River rising during his tenure.)

“It might do Steve some good to get out of town for a little while,” said one Reed supporter, who noticed that despite the disappointment of the election loss, “a certain weight appears to be lifted from his shoulders.”

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