‘None of these candidates have the experience that I have’: Carol Obando-Derstine makes her case for PA-7

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

Most Democrats talk about the cost of child care, the energy challenges posed by data centers and the need for immigration reform. But Carol Obando-Derstine, the lone woman running to represent the Lehigh Valley’s 7th Congressional District, is the rare candidate who has first-hand experience with all three of those key issues.

She is, as she likes to point out, the only working mom in the race, as well as the only immigrant – her family emigrated from Colombia when she was a child – and the sole Hispanic, in a district where 1 in 5 residents identify as Latino. And few grasp the new demands on the region’s electrical grid better than Obando-Derstine, an engineer who, until last year, worked on transmission and renewable energy integration at PPL Utilities.

As she champions affordability measures, “I understand what it’s like to pay more for child care than my mortgage,” she said in a recent interview. When she calls for defending reproductive rights, she cites her own high-risk pregnancy when she talks about “how costly and how dangerous it can be when politicians try to politicize healthcare.”

“I’ve lived through empty wallets, sacrifices and language barriers,” the candidate said of growing up the daughter of refugees from Colombia’s violent civil war. “I know first-hand what it means to struggle and to fight. And once I climbed out of those struggles, I never pulled the ladder up – I’ve worked to help others get ahead.”

But Obando-Derstine knows representation alone isn’t an argument for Congress – and along with lived experience, she has a two-decade record of leadership in political and advocacy roles. She began her career as the executive director of Skills USA Council, promoting youth workforce development programs throughout the Greater Lehigh Valley, and then led the Children's Coalition of the Lehigh Valley.

Her advocacy caught the attention of then-U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who hired her to serve as his regional manager and statewide Latino affairs advisor, and of then-Gov. Tom Wolf, who appointed her to his Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs. 

Most recently, former U.S. Rep. Susan Wild – the Democrat who held the PA-7 seat before being narrowly ousted by Ryan Mackenzie in 2024 – recruited Obando-Derstine to run against him, and has endorsed her. (The other Democratic primary candidates are Bob Brooks, the president of the Pennsylvania Fire Fighters Association; former federal prosecutor and Marine Ryan Crosswell; and former Northampton County executive Lamont McClure.)

Despite all this, the accomplishment Obando-Derstine is most proud of is going back to school in her 40s while raising her family and working at PPL, earning a master’s of engineering from Lehigh University. “I wanted to be able to connect renewable energy companies to the grid – to be part of this energy transition,” she explained.

Now, as the state’s electricity grid faces unprecedented demands from data centers – as well as stress from war-driven global energy instability – she says she’ll leverage those insights to help Congress navigate a new era.

“I understand how these systems work,” Obando-Derstine explained, “and who they fail when they don’t. I’ve always been a problem-solver.”

Among the top problems she wants to tackle in Congress is the cost of living, especially in the Lehigh Valley. “That is the single biggest issue I hear on the campaign trail,” she said. “I hear folks can’t pay for the essentials – housing, healthcare, groceries, utilities, and child care. That’s going to entail raising wages and lowering costs.”

To do that, she wants to raise the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009. She also wants to restore access to affordable healthcare that was a casualty of last year’s Republican-driven budget bill: An estimated 130,000 Pennsylvanians have lost coverage through Pennie, the state’s insurance marketplace, since subsidies expired in January, and 16,000 PA-7 residents alone have been dropped from Medicaid.

As a Latina immigrant, Obando-Derstine has strong feelings about the need to reform America’s immigration system, securing the borders while dialing back aggressive federal enforcement. President Donald Trump “acts like it’s a crime to be Latino in America,” she said. “I want to go to Congress to stand up to Trump’s ICE terrorizing immigrant communities in our district. 

“I also want to work on the long-term fix, which is reforming immigration … a fix that is legal, effective and humane,” she added, “because what we’re seeing right now is cruelty. And who better to work on this than an immigrant who has gone through the process?”

That lived perspective, argues Obando-Derstine, is what sets her apart from her rivals: “None of these candidates have the experience that I have,” she affirmed. “I want to leverage that for our district.”