00:00You may not have thought much about Scranton, Pennsylvania, since Jim and Pam and Michael Scott
00:04and the rest of those lovable misanthropes at the office went off the air. Control of the House
00:08this year is going to be decided in places that look a lot like this. The Democratic mayor of
00:13Scranton, Paige Cognetti, is running against first-term Republican Rob Bresnahan, a former
00:18small business owner. It's a race that encapsulates many of the themes that will decide how these
00:23blue-collar districts sort out. In fact, those districts are the foundation of the Republican
00:28Conference and the Republican majority in the House. But this year, there may be cracks in
00:34that foundation. Democrats still face a lot of doubts with these voters. But the widespread
00:39feeling that Trump has not made sufficient progress on the problem they elected him above all to
00:44address, which is the cost of living, has given Democrats probably their best opening since the
00:49Obama years to regain ground in blue-collar communities where they have largely been routed
00:55in the last decade. In 2018, during the blue wave election year, Democrats made their biggest gains,
01:00mostly in white-collar communities, pretty affluent places, suburban areas that have been voting
01:04Democratic at the presidential level for years, but where Republicans in the House had been holding
01:09on. Three-quarters of the House seats that Democrats flipped in 2018 had more white college graduates than
01:15the national average. The result is that there aren't that many more of those places left for Democrats
01:19to target. This year, two-thirds of the districts the Democrats are targeting have fewer white college
01:25graduates than the national average. They're working-class districts in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin,
01:31Michigan, and especially here in Pennsylvania, where Democrats are aiming at Republicans in three
01:35districts, the 7th, the 8th, and the 10th, that all voted for President Trump in 2024. While Trump won
01:42about two-thirds of white voters without a college degree in each of his presidential campaigns,
01:47this year, national polls show that his approval among them has fallen to around 50-50,
01:52and his approval on the economy and inflation, it's lower still.
01:56Bresnahan's biggest asset, as a former contractor with good ties to the building trades,
02:00he continues to draw a surprising amount of support from organized labor in a heavily blue-collar district.
02:06That's an important thumb on the scale for him. He made a large number of stock trades in 2025
02:12after writing an op-ed in 2024 calling on Congress to ban stock trading by incumbent members of Congress.
02:19He says it was done by his financial advisors without any involvement from him, but it makes
02:24him a pretty good foil for Page Cognetti's anti-corruption message. Cognetti, the mayor of Scranton,
02:30who was elected in 2019 originally as an independent to succeed a Democrat who had been indicted and
02:37ultimately convicted for corruption. Almost everyone here is expecting a close race right until the end,
02:42but if Democrats can't win here this year in this environment, it's going to be hard for them to
02:47establish any kind of meaningful majority in the House. This is exactly the sort of place that
02:52they have to win if they are going to do well in November.
Comments