Philadelphia's municipal election of November 5, 1963, involved contests for mayor, all seventeen city council seats, and several other executive and judicial offices. The Democrats lost vote share citywide and the Republicans gained one seat in City Council, but the Democratic acting mayor, James Hugh Joseph Tate, was elected to a full term and his party maintained their hold on the city government. The election was the first decline in the Democrats' share of the vote since they took control of the city government in the 1951 elections, and showed the growing tension between the reformers and ward bosses within their party. Background Since the 1951 election, Democrats in Philadelphia had held the mayor's office and a large majority of city council seats. Their victories in those years, which followed 67 years of Republican dominance, where achieved through a combination of reform-minded independents (including some former Republicans) and the Democratic organization led by Democratic City Committee chairman William J. Green, Jr. This coalition brought increasingly large victories to the Democratic Party throughout the 1950s. This pattern held through 1959 under reform mayors Joseph S. Clark Jr. and Richardson Dilworth, but by the early 1960s the coalition had begun to fray with reformers being increasingly marginalized. After Dilworth won reelection with 65% of the vote in 1959, grand jury investigations into City Hall corruption damaged the Democrats' chances in the 1961 election. The Democrats maintained power that year, but by smaller margins. Their reduced majorities and increased association with machine politics signaled the beginning of the end for the party's coalition with independent good government reformers. Dilworth's resignation in 1962 to run for governor made City Council President James Hugh Joseph Tate acting mayor. While Tate presented, in one author's words, "a rather neutral image in middle class wards," he also was the first mayor since Bernard Samuel to have come up through the ranks of a political machine. The fading connection between the Democratic organization and good-government independents gave the Republicans their first hope for victory in years. Mayor James Tate had served as acting mayor since Dilworth's resignation on February 12, 1962. In 1963, he sought the Democratic nomination for election in his own right. Tate's attempt at a four-year term exposed a growing breach in the coalition of independent reformers and Democratic ward bosses that had cemented that party's grip on the electorate since 1951. The Democratic City