In PA-7 Dem primary, Bob Brooks is going from pole to poll

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

The flip side of being an accidental union leader and an accidental political candidate is that your trajectory can feel like, well, destiny.

“It’s just way things fall,” reflected Bob Brooks in a recent interview, adding that it was “never my intention” either to lead the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association, which he has done since 2021, or to run for Congress – Brooks is among the Lehigh Valley Democrats vying to oust first-term U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District.

“Sometimes challenges are put in front of you,” he added. “You either accept them or walk away. And I choose to accept them every time.”

Of course, when it’s U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio and Gov. Josh Shapiro who are urging you on, the decision becomes easier to make. “They know my tenacity. They know what I do for my members in both Washington and Harrisburg,” said Brooks, who has also been endorsed by other top Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, as well as the backing of the progressive Working Families Party. 

“They thought we needed a change – and that I was the best person to take that seat back.” (Republican Mackenzie narrowly bested incumbent Democrat Susan Wild in 2026, and the district is considered among the nation’s most competitive.)

Brooks has felt the pull of destiny since his family’s home burned down when he was a senior in high school in North Adams, Massachusetts. With nothing left but “the clothes on our backs,” he and his mother moved back to her parents’ home in Bath, Pennsylvania, where Brooks’ grandfather was a truck driver and a Teamsters member.

From there, a firefighter – and labor leader – was born. Brooks got involved with his union shortly after joining the City of Bethlehem in 2005 as a firefighter, a career he connected with on a personal level. “When I showed up to a house fire, I’d understand and realize what these people are going through,” noted Brooks, who retired from the department last year. “Not a lot of people will ever understand that.”

Following his grandfather’s lead into organized labor also felt natural to Brooks, who has been working since he got a paper route at age 10 (“a lot of people don’t know what that is,” he observed with a chuckle.) In high school, he balanced his youth sports commitments with jobs as a dishwasher and prep cook and worked in a school supplies factory.

Brooks took over the helm of the Fire Fighters Association in 2021, after previously holding regional leadership roles, most recently as Eastern vice president. While he has never held political office, he touts his experience successfully negotiating policy as evidence of his effectiveness.

He is proudest, he said, of a 2024 measure that expanded Pennsylvania’s worker’s compensation benefits to include first responders affected by post-traumatic stress injury. “One of the biggest opponents, I hate to say this, for that bill, for years and years and years, was Ryan Mackenzie,” pointed out Brooks of the legislation, which was signed into law by Gov. Shapiro.

(Brooks’ campaign later clarified that during Mackenzie’s tenure on the House Labor & Industry Committee, the bill “sat in committee for years,” advancing only once Democrats took control of the chamber in 2023.)

At the federal level, Brooks joined colleagues from the International Association of Firefighters to rally for passage of the Social Security Fairness Act, a measure restoring full retirement benefits to firefighters and other categories of public servants who had previously been excluded. The bill was signed into law by then-President Joe Biden just before he left office in January 2025.

“Some of the talk is that I don’t have legislative experience,” said Brooks, “when actually I have, probably, the most” politically relevant experience out of the candidates running in the Democratic primary. (His rivals include former federal prosecutor and Marine Ryan Crosswell; former Northampton County executive Lamont McClure; and Carol Obando-Derstine, an engineer, nonprofit leader and onetime senior adviser to former U.S. Sen. Bob Casey.)

In Congress, Brooks said he’d build on his successful advocacy to advance priorities like affordability, which is his top issue – and, he’s pretty sure, that of his constituency as well. “Everything is skyrocketing – health insurance …what it costs in the grocery store, what it costs to fill your gas tank,” he said. (He has a lot of tanks to fill: Brooks runs three diesel pickup trucks at his small lawncare business.)

On his campaign website, Brooks’ platform reads like a wishlist for classic Democratic priorities: sustainable healthcare, a higher minimum wage, firm support for unions and retirement benefits, an end to gun violence, better funding for public schools and childcare, and border security without ICE’s aggressive enforcement tactics. Locally, Brooks also wants to bring down housing costs, modernize transportation and energy, and curb the growth of warehouses in the Lehigh Valley and Carbon County.

The Nazareth resident is also passionate about fighting the big money he says has corrupted politics. “It’s going to take a constitutional amendment to actually get rid of Citizens United,” he told City & State, referring to the 2010 Supreme Court decision loosening restrictions on political spending. “Unfortunately, our politics are being bought and paid for, and we have to stop that. Because as long as big money is allowed to play, it makes it very hard for the little guy.”

It’s that proverbial little guy that Brooks says he represents – whom, according to him, recent Democratic candidates are increasingly out of touch with.

Emphasizing that he’s been a Democrat “my entire life” – in contrast to, say, his primary rival Crosswell, a former registered Republican – Brooks said he represents the disaffected working-class Democrats who once formed the party’s core, but have increasingly drifted rightward, swayed in part by President Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric.

“The Democratic Party has become the party of elites,” Brooks observed. To win elections again, he added, “I believe we start changing the type of candidate we run – start running people that have the unique ability, like myself, to reach across… to talk to the voters that have left the party in droves, and bring them back.

“I think they feel lied to and duped over there on the Republican side, and there’s a lot of people that have been drifting. That’s why we’re (a) purple (state), right?” he said. “I have the ability to talk to those people. And they can see themselves in me.”