The Scrappy Mayor Showing Democrats How It\u2019s Done<\/a><\/p>\nRepresentative 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\u2019s most prolific traders \u2014 fifth in terms of the number of trades, as of the end of 2025.<\/p>\n
Worse, several of his trades appear to have benefited from some of his congressional votes.<\/p>\n
[\u2026]<\/p>\n
Which brings us to possibly the stickiest problem for Mr. Bresnahan: He is running for re-election in Pennsylvania\u2019s swingy Eighth Congressional District against the Democrat Paige Cognetti.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cPaige against the machine,\u201d a play on the band Rage Against the Machine.<\/p>\n
Cheesy but effective. Ms. Cognetti carried the crowded field to become Scranton\u2019s 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 \u2014 the one she is now counting on to take her to Congress.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been running this same campaign from 2019 to date,\u201d she said in a recent interview. \u201cMake government work for the people. Public service is to serve others, not yourself.\u201d
Not every Democratic candidate is fortunate enough to be running against someone with Mr. Bresnahan\u2019s promiscuous trading record. But all of them can learn from Ms. Cognetti\u2019s anticorruption moxie, a dose of which could help a Democratic Party struggling to regain the public\u2019s trust.<\/p>\n
[\u2026]<\/p>\n
Ms. Cognetti\u2019s path shows how to build the credibility Democrats lack. Having worked on Democratic campaigns and served in President Barack Obama\u2019s Treasury Department, she dove into local politics in 2018, as a director on the troubled Scranton School Board. \u201cI 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,\u201d she said. In 2019 she went to work as a special assistant to the auditor general, Pennsylvania\u2019s top fiscal watchdog. \u201cI was happily doing that when the mayor of Scranton got indicted,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n
Ask Ms. Cognetti what reform she is most proud of as mayor, and you\u2019ll 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. \u201cHiring on merit\u201d is something that \u201cbreaks through\u201d with the public, she told me.<\/p>\n
[\u2026]<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the more discrete, easier-to-get-your-arms-around issues still matter. In many cases, she said, those battles are \u201cthe kind of stuff that resonates with people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Bresnahan had better hope she\u2019s wrong on this one.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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