Washington, D.C. – Today, New York Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle published a new piece highlighting Scranton, PA Mayor Paige Cognetti’s “anticorruption moxie” and long record of cleaning up corruption in Scranton.

Read the highlights below: 

NYT: Opinion: The Scrappy Mayor Showing Democrats How It’s Done

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.

[…]

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’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 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.

 

###