In the fall of 2019, Scranton, Pennsylvania, was in crisis. Its mayor, Bill Courtright, had resigned and pleaded guilty to federal charges of bribery, extortion, and conspiracy. 

The local Democratic Party moved to select his replacement through a closed caucus. Paige Cognetti, then an adviser to the state auditor general who had previously served in the Obama administration's Treasury Department, decided she wanted no part of a closed process.

Cognetti refused to seek the Democratic Party's nomination, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer she didn't trust the party. 

"The same old boys club is trying to pick our next mayor," she said in a television ad at the time.

Instead, she ran as an independent, adopting an informal slogan that was equal parts irreverent and pointed: "Paige Against The Machine," a riff on the rock band Rage Against the Machine. 

The local Democratic Party sued to keep her and other independent candidates off the ballot entirely. It didn’t work.

Cognetti won the seven-candidate special election, becoming the first woman ever elected mayor of Scranton. She was eight months pregnant at the time.

"Nothing really makes you more committed to your city and the environment... than realizing you're going to have a baby. So I couldn't be more committed,” she told CNN in an interview after winning the election.

Now, nearly seven years later, she is running for Congress.

On September 2, 2025, Cognetti announced her candidacy for Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, which covers all of Lackawanna, Wayne, and Pike counties and parts of Luzerne and Monroe counties. 

She is challenging first-term Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan Jr., a Trump-endorsed incumbent who narrowly defeated six-term Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright by roughly 1.5 points in 2024. The Democratic primary is scheduled for May 19, 2026, and the general election for November 3, 2026.

Scranton Democrat Francis McHale, who had announced plans in August 2025 to enter the Democratic primary, later withdrew, leaving Cognetti uncontested for her party's nomination.

In her campaign launch video, Cognetti criticized Bresnahan for continuing to trade stocks while in office and said that "people here deserve a lot better than a rich kid disrespecting our hard work and proud legacy.”

She enters the race with significant institutional support. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has endorsed her, as have Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, former Rep. Matt Cartwright, and Rep. Chris Deluzio. 

Symone Sanders Townsend, co-host of MSNBC's The Weekend, flagged her candidacy as one to watch, noting that "a lot of New Deal Leaders are on the ballot this year looking to rise up into federal office, like the current mayor of Scranton, Paige Cognetti. She seems to be on her way to Congress, child. They think she's gonna give a good scrappy fight.”

After winning the 2019 special election, Cognetti ran for a full term in 2021 as a Democrat and won with over 71 percent of the vote. In May 2025, she defeated a longtime local Democratic party boss in the primary with 76 percent of the vote, then won reelection as mayor two months before formally announcing her congressional bid. 

As New York Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle wrote in a March 2026 column, Cognetti "cruised to re-election…on essentially the same reform platform -- the one she is now counting on to take her to Congress."

Cognetti herself has described her career as a continuous effort to fight institutional corruption wherever she encountered it.

 "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 told Cottle, referring to her time on the troubled Scranton School Board beginning in 2017. She later became a special assistant to the state auditor general. "I was happily doing that when the mayor of Scranton got indicted," she recalled.

"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.”

For voters who have grown frustrated with the two-party system, the most significant aspects of Cognetti's reform agenda may be the ones that receive the least attention in mainstream coverage: her support for opening up primary elections to all voters and her call to remove dark money from politics.

These are not abstract positions for Cognetti. She lived the consequences of a closed party system firsthand, and now, having experienced what closed primaries do to candidates who fall outside party structures, she has made opening those primaries to all voters -- regardless of party registration -- a stated legislative priority.

This position places her at odds with the institutional interests of both major parties, which have a shared stake in keeping primary elections restricted to their own registered voters. 

Cognetti’s support for changing that structure directly challenges one of the foundational mechanisms of two-party control.

She has also called for removing dark money from politics, arguing that unlimited and undisclosed political spending has tilted Congress away from ordinary constituents and toward wealthy donors.

Cognetti has made congressional corruption the defining issue of her campaign, and she has been deliberate about framing it as a problem that belongs to both parties. "There are very high-profile examples of this behavior on both sides of the aisle," she told Cottle. "I mean, the president mentioned it in his State of the Union.”

She is taking direct aim at Bresnahan's stock trading record. When running for Congress in 2024, Bresnahan wrote in a letter to a local newspaper that "the idea that we can buy and sell stocks while voting on legislation that will have a direct impact on these companies is wrong and needs to come to an end immediately."

Once in office, he became one of the most prolific traders in Congress, making more than 600 stock trades in 2025 before suspending the activity late in the year amid growing scrutiny.

In March 2026, Politico reporter Daniel Lippman surfaced a 2025 radio interview in which Bresnahan, after repeatedly insisting he had no involvement in his trades, appeared to describe meeting with his financial adviser to discuss "what different positions are coming up.”

Bresnahan's campaign spokesman, Chris Pack, said the comment referred to "30,000 foot investment strategy and not about stock trades," according to Lippman’s article.

Cognetti seized on the audio at a March 11 news conference in Plains Township. Learning that Bresnahan "is actually on the record stating that he speaks with his financial adviser about his stock positions while a sitting member of Congress" was not surprising but was "extraordinarily disappointing," she said. 

"This is the exact type of public corruption that led me to get on the Scranton School Board in 2017, that led me to run for mayor in 2019 in the face of a huge scandal in Scranton. My time in public office has always been pushing back on corruption." 

Cognetti is also tying Bresnahan's trading directly to his votes on health care. 

Among the trades that drew the most attention were the sale of Pennsylvania health care-related bonds worth between $100,001 and $250,000 and stock in four Medicaid providers worth up to $130,000, made before Bresnahan voted on significant Medicaid cuts.

"We can connect his Medicaid cuts to him trading Medicaid-provider stock, hospital bonds. We can see where he's purchasing defense stocks when the president is making military decisions that the public doesn't know about," Cognetti told the Times-Tribune. 

In a separate statement, she said that "health care costs have skyrocketed under his failed leadership, all while he plays the stock market and makes a quick buck off our pain" and accused him of "gutting Medicaid, slashing funding for Pennsylvania hospitals, and jacking up health care premiums.”

Cognetti does not own any individual stocks, according to the Politico article.

On banning congressional stock trading, she has been direct. 

"It is not at all about begrudging anyone's wealth," she explained to Cottle. "It's just, do it as a private citizen.” Reforms like a trading ban, she argued, allow members of Congress to signal "that they are about service and not themselves.”

As mayor, she has refused a government car and a gas card, and she pays out of pocket for work-related travel and for personal correspondence, such as sympathy cards. 

Cognetti eliminated cash payments for city business, professionalized the code-enforcement department, established a whistle-blower hotline, and worked to root out nepotism in hiring. 

Cognetti acknowledged to Cottle that some of these gestures might appear small. "It matters because the previous folks had enriched themselves," she said. With her predecessor having been found with stacks of cash in his home and ultimately sentenced to seven years in prison, Cognetti said she felt she needed to "draw a contrast." 

"You have to build trust back. And part of that is doing some things that sometimes is an overcorrection.”

Cognetti enters the Congressional race with some real advantages but also real challenges. She is the mayor of the district's largest city, has cleared the Democratic primary field, and carries the support of the state's top elected officials.

But the district has voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections, and the Cook Political Report currently rates the race as leaning Republican. 

From October through December 2025, Bresnahan's campaign raised $675,000, compared with Cognetti's $645,000, and he entered 2026 with $1.43 million in cash on hand, compared with her $805,000. 

Bresnahan has also made inroads with organized labor, flipping the support of three local unions that had previously backed Democrats, including the Pennsylvania Laborers District Council, which had supported Cognetti during her 2019 mayoral campaign.

Cognetti is also facing scrutiny of her own. Politico reported in February 2026 that Republicans intend to make an issue of her administration's purchase of the Fidelity Bank building adjacent to Scranton City Hall for use as a municipal annex, noting that her uncle-in-law sits on the bank's board and that she received $14,600 in campaign contributions from Fidelity board members in the months before the purchase.

Cognetti denied any impropriety. "Every decision that I have made is for the well-being and the betterment of the citizens and the city of Scranton," she said in an interview with the Times-Tribune.

Political analyst Christopher Borick, quoted by the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, noted that simply being competitive against an incumbent with favorable conditions can be enough. "Sometimes, just being in the ballpark against incumbents and having some winds at your back is all you need.”