Afternoon everyone. Excited to share a new conversation with Paige Cognetti who is running for the U.S. House in the eighth district of Pennsylvania. A recording and rough transcript can be found above. Mayor Cognetti is a great candidate and I promise you will enjoy getting to know her.
Donald Trump won this district by 8.5 points in 2024, and the freshman Republican in the seat, Rob Bresnahan, defeated the incumbent Democrat, Rep. Matt Cartwright by 1.6 points.
Here’s how the Mayor introduced herself in our conversation:
I’m Paige Cognetti. I’m the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the 8th Congressional District. We’re about 120 miles west of New York City, a couple of hours northwest of Philadelphia—a really cool region of Pennsylvania and of the country.
I’ve been mayor for six years. I came into office in 2019. It wasn’t the plan. There was no mayoral race scheduled that year, but unfortunately, we have a lot of generational corruption in this region, and the former mayor was indicted for extortion, which triggered a special election. I ran as an independent in that race along with others — four independents, a Democrat, and a Republican.
The local Democrats handpicked their candidate behind closed doors. I switched to independent to challenge that. They actually took us to court and tried to get us off the ballot, but we got through it. I won with 37% of the vote, and since then, I’ve been re-elected twice—once in 2021 and once just a few weeks ago in 2025.
We’ve continued to reform our city government, taking Scranton from a real period of crisis—not just a trust crisis after the scandal, but also a financial crisis. We were at junk bond credit status. We now enjoy an investment-grade credit rating. We’ve been able to modernize the government and make it work for people. Fairness is what drives me—that’s what we do every day.
In contrast, our freshman member of Congress has become one of the most prolific stock traders in the entire congressional body. He campaigned against stock trading last year—said it was sickening and he would ban it immediately. But now he’s often among the top 10 most prolific traders in Congress. And you can tie his trades to his votes—selling six figures of Medicaid provider stock a week before voting to slash a trillion dollars from Medicaid.
That matters everywhere, but especially in a district like Northeastern Pennsylvania that has had so much public corruption—mayors, state senators, attorneys general, judges, county commissioners. Too many people have been in office to benefit themselves, not the people. Unfortunately, I see the same pattern with our freshman representative. So I’m running for Congress to make sure Northeastern Pennsylvania has somebody who will fight for them.
Mayor Cognetti is one of the four candidates - along with Christina Bohannan (IA-01), Jo Mendoza (AZ-06), and Janelle Stelson (PA-08) - in our Winning The House campaign, which is our way of supporting those fighting to flip red House seats blue and take back the House next year. Please consider making a donation to our campaign which is split equally among this four wonderful candidates, or make a donation to Mayor Cognetti directly here. We’ve raised $30,000 so far for these four and hope to hit $50,000 by the end of the month.
You can also learn more about the Mayor or volunteer for her campaign by heading to her campaign website. Here’s her campaign bio:
Paige Cognetti is the Mayor of Scranton, PA. She first ran for mayor as an Independent, in a campaign called “Paige Against the Machine,” for her fight to take on corruption against the local Democratic machine.
As mayor, Paige reformed the office – taking on special interests and battling corruption in City Hall. She turned down the city car, eliminated cash payments, and cut costs, leading to budget surpluses and rapid improvement of the city’s financial position. Paige has balanced the city’s books, brought in new businesses, and cut red tape to foster job growth and new homes getting built. She is continuing to lower costs by taking on special interests like public utilities, properly managing city assets, and adding modern infrastructure to temper rising insurance costs.
Enjoy getting to know this rising star in our party, and let’s do our part to make sure she flips this red seat blue next year - Simon
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