SCRANTON, Pennsylvania — Less than two weeks ago, thousands of Scrantonites converged in their downtown for the 64th run of one of the oldest St. Patrick’s Day parades. Rob Bresnahan, the Republican congressman who represents the 8th district, joined them, walking with the local operating engineers union as it made its way along Mulberry, Wyoming, and Lackawanna Avenues.
Jimmy Gimmel, the vice president of International Union of Operating Engineers Local 542, said that he extended the invitation to Bresnahan because of his commitment to the union’s needs and concerns, and understanding their desire to attract both new jobs and train the next generation in the trades.
“The congressman is definitely the best person for our guys,” said Gimmel, who says he has been a registered Democrat all of his life.
Gimmel said that Bresnahan has their back and understands the importance of the apprenticeship program. “Because we are a self-funded apprenticeship, so if we don’t work, our apprentices don’t learn,” he said. “If our members aren’t working, then that affects the entire local, and it really hurts the future of the guys because we want to train the future. That’s our goal here, is training our guys,” he said.
While no formal endorsement has been announced yet, it is fairly obvious that the local operating engineers will throw their support behind Bresnahan. They’d be joining numerous other union endorsements that the Republican freshman has earned heading into this fall’s midterm elections, including the IBEW Local 163, the International Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, the Pennsylvania Laborers’ District Council, and this week’s endorsement by the Amalgamated Transit Union on Tuesday.
Since 2016, the biggest political earthquake that has shaken American politics is the movement of union households that were once the backbone of the Democratic Party — manufacturing, energy, rail, public safety, and trades — to Republicans like Bresnahan.
That support was what kept former Democratic congressman Matt Cartwright in his seat for so long — until the D.C.-centric elite politics of his party eventually unmoored the voters from him.
Voters started drifting from Democrats, and not just because they changed their priorities, but because of where the Democratic Party has moved. They feel totally disconnected from where the party has gone. This gave Bresnahan the ability to make inroads with Democrats like Gimmel and his members.
While Democrats are looking for a road map to get back to securing a winnable seat here in Scranton, the GOP has quietly solidified inroads with old school “Bill Clinton Democrats.” It isn’t any different from watching the same breakdown of the Democratic Party in Youngstown, Ohio, where Democrats once ruled the Mahoning Valley for generations. This began to unravel in 2016 and was congealed in 2024 when Sherrod Brown lost his Senate seat after losing the support that he had held for three terms.
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Bresnahan’s district encompasses all of Wayne, Pike, and Lackawanna counties, along with portions of Luzerne and Monroe. A native of Kingston, he became the CFO of his grandfather’s business, Kuharchik Construction, before he turned 20. That offer came with a stipulation from his grandparents: finish college first.
Bresnahan’s grandfather, an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers electrician, started the business out of his garage with his grandmother in 1973. Bresnahan purchased the company at fair market value several years later. He still holds a significant stake in the company after partnering with Midwestern Electric, which provides specialty electrical services to the municipal and state owners of the U.S. Midwest’s traffic infrastructure, after they invested in the company in 2023.
His challenger is the mayor of Scranton, Paige Cognetti, an Obama campaign fundraiser who went on to serve in the Obama-Biden administration as a senior adviser for the U.S. Treasury Department. The Harvard grad followed that with two years as a wealth advisor for investment giant Goldman Sachs in New York City. An Oregon native, she married local and was appointed to the school board in 2017, before quitting less than a year later to work for then-Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale. She then ran for mayor of the “Electric City,” serving three terms.
In her race to unseat Bresnahan, Cognetti has currently placed all of her chips on congressional stock trading, which Bresnahan ran against in 2024. But multiple legislative bills to end the trading have repeatedly stalled in the past year since he took office.
Last May, Bresnahan introduced the Transparency in Representation Through Uniform Stock Trading (TRUST) Act, which banned stock trading for members of Congress. He also signed on to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s discharge position to force a vote on her bill to ban stock trading.
In office, Bresnahan has taken a series of pro-union positions, voting for western Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio’s amendment to the T&I Committee Reconciliation markup that authorizes Amtrak to enforce preference rights in court in order to enforce current law. He also voted against an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which prohibited the development of offshore wind energy projects on the questionable grounds that they somehow interfere with radar capabilities. That amendment would have caused the loss of thousands of building trades jobs.
Bresnahan also voted against H.R. 2262, the Flexibility of Workers Education Act, which allows employers to not pay workers for mandatory training outside of work hours, something that the AFL-CIO, as well as many other unions, opposed.
This House race, like several others in Pennsylvania, will be one of the races that decides which party will hold the majority next year should the midterm elections remain close. Congetti is ideologically quite progressive, which works in the city of Scranton. However, she will struggle with navigating that in the outlying counties.
Her argument — even when Trump visited the Poconos in December — also landed on congressional stock trading. In interviews with voters here, their top priorities were job creation, the ability for their children to be able to stay here and make a living, immigration, and lowering the cost of goods.
Bresnahan said that he has earned the support of traditional union voters — endorsements that he did not have when he first ran in 2024 — due to both his background and understanding of their concerns.
“I was a union electrical contractor. My grandfather was a 50-year member of the IBEW. I was the chairman of a joint apprenticeship training committee for IBEW 163, so my background was always with labor,” Bresnahan said.
He added that the proof is in pudding: “When we were all in those rooms together, we didn’t put on a union versus non-union hat. We put on the hat that was best for the organization that we were representing at that time,” he said.
He says that one of his most important issues is finding opportunities to create jobs in northeastern Pennsylvania. “So at the end of the day,” Bresnahan said, “people in northeastern Pennsylvania just want an opportunity to take care of their families.”
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Apprenticeship programs have always been something that is extremely close to his heart, the congressman said.
“Because you have an opportunity to earn while you learn. You graduate with zero dollars in debt. These are jobs that will never be replaced by artificial intelligence, and you have a family-sustaining career at the end. So I stood for the right to collectively bargain. And you know what? Sometimes, just because there was an ‘R’ next to my name doesn’t mean I should be interpreted differently.”
