‘I’m the only one that’s ever been an elected official’: In PA-7 Dem primary, Lamont McClure runs on his record

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with Democratic candidates for PA-7. 

Lamont McClure Jr. doesn’t waste time in making his case for representing Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District come January. Of the four candidates running in May’s Democratic primary, “I’m the only one that’s ever been an elected official. I’m the only one that’s ever been on a ballot … the only one that’s ever been tested,” he told City & State just minutes into an interview. “And I think this makes me the safest option to nominate – and face (incumbent U.S. Rep.) Ryan Mackenzie in the fall.”

Having served two terms as Northampton County executive, McClure, who has a slew of endorsements from local politicians, is almost certainly the most familiar face among the candidates (the others are Bob Brooks, the president of the Pennsylvania Fire Fighters Association, who has been endorsed by Gov. Josh Shapiro; former federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell; and Carol Obando-Derstine, an engineer, nonprofit executive and one-time senior adviser to former U.S. Sen. Bob Casey.)

Throughout the campaign, McClure has emphasized his local identity, referencing his Carbon County roots and noting in a recent candidates’ debate that while Mackenzie – a first-term representative who is considered particularly vulnerable in this swing district – swept Carbon County over then-incumbent Democrat Susan Wild by by 40 points in 2024, McClure would be unlikely to lose his home turf (or, he says, the general election).

Even before he was elected county executive in 2017 (he served from 2018 until earlier this year), McClure was well known locally as a former Northampton County Councilmember and an attorney representing steelworkers in asbestos cases at the personal-injury firm of Peter Angelos.

While serving as county executive, he partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build 25 local affordable housing units – an experience that showed him local government’s limited ability to effectively confront large-scale problems, like housing affordability, that require a large-scale solution. And after 16 years in local government, he realized he was eager to make a broader impact – ideally, in Congress.

Twenty-five units “are going to make a real difference in the lives of those families. However, that is like taking a bucket of water out of the Atlantic Ocean … The housing crisis is a national problem that cries out for national solutions,” McClure explained, noting that in Congress, he would prioritize the fight against tariffs that have contributed to high construction costs. 

In Northampton County, “I ran into a number of issues that local governments just can’t solve,” he added. “I discovered … that we need more people in our national government who want to support the local government in the things that it’s doing – whether it’s building more housing, whether it’s confronting climate change, whether it’s making sure that there’s enough money to care for the most vulnerable people in our society.”

If he now has a greater understanding of local government’s limitations, he had an early education in its possibilities. McClure’s father directed the Carbon County Housing Authority for nearly four decades; his mother, a bank teller who also worked at a senior nutrition center, was the first woman to serve as president of the Weatherly Area School Board.

“Some of my earliest memories are of us talking about these things,” he recalled. “I learned the values that I brought to governing at our kitchen table.”

Those values drove McClure to study law at Duquesne University, and to pursue a career representing tradespeople affected by asbestos exposure – an experience that he calls the highlight of his career.

“Fighting for those people for 17 years was a great honor for me,” McClure said.

“We took on the largest corporations in the world … who exposed these steelworkers and other tradespeople and their families, for that matter – often their wives, through laundering their clothes, and got various horrible diseases … mesothelioma, lung cancer.”

As county executive, McClure trained his adversarial strategy on the proposed warehouses that have threatened to gobble up the region’s green spaces. “Northampton County and the Lehigh Valley have been overrun by warehouses,” he said. “A lot of good people have jobs working in the warehouses in Northampton County, but our point was, we just didn’t need any more.”

Direct intervention wasn’t an option, since planning and zoning decisions happen at the local level. So, as county executive, McClure found an indirect but effective way to fight back: preserving green space so it wouldn’t be developed into warehouses, data centers, or anything else.

During his two terms, Northampton spent $25 million on farmland preservation – an investment that, he said, leveraged tens of millions of dollars more in state and federal conservation funding. And he did that, McClure emphasized, while passing eight straight county budgets without tax increases for Northampton residents.

In Congress, he’d like to see more spending on healthcare – specifically, on Medicaid. “Mackenzie provided the deciding vote for what they refer to as the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’” McClure said. “In that bill, they cut $1 trillion out of Medicaid funding.

“I think we replace Mackenzie,” he went on, “and if I could accomplish one thing initially, I would want to throw all of my effort into getting that trillion dollars of Medicaid cuts restored.”