‘Serious about reform’: A Q&A with Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti

Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District race is one of the commonwealth's most closely watched contests. Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, a Democrat, is taking on Republican incumbent Rob Bresnahan in a race that will play a pivotal role in determining whether Democrats win control of Congress or Republicans ultimately hold onto power. 

Cognetti, who has served as mayor of Scranton since 2020, spoke with City & State about the race, the anti-corruption agenda she plans to fight for in Washington, D.C., and what she’s heard from voters throughout the midterm election cycle. 

The following conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

What made you decide to run for Congress this cycle?

I did not plan to do this; I love my job as mayor. It really goes back all the way to 2017, when I first stood for an appointment on the Scranton School Board: I had been reading our local news and seeing that Auditor General Eugene DePasquale had put out a report that showed that the Scranton School District was very poorly run, and there was potentially even criminal activity happening. There was a resignation, and I stood for an appointment to that board in the fall of 2017, then spent the rest of 2018 calling for reform. 

I started doing that work for Eugene DePasquale at the auditor general’s office in 2019. I was happily doing that when the mayor of Scranton was indicted for extortion and bribery in July of 2019. I was pregnant with our first daughter – six months pregnant. It was not a convenient thing, but we weren’t going to raise our child in a place where this kind of behavior and public corruption were OK. So I ran as an Independent because the local Democratic Party had kind of gone into a back room, picked a person, and just assumed that they would sail to victory. We did not need more of the same. The voters of Scranton deserved a different choice. So I ran as an Independent and I won in a seven-way race. Won again in 2021. Won again in 2025. In that time, we’ve been able to put the financial controls in place and get the city on a fiscal track. We went from a junk credit rating to an A-. We have cut our debt in half. I love my job. I love serving our city here in Scranton, and being mayor is a lot of fun as well. It’s an executive position, and it’s tremendously rewarding. 

I saw, unfortunately, last summer, in our new member of Congress, somebody who was exhibiting the same pattern of saying one thing and doing another. He campaigned on banning congressional stock trading, even writing an op-ed in 2024 calling it sickening to make money on your votes in Congress with information only members of Congress have. He became one of the most prolific stock traders in Congress as soon as he got there. So while he was day-trading on our dime in 2025, he was also saying that he would never cut Medicaid and healthcare – and said even to the governor himself that he would never cut healthcare. Then, in early July 2025, he voted for the Big Beautiful Bill, giving himself a tax break as he cut a trillion dollars from the system. 

We’ve already seen 9,000 of our neighbors here in this region who no longer have health insurance. We had ERs that were bursting at the seams before the Beautiful Bill cuts. But it’s getting worse and worse – and he traded stocks on it. So really, Rob Bresnahan recruited me into this race. It’s not something that I was seeking to do, but I won’t stand by and let the people of Northeastern Pennsylvania be represented by somebody who is in it for themselves. 

If you’re elected, what would your top priorities be? 

Day One, Congress, in January 2027, has to immediately end the war in Iran. We have to vote to end this reckless war of choice that no one asked for and is driving up our costs to a point that is just completely unsustainable for consumers, for businesses, for farmers, for manufacturers. We have to end these blanket, irresponsible tariffs; there’s no reason for us to be in a trade war with Canada. Targeted trade tariffs can be a useful tool, certainly, but that is not what we’re experiencing here. Rob Bresnahan voted six times for the war in Iran – he voted eight times to support these tariffs. He has made it harder to live and harder to do business in this region with those votes. We need to reverse those. 

We also need to reverse the Medicaid cuts before they have the worst impact; we’ve yet to see the worst. Our healthcare system is tremendously flawed. We need deep reform in America’s healthcare system, but we cannot do it with a trillion dollars cut from the system and millions of Americans without healthcare access. The Affordable Care Act was never perfect, but one problem it aimed to solve was people using the ER as their primary care. We are back to that. We will certainly be back to that in the coming months as more people lose access. So we need to end the war and the tariffs, put the floor back under Medicaid, and we also have to figure out what are some of the quick wins that we can do for the American people.

I’m a mayor, so I’m thinking, “What are the crosswalks we can paint to show people that we’re serious?” When I think about ways that we can show the American people we’re serious about reform, one is our anti-corruption agenda. It includes a real ban on congressional stock trading. The Republican Congress passed one this summer, but it’s full of holes by design; it’s just a messaging bill. It’s not a real ban on stock trading. Running for Congress is a choice: You don’t have to do it. There’s no reason, as a member of Congress, that you should be trading individual stocks. Listen, there are offenders on both sides – the top stock trader in Congress is a Democrat. We need folks to understand that we’re serious about reform. 

Another piece of that is corporate PAC money. There’s no reason that a member of Congress should be setting their schedule based on who’s going to give them a PAC check. We don’t accept PAC checks here – I don’t accept money from vendors from the City of Scranton. I never have. So it’s about showing that you’re serious about making these reforms, serious about term limits. That’s another thing that people are begging to reform, that people really want to see. My proposal is 18 years for Congress, 18 years for Senate, 18 years for the Supreme Court – with the hope that someday, somehow, we can end Citizens’ United and take all this egregious dark money out of our political system. 

What are you hearing from voters about their top concerns?

Affordability is on people’s minds, but people are really linking it to the cost of corruption. The link between folks going into public office for themselves and our costs going up is no secret. People see that Big Pharma and for-profit hospitals, health systems, health insurance systems are in charge of our healthcare system, and they’re really writing the bills for themselves. They’re loading up congressional campaign funds with dollars. People see that – they understand that the system is rigged. They want it to be unrigged. They see that you’ve got this system where corporations are in charge of the laws and the regulations – and we are seeing now the result of decades of that. 

They’re also linking their inability to afford gas, inability to afford their groceries, their inability to afford utilities, on the war in Iran, on the tariffs, on the proliferation of data center development that is all over Northeastern Pennsylvania. It’s everywhere I go: Almost every community is dealing with some level of data center proposals. So the link between the data center buildout, the Big Tech companies, and the AI push is directly related to the squeeze that we’re feeling in our bills here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. 

Is there a role you see Congress playing in addressing concerns around data center development, or is that really more of a local conversation?

We have to work together at the federal, state, and local levels to stop these data center developers from taking advantage of local government. Local governments need to have the ability to say no to these developers. They need the capacity to do that, though, and we need to work together across all levels of government to figure this out. 

There can be data centers in some places. The Berwick project, the Homer City project – those are places where there are locations that have always been and will always be industrial, brownfield sites. That is very, very different from the developments that, right now, threaten to take up 14% of Archbald Borough's land, a community of 8,000 people. We have to work together to put reasonable regulations on the board, make sure that utilities cannot do buildouts on the backs of residents and businesses. I feel like I am at a hearing almost every month on behalf of the people of Scranton to fight back against PPL or UGI or PAWC – they’re always wanting to increase our rates. We absolutely cannot have any of the data center buildout, even in those handful of projects that can responsibly go forward, we cannot have those buildouts on our backs. 

So we need federal, state, and local all to work together to make sure that we are responsibly building it out. We obviously are not going to stop AI. That’s not the goal. But we can work together to figure it out. We do need federal regulation and guardrails around AI. I do not see this Congress or this administration doing any of that. We need, in a new Congress, to call for guardrails, call for monitoring, call for a federal AI regulator. That will go very far, I think, in reining in some of these data center proposals right now. So much of it is speculative. So much of it is just folks looking for the shiny gold object and the quick money. We need to pull back, figure out what our nation needs and think about it from a national security perspective. 

How do you see your mayoral experience ultimately translating to Congress? Is there anything you want voters to know about the type of representative that you would be? 

I think Congress needs more folks who’ve served at the local level. I think when you have somebody who’s been at the local level as a mayor, for example, you have an understanding of how to make things work on the ground. Yesterday, we celebrated the completion of a stormwater project in the South Side in Scranton, our Minooka section. The owner of a car dealer there remarked that this has been a problem since the 1950s; he’d been asking for help for 25 years from the city. Yesterday, we completed the project officially and were able to deliver that. 

That was federal funding, working with the state through PennDOT and their engineers, the city, our project management, and getting all the funds and vendors together to make a massive improvement in not just quality of life, but business. Having that experience as a mayor is extraordinarily useful to be in the United States Congress and understand what funds need to go where, what are the infrastructure projects that need to be highlighted, what are the transportation projects that really need to be funded, and making sure that those programs and those policies actually work on the ground. 

I have run the city in a nonpartisan way. Stormwater is not a partisan exercise. I work with mayors who are independent, Republican or Democrat throughout our region and the nation to find good solutions. I will be the same way in the United States Congress: I will work with anyone to improve our communities, and I will take the local experience of getting things done to Washington, which is in deep, deep need of reform.