Paige Gebhardt Cognetti has picked up endorsements from a cluster of major Pennsylvania labor groups as the 8th Congressional District race sharpens into a fight over which candidate can claim organized labor’s trust. The Democratic Scranton mayor now has backing from the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, along with endorsements last month from the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO and the Greater Wilkes-Barre Labor Council.
That matters because the race is not unfolding like a simple party-line contest. Rob Bresnahan, the first-term Republican seeking reelection, has also built a labor profile of his own, with endorsements from six local Fraternal Order of Police lodges, the Pennsylvania State Troopers Association, and AFGE and AFGE District 3 in May. AFGE District 3 covers Pennsylvania and Delaware, and Phil Glover said Bresnahan “took a courageous stand” when the congressman defended federal collective bargaining.
For Cognetti, the endorsements show that unions remain willing to line up behind a Democrat in a district where labor politics still carry weight. For Bresnahan, they show something more unusual: a Republican endorsed by Donald Trump who has nonetheless won support from some unions by breaking with his party on labor questions. AFGE had backed Kamala Harris for president in 2024, but it later praised Bresnahan as “one of the most active freshman Republicans in Congress on federal workforce issues,” and he was one of five House Republicans who joined Democrats in signing a discharge petition last year.
The split has a clear explanation, even if it is not a comfortable one for either party. Bresnahan’s support from some labor groups appears tied to his defense of collective bargaining after Trump’s March 2025 executive order stripped bargaining rights from workers across dozens of agencies. That helps explain why AFGE could move from backing Harris in 2024 to backing Bresnahan in May, while the Pennsylvania Laborers’ District Council, highlighted in a late-June report, also backed him after supporting Cognetti in her 2025 mayoral reelection bid.
That is the practical lesson of the race as it heads toward November: organized labor is still broadly aligned with Democrats, but not uniformly so, and in one of the nation’s most competitive midterm races, the endorsement map is being redrawn candidate by candidate. Cognetti has assembled a classic labor coalition. Bresnahan has proved he can pry loose pieces of it anyway. The unresolved question is how far that cross-current can carry him once the campaign moves from endorsements to votes.
