LOWER MACUNGIE TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Every four years, Pennsylvania plays a critical role in deciding who sits in the Oval Office. This year, in the same diners, farm fields, suburbs, union halls and front porches, the state may also decide who runs the House of Representatives.
Pennsylvania is home to four congressional districts drawn so tightly a stiff wind could flip them, and they could determine whether Republicans keep their slim majority or hand the gavel to Democrats.
“The road to control of the House goes right through Pennsylvania,” Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro told me. “Whoever wins the four most contested House races in this state will decide who controls the majority in Washington next year.”
Shapiro, who is running for reelection this year, isn’t just talking. He’s spending. He recently launched “Rise Up Pennsylvania,” a $3.3 million push targeting Republican incumbents in these four districts that run from the Cumberland Valley into the Lehigh Valley, through Bucks County and up toward Scranton.
The math explains the urgency.
Shapiro holds a double-digit advantage in the governor’s race over Republican state Treasurer Stacy Garrity. However, the latest Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters showed Shapiro going from leading by 18 percentage points in February to 13 now.
Pennsylvania’s House delegation leans Republican, 10-7. Nationally, Democrats need a net gain of three seats to take control. The latest Cook Political Report ratings for the four seats list the 1st Congressional District as likely Republican — the others are toss-ups.
Shapiro supports these challengers facing GOP incumbents: Bob Harvie against Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in the 1st; Bob Brooks against Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in the 7th; Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti against Rep. Rob Bresnahan in the 8th; and Janelle Stelson against Rep. Scott Perry in the 10th.
Two years ago, a possible Democratic wave looked like fantasy. Six-term Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright was defeated by Bresnahan. Three-term Democratic Rep. Susan Wild lost to Mackenzie. Three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey was ousted, and Donald Trump carried the state on his way back to the White House.
Then came last November. Under new state party chairman Eugene DePasquale, Democrats held three state Supreme Court seats up for retention and won races in Bucks, Washington, Erie and Luzerne counties, places that Trump carried 12 months earlier.
That’s the whiplash that defines Pennsylvania politics. No one here mistakes a win for something permanent. Voters have less brand loyalty to either party than outsiders understand.
This isn’t a Democratic slate drawn from the party’s rising socialist wing. Harvie, Brooks, Cognetti and Stelson describe themselves in the language of an older tradition — New Deal Democrats with progressive leanings, not democratic socialists.
Privately, Democratic operatives said that’s the key strategy: convince skeptical swing voters that backing the Democratic candidate isn’t a vote for a leftward lurch. In Pennsylvania’s working-class corners, the “socialist” label can still sink a campaign before it starts.
Too much media attention on the far left — including U.S. Rep. Summer Lee in Pittsburgh and state Rep. Chris Rabb in Philadelphia, both of whom have received endorsements from the Democratic Socialists of America — could cost the four congressional challengers votes.
DePasquale insists the real edge is local. “We have candidates that are uniquely tied to their district,” he said, adding that they are not interchangeable names plugged into a national script, but figures shaped by the communities they’re trying to represent.
The 1st
Democrat Bob Harvie began campaigning as a teenager on the sidewalks of Bucks County’s Bristol borough, handing out literature for his uncle’s mayoral run. “The first campaign I worked, I was 13,” he said, recalling the 1985 race. His mother helped start the Bristol Parent Teacher Organization; his grandfather helped organize the local Little League. “That’s the way we did the campaign,” Harvie said. “You got involved. You did something to make your community better.”
That instinct is why, at 54, this high school teacher left the classroom for the campaign trail. “My mom had four brothers. They all served in the military,” he said. “I’ve always been raised to love this country … and I can’t stand what’s happening to it.” That comes bundled with frustration at his own party: “I’ve been a Democrat my whole life and feel the party has lost its way.”
What Harvie is really selling is roots. His great-grandfather sold pasta off a Bristol pushcart around 1900; his mother, nearly 82, has lived her whole life on one block. “I’ve never lived anywhere else but Bucks,” he said.
Before Republican Brian Fitzpatrick got to Washington, he spent 15 years as an FBI agent and federal prosecutor, work that shaped his instinct for problem-solving and public service. He has served in Congress since 2017.
Fitzpatrick’s older brother, Mike Fitzpatrick, had held the seat before him, and when Mike decided against running for reelection, Brian stepped into the race and won the seat. Mike died in 2020 at age 56 after a long battle with cancer. Brian’s decision to run was marked by sadness, but also by continuity, a handoff rooted in duty more than ambition.
The 52-year-old is known for taking a more district-focused, pragmatic approach. GovTrack describes him as a “purple” member, which suggests he often sits between party lines rather than voting strictly by ideology.
Fitzpatrick said his constituents are his bosses. For him that means more than passing laws. It means calling agencies, cutting through federal red tape and turning pain into action. “The job is part legislator, part conduit, part lifeline,” he said.
The 7th
Born in North Adams, Massachusetts, Democrat Bob Brooks, 53, hauled a paper route by age 10 and worked in a factory before high school ended — then his house burned down his senior year. His mother moved the family to Bath, near her parents. He loaded a U-Haul and followed. College didn’t stick — “school wasn’t for me” — so he cycled through gas stations, pizza delivery and bartending, until a buddy told him to take the civil service test.
That exam made him a Bethlehem firefighter — “the best job in the world,” he called it — and a union man. He was tapped as shift vice president partly because he said he already knew how to run a clam bake. He rose to president of the state firefighters’ association, coached baseball for three decades and retired last year. “My wife said I had to get a part-time job,” he joked of running. “I’m not quite sure this is what she had in mind.”
He’s drawn food stamps, lived in public housing and faced foreclosure — hardship he wears like a credential. He said voters raise one issue the most with him: “affordability, the magic word of the day.”
Brooks faces Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, in one of the nation’s closest toss-ups.
In the shadow of the old Bethlehem Steel plant, Mackenzie, 43, talked about his first year and a half in Washington: Thousands of constituent cases closed. More than $100 million in covid-era health care reimbursements freed up for local hospitals. A $47 million contract for Mack Defense to build dump trucks for the military in the Lehigh Valley.
When he talks about what remains unfinished, Mackenzie reveals his long-term grudge against his own institution. He wants term limits and a stock-trading ban for members of Congress. He’s also pushing for a bill to ensure data centers pay for their own electricity, “rather than quietly passing that cost to the widow down the road who just wants her lights to stay affordable.”
The 8th
Democrat Paige Cognetti, 45, came to Pennsylvania by way of Oregon and the politics of war. “I disagreed with the Iraq War,” she said of the decision that redirected her career into politics. She worked in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department and graduated from Harvard Business School. A stints as a wealth manager at Goldman Sachs followed. She returned to Scranton a decade ago to settle down — and started reading about corruption in the mayor’s office.
An auditor general’s report on the Scranton School District uncovered financial mismanagement that pushed Cognetti into local politics and an appointment to the school board. By the time Scranton’s mayor was indicted on extortion and bribery charges, Cognetti was pregnant with her first daughter. She watched the local Democratic machine anoint the mayor’s replacement behind closed doors. “I was not going to have that,” she said. She ran as an independent in 2019 and won — then won again in 2021 and again last year against the city’s Democratic Party chair.
As mayor, she said she has “declined a city car, a gas card, a pandemic-era paycheck and a raise she was legally owed,” while improving Scranton’s credit rating from junk to A-minus. Cognetti is banking on voters looking at her governing record, not the party label. “People vote for the person, not the party,” she said.
Cognetti is challenging Republican incumbent Rob Bresnahan, 36, who doesn’t talk like someone reapplying for his job in Washington; instead, he seems like he never left northeastern Pennsylvania. “This isn’t about building a political career,” he said of running for the seat he won in 2024. “It’s about fighting for the community that raised me.”
Five generations deep in Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike and Wayne counties, Bresnahan — the district’s first Republican in a generation — ticks through the plumbing of constituent service like a man reciting his own family’s history: nearly $86 million in funding for local projects in the 2026 fiscal year, including a new career and technical center in Pike County.
Lowering health care premiums, utility bills, rent and the cost of groceries motivated him to continue to serve. “That, along with growing jobs and opportunities here, is ultimately at the end of the day what I want to accomplish for our district,” he said.
The 10th
For 30 years, Janelle Stelson told other people’s stories from a television news desk.
Born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and raised near Seattle, she moved east after college to be near retiring grandparents. “I took a job writing speeches at an embassy, figuring I’d be going back home,” she said of eventually returning to her Seattle roots. Instead, her writing skills led her to newscasting and a new home in central Pennsylvania.
What turned a broadcast journalist into a candidate was a moment on air she cannot shake. “I was live on the set when the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, and our congressman was dancing in the streets,” she said of Rep. Scott Perry, who was not literally dancing in the streets when the court overturned Roe v. Wade. She ran against Perry in 2024 and came within a whisker of unseating him.
Ask her what’s driving voters now, and she ticks off grocery prices and utility bills as data centers push costs onto neighborhoods. Corruption ranks right up there, which is why she supports term limits and sold her stock holdings before she launched her campaign.
Her district includes Hershey’s chocolate plants and the Three Mile Island nuclear site that is being refurbished. “It’s a little bit urban, very suburban, a little bit of everything,” she said.
Perry doesn’t dress up his pitch to voters. “You know me by now. Kind of what you see is what you get,” he said. “What I fight for at home are the same things that I fight for in Washington.”
When pointing to his record, he highlights his battles over a massive federal tax and spending bill. In those negotiations, he pushed to eliminate taxes on overtime, tips and Social Security benefits. He notes that he fought “against not only the other side, but my own side” to advance these measures.
Perry anchors his reelection run to two issues: stopping automatic camera surveillance used by law enforcement agencies and lowering rising electric bills. On surveillance, he insists it isn’t a partisan matter. “People don’t like it, and they want somebody fighting for them,” he said.
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