Rep. Rob Bresnahan released a campaign ad accusing Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti of raising taxes, firing teachers and seeking to disarm police, calling her attacks on him full of baloney.
Bresnahan posted the video as the Pennsylvania Republican faces a midterm challenge from the Scranton Democrat, who has hit him over stock trades while she runs for Congress and draws heat at home for time away from City Hall.
The ad frames Cognetti’s record as the real issue in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Bresnahan says she and her allies are pouring money into a false picture of him while her own local decisions tell a different story.
He put it bluntly in the spot.
"Paige Cognetti and her allies are full of baloney, spending millions to paint me as something I am not,"
Bresnahan said, then listed the charges he wants voters to weigh: tax hikes, benefit cuts, teacher layoffs, and a push that he says would disarm police.
Cognetti’s side has made congressional stock trading a central line of attack. In a September campaign video, she claimed Bresnahan had already made 600 trades this year and timed buys around tariffs, contracts, and votes.
Bresnahan answered that charge head-on in the new ad.
"I voted to ban congressional stock trading, and I don’t trade my own stocks. Paige worked for Goldman Sachs and Wall Street."
His campaign has called her trade descriptions “lies” and said he has taken legitimate steps to ban the practice. Prior reporting cited in the coverage notes he relies on a financial adviser and does not know about transactions before they happen. He is a wealthy former electrical contracting executive now serving in the House.
Recent polls have shown Cognetti with a narrow lead in the race. That margin helps explain why both camps are spending hard and why local governing choices are now national campaign fodder, much as Pennsylvania Democrats have strained over other high-profile figures who break with party orthodoxy.
Bresnahan’s message is simple: voters should judge the mayor by the budgets she backed, not by ads about his portfolio.
One of the sharpest hits lands on Cognetti’s time on the Scranton School Board. Townhall reporting cited in the coverage says she voted for a city budget that cut 89 teachers, raised taxes on working families, and still left a $4 million deficit.
Bresnahan folds that record into a broader indictment of her local leadership.
"She raised taxes, cut benefits, fired teachers, and wants to disarm the police,"
he said in the ad. He added that she is lying and knows it, and that misleading Northeastern Pennsylvania is what “Paige and her money machine do best.”
Those school-board numbers give the tax-and-teachers attack concrete weight. A mayor running for Congress on progressive credentials now has to explain a vote that reduced classroom staff while asking residents for more money and finishing in the red.
Local officials tied to troubled records have become recurring problems for Democrats further up the ballot, a pattern also visible when a Georgia senator’s mayor ally later faced impeachment over misconduct.
The police funding fight centers on 2021. Bresnahan says the guns and ammunition budget was cut from $43,500 to $20,000, more than 50 percent, and that Cognetti’s administration engaged anti-police activist groups before that reduction.
City Council added a separate $23,629 “special operations ammunition” line item that same year. Bresnahan has said Cognetti did not sign the 2021 budget and that her later denials do not erase what her administration did.
In August he held a press conference with House Speaker Mike Johnson to press the point. Coverage of that event had him noting Cognetti’s claim that she did not disarm the police, then arguing the budget cut still stands as the record voters should see.
For residents who want officers equipped and backed, a halving of the core guns-and-ammo line is not a bookkeeping footnote. It is a choice about whether the city treats public safety as a priority or a bargaining chip.
While Cognetti campaigns for Congress, some Scranton voices say she is already gone. Resident Rik Little put it in plain terms.
"We got a mayor who’s not here,"
Little said, adding that the mayor should be there every week.
At a July meeting on a $1.9 million deal between Scranton and Fidelity D&D Bancorp, councilmember Sean McAndrew said the only thing he knows about the mayor’s five-year outlook is that she does not plan to stay, she plans to be in Congress.
That complaint lands harder because the same mayor is asking voters to promote her. Taxpayers still living with school cuts, tighter police budgets, and day-to-day city business hear a candidate talking about Washington while the council talks about her empty chair.
Party loyalty has limits when local results disappoint. Even longtime Democrats have broken ranks after leadership failures closer to home, including a mother who told Congress she was ashamed of her party after a tragedy tied to weak enforcement.
Bresnahan’s ad is a classic contrast spot: his vote to ban congressional stock trading and claim that he does not trade his own shares, set against Cognetti’s Goldman Sachs and Wall Street background and her local budget votes.
Cognetti’s September video tried to lock him into a trader narrative, Chinese stocks near a tariff, missile and jet stocks near conflict and contracts, crypto names near a vote. His campaign calls those characterizations false and points to the ban vote and adviser-managed accounts.
Axios Congress reporter Andrew Solender shared the Bresnahan video on X, giving the spot wider reach as the race tightened. The fight is no longer just about one member’s trades. It is about whether a mayor who cut teachers, raised taxes, and oversaw a deep police ammo reduction can run against “corruption” without answering for City Hall.
Internal Democratic fights over message and personnel keep surfacing in other races too, from James Carville’s break with far-left influencers to campaign shake-ups when staff controversy hits the headlines.
Bresnahan is betting Scranton and the surrounding counties care more about classrooms, tax bills, and whether cops have ammunition than about the latest trading spreadsheet. Cognetti is betting the stock-trade story still moves enough independents to offset the local record.
Voters in Northeastern Pennsylvania now have both files in front of them, the ad, the budget numbers, the council complaints, and the dueling videos. The choice is whether governing results at home matter more than the attack line from the campaign trail.
When a mayor seeks a promotion, the budget votes and empty-chair complaints travel with her, and taxpayers get the final say.