EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. — Paige Cognetti is trying to be the kind of Democratic candidate Republicans want to have a beer with.
It’s why her congressional campaign held a meet and greet at a local brewery here Sunday (her fourth such event) during which the candidate — dressed casually in jeans and a red-and-black flannel shirt — talked about her husband’s local sandwich shop and her “deep love of craft beer.” Or why, politically speaking, she’s perfectly happy to pick a fight with fellow Democrats if they stand in her way.
“We have to make real reforms,” she said, addressing about two-dozen potential voters before grabbing a beer herself and mingling with the crowd. “And that’s going to mean taking on both parties.”
As if to underscore her point, the 46-year-old was speaking next to a campaign sign adorned with the band-inspired slogan “Paige Against the Machine.” Cognetti coined the phrase during her 2019 independent bid for mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, when she defeated local Democratic candidates she viewed as part of a corrupt system.
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This year, she’s attempting to take the same independent ethos and infuse it into her campaign for Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, running in a battleground race against Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan. Her message: She’s not like other Democrats, not beholden to them and not interested in protecting the political status quo they helped create.
The message moved at least one brewery patron: 48-year-old Keith Swiatkowski, a political independent who works as a butcher. He said he was first impressed by Cognetti when he saw a campaign ad that emphasized her differences with her party. After the two spoke, each with a beer in hand, he was sold.
“I’m tired of the choices being between shit and diarrhea,” Swiatkowski said. Gesturing toward Cognetti, he said, “This is a breath of fresh air.”
Cognetti is emblematic of a larger strategic choice from Democrats this year ahead of November’s election. Across the country, Democratic candidates are aggressively distancing themselves from a Democratic Party whose image sunk to record lows after the 2024 election, intent on portraying themselves as something different than the same old Democrat.
These candidates are playing local quinceañeras, bragging about prosecuting Democratic politicians, rejecting help from national party leaders, explicitly disowning liberal doctrine or even ditching the party label altogether. All of it’s necessary, they say, to win an election fought mostly on Republican-leaning turf, where success depends on winning over some independent and Republican-leaning voters.
“There’s no question that the Democratic Party’s brand is in the toilet,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist, “and that running on a platform copied and pasted from national Democrats is not going to win you a seat in a tough district. But you can’t manufacture independence, and voters can smell bullshit.”
Smith advises Majority Democrats, which was formed to help identify and promote Democratic candidates its leaders believe can transcend the party’s image and outperform the average candidate. Cognetti is a member of the group — and she’ll likely need to meet its aims to win her race.
Both parties view the 8th District race as part of the core House battlefield, as Democrats try to win a majority of seats in an election for the first time since 2020. The Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss-up.”
The district, which sprawls over Pennsylvania’s northeast corner, was once a bedrock of union-supported Democrats but has turned sharply right in recent elections, with Trump winning it by over 8 percentage points in 2024. Boosted by the president, Bresnahan defeated six-term incumbent Matt Cartwright in the same election, albeit by a narrower 1.5-point margin.
It’s why, as much as Cognetti tries to portray herself as different, Republicans spend just as much time telling voters she’s simply hiding her true beliefs and is the same kind of national liberal politician they detest.
“She is certainly trying to separate herself from being the liberal progressive Democrat that she truly is,” Bresnahan told The Washington Sun in an interview. “But the reality is, she is very, very far from being a moderate, middle-of-the-road person.”
Bresnahan and his allies have attacked Cognetti over campaign donations (she received money from the Soros family), taxes (she raised property taxes as mayor of Scranton) and her career as a Democratic political operative (she worked for Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and served in Obama’s Treasury Department).
Lately, they’ve focused extensively on Cognetti’s birthplace, in Portland, Oregon, arguing that she’s not a local do-gooder but a West Coast liberal using northeast Pennsylvania (known in the state as NEPA) as a political stepping stone. One ad from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC, literally starts calling her an “Oregon native” and “New York City transplant.”
Bresnahan has been happy to draw the contrast.
“I was born here. I went to school here. I started my career here. I got married here, and God willing, I’ll die and get buried here,” he said. “I used to be on a board for a cemetery, so I know ultimately where I’m going to end up, and it’s northeastern Pennsylvania.”
Republican strategists frame the race as a referendum on whether voters in the district view Cognetti as a Democrat distinct from the national party.
“If she’s Kamala Harris by Election Day, she loses this election,” said one Bresnahan adviser, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Even if she’s close to Kamala Harris, she loses this election.”
In an interview, Cognetti dismissed the Republican attacks against her, saying her record has proved her independence.
“I have a record of standing up to corruption, no matter who it is,” she said. “That’s exactly what we need to do in D.C. We need to fix the system, and that’s gonna take standing up to a bunch of bad practices and systemic issues that we have that benefit folks in D.C., be they Republicans or Democrats.”
Cognetti ran as an independent candidate for mayor of Scranton in 2019, running against a Democratic nominee she said had been selected through a corrupt process. The previous mayor had resigned suddenly that year and pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges, according to The Scranton Times-Tribune.
Her campaign ads have played up that history, portraying her as an independent corruption-fighter aligned with Democrats of yesteryear.
“She’s different, a Democrat with a backbone like they used to make them,” says one person featured in an early ad. Another ad features a man who says he voted for Trump three times, who calls Cognetti an “old school tough gal.”
Cognetti’s policy agenda has a similar theme. She wants to ban corporate PAC money, wants 18-year term limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices and thinks independent voters should have a right to participate in partisan primaries. Her ads also tout how as mayor, she increased funding for police.
She said she’s not focused on potentially impeaching Donald Trump if she wins, and blamed Joe Biden’s border policy for creating a migrant crisis in Scranton and other cities across the country.
“The border was a huge problem that should have been addressed far sooner than it was,” she said.
Democrats familiar with the region say Congetti’s approach is a political no-brainer.
“If she doesn’t, she’s committing political malpractice,” said former Rep. Chris Carney, a Democrat who represented parts of the current 8th District from 2007 to 2011.
“She needs to run the way I ran in that area,” he said. “Take note that she has not campaigned with AOC, for example. She is staying as a moderate Democrat.”
Cognetti told patrons at the brewery that she had originally come to NEPA to work for Carney’s campaign in 2006, at which time she met her future husband, who was from the area.
Cognetti does tout her liberal values, too. In the same speech at the brewery, she praised Carney for supporting the Affordable Care Act in 2010, saying it cost him his career but was the right thing to do to deliver health care for the district’s citizens. She said her first priority in Congress would be restoring cuts to Medicaid enacted by the GOP congress in 2025.
Cognetti and her allies have run much of their campaign criticizing Bresnahan over a series of personal stock trades they say are interlinked with his votes on health care and the Iran war. And, as is the case across the electoral map this year, Trump’s sinking approval ratings amid the war and rising gas prices have threatened the GOP’s chances.
Bresnahan said the Trump administration needs to “figure out a way to securely reopen the strait and bring a resolution, and I’m hoping there is a diplomatic solution quickly.”
He would welcome campaigning with the president, he added, but acknowledged his popularity has taken a hit.
“I think he would be a lot more popular, by a landslide number, once we could bring a resolution to Iran and get fuel prices back to a reasonable area,” the congressman said.
That doesn’t show signs of happening quickly now, with the election just over a month away. So Cognetti is left to press her advantage.
At the brewery, Cognetti went table by table to chat with everyone over beers and pizza. At one point, she talked up her plan to open primary elections to independent voters.
“I promise you that I will fight in Washington, D.C., anyone who is going to put us at risk, anyone who thinks that a rigged system is OK,” she said during her speech. “I’ve taken on our local Democrats up in Scranton. I will take on anyone in D.C.”
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