Pennsylvania\u2019s Seventh Congressional District, on the state\u2019s eastern edge, no longer evokes Billy Joel songs about dying factories. Allentown has a new boutique hotel, specialty coffee shops and high-rise loft apartments, the effects of an economic boom powered by logistics, biotech and high-tech manufacturing.<\/p>\n
But that growth has driven up costs and squeezed the region\u2019s predominantly working class population.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of scary,\u201d said Brian Fasolino, 28, who recently returned to Jim Thorpe, a town in the north of the district, after six years in the military. He found a job installing piping systems, but said he is not making enough to move out of his parents\u2019 house. \u201cI was kind of hoping that things didn\u2019t change all that much, and boy was I wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Seventh District is one of two House seats in Pennsylvania that flipped from Democratic to Republican in 2024, but Democrats are betting that their newly minted House candidate \u2014 a retired firefighter and union representative named Bob Brooks \u2014 will be able to beat the freshman Republican incumbent, Ryan Mackenzie, with an economic message.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they can see themselves in me,\u201d Mr. Brooks said of voters in the district, noting that he had received food stamps and lived in public housing as a teenager after his family\u2019s home burned down. \u201cI have lived the life they are living.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Brooks, who won Tuesday\u2019s Democratic primary, added: \u201cThe party has lost people just like me for a long time. It\u2019s time to give them some reason to come back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Mackenzie, whose primary was uncontested, said in a statement Wednesday that he will \u201cbe running on my track record of delivering tax relief to every American, fighting for working families, and being an independent voice for the people of the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Lehigh Valley, which includes Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, is a microcosm of the country, more suburban than rural, with midsize cities that are growing increasingly diverse. Allentown is now majority Latino. The city votes Democratic, but in 2024, President Trump made gains in all but three of its 55 precincts, said Mayor Matt Tuerk. The biggest swing occurred in the precinct that was the most heavily Hispanic, he said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump won the Seventh District and its northern neighbor, the Eighth District, which includes the predominantly white, blue-collar cities of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. The median income in the Lehigh Valley is $84,260, up 44 percent since 2014, according to the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation. In the Eighth District, median income stands at $69,715, up from a decade ago but still below that of the state. <\/p>\n
Both are considered tossups, part of a handful of seats that are likely to decide control of Congress in November.<\/p>\n
Voters in eastern Pennsylvania say the economic lives of working class people are precarious. Residents are moving back in with their parents, putting off car repairs, driving less to save gas and preparing their food at home.<\/p>\n
In Allentown, Fabricio Teran, 43, a mechanic in a mostly empty auto body shop, said that last year at this time, there were more than 10 cars in for work. The few repairs happening now are taking longer, because customers trying to save money are ordering their own parts, which often don\u2019t fit.<\/p>\n
Karla Rodriguez said her family\u2019s Rotisserie Chicken shop on North Seventh Street had to raise prices to keep up with the rising cost of supplies, and it hit customers hard. She now sells 300 chickens a day instead of 500.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve never been this tight in the profit margin,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019ve never been this bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Rodriguez had a baby five months ago and was shocked at the cost of formula. With a brother in the military, she worried about the war in Iran.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of chaos going on, and nothing\u2019s really steady right now,\u201d she said. \u201cIf it stays like this for a long time, I don\u2019t know. A lot of people are not going to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Economic pain does not necessarily mean political gain for Democrats. In Scranton, Gabriel Perez said he shifted to home health care work after rent for his small empanada shop doubled. He still supports Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s real rough right now,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of things look crazy. But if we falter, it will be worse. If he turns around and stops flexing his muscles with military might, we will be looked at like a laughingstock.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest concern for residents is housing. Less than two hours from New York, the Lehigh Valley has long absorbed people fleeing high rents and struggling schools. Now those include white-collar workers drawing higher incomes.<\/p>\n
\u201cHousing costs have changed really dramatically,\u201d said Christopher Borick, a political science professor and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. \u201cIt\u2019s so stark.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carmen Dancsecs, 45, a mortgage loan officer and investor in the Allentown area, said she bought an 1,800-square-foot house with one and a half bathrooms in what had been a very affordable area in Allentown for $150,000 in 2024. She sold it a year later for $295,000.<\/p>\n
Rising costs have led to rising debt among her clients, who are almost all Latino, she said. That is making it harder to get a mortgage. One recent client, a truck driver, put $22,000 of diesel fuel for his truck on a credit card.<\/p>\n
She said she is seeing foreclosures for the first time since the financial crisis nearly 20 years ago.<\/p>\n
Ms. Dancsecs has voted for Democrats for president in the past few elections, but she said that a number of her friends, many of them foreign-born Americans, voted for Mr. Trump, and they are feeling stung.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know quite a few people who are Republicans and are done with MAGA,\u201d she said, adding that they tend not to talk about it because they don\u2019t want to be criticized by those who still support the president. \u201cI call them closet people.\u201d<\/p>\n
William Bonilla is not a closet person. A retired forklift operator and a Republican, he talks in angry tones about Mr. Trump. On his porch in Allentown, he ticked off what he saw as the administration\u2019s mistakes, the immigration raids, the war with Iran.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was saying, \u2018Oh, things are going to get better, and prices are going to go lower,\u2019\u201d Mr. Bonilla said, \u201cand then you go and start a freaking war!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like, wow, he really took us for a ride there,\u201d he said. \u201cI hate getting taken.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked to describe the state of the country, he said, \u201cIt\u2019s lopsided. If you ain\u2019t got money, you ain\u2019t got nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the parking lot of Redner\u2019s grocery store, Francis Amigo, a 63-year-old loading dock worker, wheeled a shopping cart with a sparse haul, including a few frozen pizzas on sale, some bags of pretzels and a container of iced tea. The total, he said holding out the receipt, was $106 \u2014 about double what he would have paid a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n
He said the war was to blame for the prices. But he had \u201cmixed emotions\u201d about the president, for whom he voted three times.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes it seems like maybe he\u2019s overdoing it, like shoot first and ask questions later,\u201d he said. \u201cBut at least he\u2019s doing something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pennsylvania\u2019s Seventh Congressional District, on the state\u2019s eastern edge, no longer evokes Billy Joel songs about dying factories.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,7786,78565,88198,88200,24888,69352,28,88197,87681,3857,88199,69511],"class_list":["post-198909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-pa","tag-donald-j","tag-fees-and-rates","tag-hispanic-americans","tag-mackenzie","tag-midterm-elections-2026","tag-pennsylvania","tag-prices-fares","tag-ryan-1982","tag-trump","tag-united-states-economy","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}