The blue-and-yellow signs outside Paige Cognetti’s Congressional campaign headquarters drive home her message: “Ban Corporate PAC Money,” “Ban Congressional Stock Trading,” and “Fight Washington Corruption.”
Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, has made “corruption” synonymous with issues top of mind for voters across the country, from the rising cost of living to the proliferation of data centers. She even adopted the slogan “Paige Against the Machine.”
The toss-up US House race between Cognetti and freshman Republican Representative Rob Bresnahan is one both parties are watching for signs of who might win control of Congress — and with it oversight of President Donald Trump’s administration — next year. Democrats need to flip only a handful of seats to reach a majority. A trio of toss-up races in Pennsylvania could put them over the top.
Mayor since 2020, Cognetti plays a key role in Democrats’ plan. To make her case, Cognetti has hammered Bresnahan over his stock trades while in office.
Read More: Trump Has Out-Traded All of Congress With 29,000 Transactions
The lawmaker has faced scrutiny for selling shares in healthcare providers before voting to slash Medicaid funding and trading AI-linked stock while encouraging data center development. Like around the country, AI data centers are unpopular in Pennsylvania. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday showed 64 percent of likely voters think data centers will do more harm than good in the state.
Overall, Bresnahan made about 650 individual stock, bond and option trades in 2025, his disclosures show, after calling Congressional trading “sickening” during his 2024 campaign.
“People understand the connectivity between their costs and the corruption, and they really want something to be done about it,” Cognetti, 46, said late last month.
Bresnahan says that a financial adviser was responsible for his trades. In his disclosures he says he has “no role in, nor am informed of, specific investment decisions prior to their execution.” The lawmaker has since stopped trading individual securities outside of government bonds and introduced a bill to curb stock trading by members of Congress. It had no cosponsors.
“I understand where she’s trying to suggest this,” Bresnahan said, maintaining he never timed stock trades based on legislation – “never once, right hand to God, on my mother.”
GOP consultant Christopher Nicholas said of all the Republicans running in Pennsylvania’s competitive House races, Bresnahan is “the only one who made an unforced error.”
Bresnahan joined Congress after narrowly defeating a six-term Democrat. While Trump won the 8th Congressional District by more than 8 points in 2024, Bresnahan got elected by less than 2 points . The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates this year’s race, anchored in the northeastern Wyoming Valley, one of 22 toss-ups for the US House.
It’s the kind of contest that both sides say could be a bellwether for the next presidential election. Trump carried Pennsylvania by less than 2 points in 2024, winning the nation’s biggest swing-state prize. The Wyoming Valley, once a hub for anthracite coal mining, is one of the areas behind the commonwealth’s realignment of predominantly white working-class voters in favor of Republicans – though Scranton, the largest city in the region, remains solidly blue.
“You can see on the ground that it’s a tough district,” said ex-US Senator Bob Casey, a Scranton native who lost his seat to Republican Dave McCormick in 2024, but he said economic issues had made it “a much different environment now.”
Bill Jones, a three-time Trump voter from Scranton who appears in one of Cognetti’s ads, said it’s getting harder to make ends meet. “Groceries are ridiculous,” the 73-year-old said. “And don’t even get me started on gas.”
Overall, Bresnahan has outraised Cognetti throughout the campaign, but Cognetti outperformed Bresnahan in the second-quarter, raking in $2 million to his roughly $1 million, and ending the quarter with $1 million more cash on hand for the race’s final stretch.
Super political action committees are pouring in millions more. The Congressional Leadership Fund, which backs Republicans, is slated to spend $4.6 million in the final two months of the race, according to AdImpact. House Majority PAC, which is supporting Cognetti, will shell out $4.2 million over the same period. In addition, the National Republican Congressional Committee is spending $1.4 million and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has booked almost $770,000 in ad time.
Trump Support
While some vulnerable Republicans have distanced themselves from Trump, Bresnahan, 36, has embraced the president and his agenda. In return, Trump enthusiastically endorsed Bresnahan, who stepped down as head of his family’s electrical-contracting company to join Congress. But Trump has not announced plans so far to boost the GOP ticket in Pennsylvania. Instead, the president is barnstorming mostly red states including Oklahoma, Alabama and Texas, where he may rouse supporters for candidates facing unexpected pressure from Democrats.
At the same time, Bresnahan has secured endorsements from labor groups known to back Democrats, like the American Federation of Government Employees, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters.
In an interview, Bresnahan acknowledged the state of the economy as a result of the Iran war, but downplayed its impact on whether he secures a second term.
“I’m not discounting the reality of fuel prices right now,” Bresnahan said. But he added that voters “also remember during the Biden administration when fuel went over $5 a gallon.” He backs an immediate end to the war, which Trump has said will last at least through the midterms. “Today. Now. Yesterday. I mean, as soon as humanly possible,” he said.
A former adviser in President Barack Obama’s US Treasury Department, Cognetti has tried to distance herself from the Democratic establishment, even circumventing a nominating process she considered corrupt in 2019.
“I will not have any qualms about taking on Democrats in Congress who are not doing the right thing,” she said.
Cognetti has, however, accepted endorsements from the centrist New Democrat Coalition and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, who’s up for reelection and seen as a 2028 presidential contender, has used this year’s midterms to position himself as a kingmaker, endorsing a slate of primary candidates and pouring millions from his war chest into down-ballot races.
As mayor, Cognetti vowed to reform City Hall, getting rid of cash payments and setting up a whistleblower hotline. Cognetti has refused a city-owned vehicle for her job.
Meanwhile, Bresnahan said there’s nothing he’d praise about her tenure as mayor: “I’ve still yet to see it.”
The area bordering Scranton’s Lackawanna County is known for an early 2000s scandal in which two judges took millions in kickbacks to send juveniles to for-profit detention centers. Cognetti said that case still resonates and criticized Bresnahan for not doing enough to push back on “the system in Washington.”
“People all throughout this district are really, really sick of corruption, and this feeling of the system being rigged,” she said.