No single state in America better captures the forces and fault lines shaping the coming midterm elections than Pennsylvania.
Just two years ago, Pennsylvania was at the epicenter of a nationwide Republican revival. President Trump swept its electoral votes. His party ousted an entrenched Democratic senator. And it was the only state where Republicans flipped two House seats.
Now the pendulum has swung. Mr. Trump’s support has crumbled. And Democrats are targeting four bellwether House districts in the state that together would give them the congressional majority.
What makes Pennsylvania so revealing is how emblematic those races are of the candidates, issues and demographic shifts that will determine outcomes across the country.
A Republican is clinging to power in sprawling suburbs that have otherwise turned blue. Democrats are trying to reclaim fast-growing Hispanic areas that swung to the right two years ago. White, working-class voters in aging industrial towns and rural areas have lost patience with the president’s promises.
“Pennsylvania runs the whole gamut of the midterms in four races,” said Jesse Ferguson, a national Democratic strategist involved in House elections. “If Democrats can win every kind of fight there, there is no district safe for Republicans in this moment.”
One race features the House’s most outspoken moderate Republican; another includes the former leader of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. Stock trading and corruption is a recurring theme in advertising. Accusations of socialism are flying.
Yet for all the differences between these districts, there is a commonality to the G.O.P.’s troubles.
His name is Donald J. Trump.
The president’s approval rating had dwindled to 34 percent in the most recent Times/Inquirer/Siena poll of Pennsylvania voters. Three-quarters of voters disapprove of his handling of the cost of living.
Manpower and money are pouring into the state. More than $105 million in advertising on broadcast, cable and streaming is blanketing screens of all sizes in those four districts.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, kicked off his 100-day sprint to the speakership in Pennsylvania over the summer. He returned last weekend for a rally in one district and made appearances in Black churches in another. A few days earlier, the man whose job he is trying to take, Speaker Mike Johnson, blitzed through the state’s battlegrounds in a single day on behalf of all four Republican incumbents.
Polls show that Democrats are heavily favored to flip the House. What the size of that majority, and its shape and direction, are likely to depend on are the results in places like Pennsylvania.
A flip in all four would signal a Democratic wave; a flip in none would represent an unexpected Republican revival.
Here’s a closer look at each of those races and what they tell us about what might happen on Nov. 3.
PA-1: Has a Republican survivor’s time run out?
With his dismal approval rating, Mr. Trump appears to be a drag for Republicans across Pennsylvania. But in no race does his unpopularity loom larger than in Pennsylvania’s First District, on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
The district voted against Mr. Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Yet each time Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican, managed to win anyway — the only member of Congress in his party to do so.
On paper, the suburban seat should be the easiest to flip of the four top battlegrounds. In reality, strategists in both parties say it is the toughest — because of Mr. Fitzpatrick’s unique staying power. He is a moderate Republican who counts the support of typically big Democratic organizations, including labor unions and some big environmental groups.
Mr. Fitzpatrick for years has been something of a white whale for national Democrats. But party officials believe the combination of Mr. Trump’s lowly standing and the popularity of the Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, has opened a door of opportunity. Mr. Shapiro had a 60 percent approval rating in the same Times/Inquirer/Siena poll.
Mr. Fitzpatrick’s Democratic challenger in 2026, Bob Harvie, told a crowd of Democratic activists earlier this month in Green Lane, a small borough in suburban Montgomery County, that he hopes to be swept into office with a Shapiro blowout.
“All of us who are running are going to be clutching both hands, white knuckles, onto those Josh Shapiro coattails,” Mr. Harvie said in a speech. “Because they’re going to take us somewhere.”
Mr. Shapiro has endorsed Mr. Harvie. He has appeared at events with him over two consecutive weekends. But he notably did not mention Mr. Fitzpatrick’s name in either, instead speaking narrowly about the implications of the race for congressional control.
“Not a coincidence,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said over coffee at a diner two days after the first event.
Mr. Fitzpatrick, who has not endorsed the Republican running for governor, called Mr. Shapiro a “friend.” He invited him to his wedding over the summer, though Mr. Shapiro did not attend. “He sent a lovely note,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.
National Democrats recently started using images of Mr. Fitzpatrick, in black tie, toasting at his wedding in attack ads.
“I respect whatever Josh does, and I want him to do well,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “And he knows that.”
PA-7: Will Latino voters come back home to Democrats?
If Pennsylvania is a swing state, then Northampton, nestled in the Lehigh Valley along the New Jersey border, is one of its swingiest counties. Northampton has alternated between the two parties in every presidential election since 2012, voting with the winner each time: Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump.
Most recently, in 2024, Representative Ryan Mackenzie ousted a Democrat on the strength of a Republican resurgence in Allentown, which is majority Hispanic and the district’s biggest city. Some of its more diverse precincts swung 20 percentage points or more in that year’s presidential race. After he won, Mr. Mackenzie said he hired a Spanish-language outreach coordinator on “day one” for his congressional office.
Victor Martinez, the host of a popular Spanish-language radio show in the Lehigh Valley, had warned Democrats in 2024 about Mr. Trump’s rising appeal. This year, he said, local Republicans should brace for a Hispanic revolt.
“Here we are two years later and the sentiment is, ‘Wait a minute, it got worse!’” Mr. Martinez said of Latinos who gave Mr. Trump a chance on the economy. “Gas is more expensive! Groceries are even more expensive! Electricity is more expensive!”
Bob Brooks, his Democratic challenger and a union leader for firefighters, has his own Hispanic outreach effort. It is branded “Bombero Bob” — Spanish for firefighter — though he said the Latino community’s concerns are largely the same as those of the union members he represents.
“They have the same problems as everybody else,” he said. “They feel lied to.”
Today, the seat is generally seen is one of the most likely of the four to flip.
As Mr. Mackenzie took a seat inside the lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police in Bethlehem last week, he set out to make the case for why, as a freshman Republican he, might buck both parties’ history of midterm losses.
Just down the road, a billboard yoked Mr. Mackenzie to the president. But Mr. Mackenzie bragged about solving 10,000 constituent cases and securing federal funding for a firehouse in Alburtis and an upgraded emergency communications system in Carbon County. “It’s not just about the climate,” Mr. Mackenzie insisted. “It’s much more about individual candidates.”
Yet even some supporters fear the opposite.
“Unfortunately, I think people aren’t voting for the individuals,” said Lucy Lennon, 63, who owns a real estate company in Bethlehem, and came to a recent Mackenzie event. “They’re voting party. And there is some backlash on the Republican Party, for whatever reason.”
PA-8: Anger over stock trading in a working-class enclave
Just to the north, Pennsylvania’s Eighth District has become a national symbol of the Democratic Party’s steady decline in the Trump era among blue-collar workers. Centered around the city of Scranton, voters in the district knocked off a longtime Democratic incumbent in 2024 in favor of a Republican, Rob Bresnahan.
Mr. Bresnahan’s re-election campaign has been shaped by some of the same issues dominating races across America: congressional stock trading and grocery prices.
In 2025, Mr. Bresnahan emerged as one of the most prolific stock traders of that year’s congressional freshman class, after campaigning against the practice the year before.
In an interview, he said he explored putting his assets in a blind trust, but he concluded that it was unworkable. He said his financial advisers made trades independently. His individual stock trading has slowed, if not stopped entirely, since all the attention.
“The whole message that they’ve been running against me is over my stock trading,” Mr. Bresnahan said in an interview after a rally in a warehouse in Hazelton, denying he oversaw his own trades.
Accusations of insider trading among members of Congress have flooded races nationwide. In the Eighth District, Paige Cognetti, the mayor of Scranton and Mr. Bresnahan’s Democratic challenger, has made it a centerpiece.
She has also linked it to affordability, another major issue on voters’ minds.
“There is a clear line now between corruption and costs,” she said in an interview.
Democrats are trying to make this connection for voters all across the country.
Ms. Cognetti recorded a commercial recently in her husband’s grocery store, lashing prices and stock trading in the same spot. “Making that bread for themselves,” she said of Congress as she smushed a loaf of bread, “while the middle class gets squeezed out.”
Mr. Trump has carried the district all three times he has been on the ballot, so Ms. Cognetti is trying to run as a different kind of Democrat. She is leveraging past skirmishes with local Democrats and using the catchy tagline “Paige Against the Machine” from her mayoral run.
“There’s certainly frustration about the cost of groceries and the kitchen table issues,” Mr. Bresnahan acknowledged. He said his grandmother calls him almost daily to talk about rising prices.
“I’m asking for another chance to continue to move that ball,” he added.
Yet Mr. Trump still boasts a potent base in the region.
Dwayne McDavitt, a founder of Bikers for Trump Pennsylvania, came out to see Mr. Bresnahan at a rally with Mr. Johnson, the House speaker, at a warehouse in Hazleton. He said with disdain that the Democrats had only one message this year.
“What they’re running on,” he said, “is hating Trump.”
PA-10: A Trump ally under siege, even in a Republican district
Two years ago, Janelle Stelson, a former television newscaster, lost Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District to Representative Scott Perry, a Republican, by just over 1 percentage point.
In an interview, Ms. Stelson, a Democrat, described the central Pennsylvania region she hopes to represent as Republican, but she said Mr. Perry, the former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, was too far right even for the 10th District.
“The most extreme of the extremes,” she said.
In her rematch, Ms. Stelson has run ads embracing parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, such as cutting taxes on tips and overtime.
Republicans have tried to cast her as a “smooth talker” and hammered her as “too liberal for Pennsylvania,” comparing her to socialists and progressives in their ads: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Yet even in a district that Mr. Trump carried, Democratic groups have run ads urging Mr. Perry, a staunch Trump ally, to “stop voting with Trump” — a potential sign that politics are shifting even there.
“He has been a very willing acolyte for the president and we have seen the president’s poll numbers drop precipitously,” Ms. Stelson said. “You can’t stand up for somebody like that all the time and expect that you’re not going to be affected.”
Mr. Perry’s campaign did not make him available for an interview.
In recent days, the Trump administration further jolted the race. The Department of Homeland Security announced the arrest last week of a Nigerian man on charges of indecent exposure — and included in its announcement a scathing political attack on the Stelson campaign, alleging that he had worked for her.
“It’s unbelievable that Janelle Stelson would employ an illegal alien,” Charles Wall, deputy director of I.C.E., said in the news release.
The Stelson campaign said it wasn’t true. The man had neither worked for nor volunteered for the campaign or its vendors, the campaign said.
According to a police report, law enforcement found fliers for Ms. Stelson in the suspect’s vehicle. A watchdog group has since called for an investigation into whether the Department of Homeland Security had improperly engaged in partisan politics.
Meanwhile, on his recent swing through Bethlehem and Nazareth, Mr. Johnson noted that it was his seventh visit to that district — more than any other swing seat in America.
“The entire country is watching,” Mr. Johnson said, “what happens in about four districts of Pennsylvania.”
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