Representative Rob Bresnahan is in a sticky political spot. A Pennsylvania Republican, he ran for the House in 2024 on a vow to end congressional stock trading, only to spend his freshman year becoming one of Congress’s most prolific traders — fifth in terms of the number of trades, as of the end of 2025.
Worse, several of his trades appear to have benefited from some of his congressional votes.
Mr. Bresnahan’s go-to defense has been that impropriety is impossible because a financial adviser independently handles all his trades. Last week, Politico called attention to a 2025 radio interview in which he mentions talking with his financial adviser about “what different positions are coming up.” A spokesman for Mr. Bresnahan, Chris Pack, told me the comment had been taken out of context and similarly assured Politico that such discussions involve “30,000-foot investment strategy,” not specific trades.
Which brings us to possibly the stickiest problem for Mr. Bresnahan: He is running for re-election in Pennsylvania’s swingy Eighth Congressional District against the Democrat Paige Cognetti.
Currently in her third term as the mayor of Scranton, Ms. Cognetti knows government corruption. She has, in fact, spent the past decade working various jobs to clean up her corner of Northeastern Pennsylvania, a region long known for public graft, grift and mismanagement.
Notably, some of her fiercest fights have been with her own party. She first ran for mayor as an independent in 2019, to replace a Democratic incumbent who had pleaded guilty to extortion, bribery and conspiracy. Pitching herself as a scourge of the local Democratic machine, she vowed to clean up City Hall. Her unofficial slogan became “Paige against the machine,” a play on the band Rage Against the Machine.
Cheesy but effective. Ms. Cognetti carried the crowded field to become Scranton’s first female mayor, then (mere weeks after giving birth to her first child) got to work overhauling how the city operated, in areas such as contractor hiring and data tracking. Voters were impressed. She cruised to re-election in 2021 and again last November on essentially the same reform platform — the one she is now counting on to take her to Congress.
“We’ve been running this same campaign from 2019 to date,” she said in a recent interview. “Make government work for the people. Public service is to serve others, not yourself.”
Not every Democratic candidate is fortunate enough to be running against someone with Mr. Bresnahan’s promiscuous trading record. But all of them can learn from Ms. Cognetti’s anticorruption moxie, a dose of which could help a Democratic Party struggling to regain the public’s trust.
Ms. Cognetti has been happily pummeling Mr. Bresnahan on the stock-trading issue. But she is quick to point out that there are “very high-profile examples” of this behavior on both sides of the aisle, along with reform fans in both parties. “I mean, the president mentioned it in his State of the Union.”
In campaigning against the Washington swamp, the out party traditionally enjoys an edge. In 2018, Democrats decried the corruption and chaos of Trump 1.0 in 2018 and won back the House. In 2006, a string of Republican scandals — including the indictment and later resignation of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, on campaign-finance-related charges and revelations that Representative Mark Foley had been creeping on young House pages — helped Democrats flip both chambers of Congress.
But Democrats cannot kick back and expect the politics of scandal to play out as they usually do. Today’s anticorruption zeitgeist feels different. Americans aren’t upset with one party’s misconduct; they are sick of the whole system, and many see Democrats as the champions of an illegitimate status quo. Last summer a poll commissioned by the progressive government-reform group End Citizens United found that, among likely voters in House battleground districts, slightly more considered Democrats to be corrupt than Republicans (49 to 44 percent). Respondents said they trusted Republicans more “on key issues like standing up to special interests” and “fighting government corruption.”
Ms. Cognetti’s path shows how to build the credibility Democrats lack. Having worked on Democratic campaigns and served in President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department, she dove into local politics in 2018, as a director on the troubled Scranton School Board. “I really started to battle the Democratic machine from then, because the school district is the first stop on the way to City Council and other places,” she said. In 2019 she went to work as a special assistant to the auditor general, Pennsylvania’s top fiscal watchdog. “I was happily doing that when the mayor of Scranton got indicted,” she recalled
Ask Ms. Cognetti what reform she is most proud of as mayor, and you’ll get a list of unglamorous-sounding achievements. Under her, the city put in place systems to improve financial accountability. It did away with cash payments for city business. Its code-enforcement department was professionalized. A whistle-blower hotline was set up. Nepotism in hiring, a long-running tradition, was rooted out. “Hiring on merit” is something that “breaks through” with the public, she told me.
Ms. Cognetti has refused a government car and a gas card. She pays for her own travel, even for job-related trips, and she pays for her own stamps for correspondence like sympathy cards.
I asked whether such small-bore efforts really matter or if they might risk seeming a little gimmicky. “It matters because the previous folks had enriched themselves,” she insisted. With her mayoral predecessor having been found with stacks of cash in his home and ultimately sentenced to seven years in prison, Ms. Cognetti felt she needed to “draw a contrast,” she stressed. “You have to build trust back. And part of that is doing some things that sometimes is an overcorrection.”
Reforms like outlawing congressional stock trading would allow members to similarly signal “that they are about service and not themselves,” she said. Polls show that a vast majority of Americans support a ban, which Ms. Cognetti considers a no-brainer. “It is not at all about begrudging anyone’s wealth,” she said. “It’s just, do it as a private citizen.”
Ms. Cognetti is well aware that there are more systemic problems plaguing Washington. Opening up primary elections currently restricted to voters affiliated with a party is one of the items on her list to tackle. And like many Democrats, she is all for draining the dark money from politics.
But the more discrete, easier-to-get-your-arms-around issues still matter. In many cases, she said, those battles are “the kind of stuff that resonates with people.”
Mr. Bresnahan had better hope she’s wrong on this one.
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