(NEW YORK) — Voters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania are headed to the polls on Tuesday in primaries that will set up matchups critical for both control of the state and the House in the 2026 midterm elections.
Both parties know how key the state is to their efforts.
“The road to the majority in the House of Representatives runs through Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Republican Party Executive Director James Markley told ABC News.
And Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk, a Democrat, told “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz in a recent interview, “The path to a Democratic majority in Congress is places like Allentown, places like Scranton.”
A marquee race for governor
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat first elected as governor in 2022 after almost two decades in state politics, is set to vie for a second term. He faces speculation that he’ll run for president in 2028 but has said he currently remains focused on 2026.
Republican State Treasurer Stacy Garrity is set to be the GOP’s standard bearer for governor. She has said she hopes to unseat Shapiro by pointing to challenges Pennsylvanians still face with affordability and other issues.
Neither candidate faces any opponents on their primary ballots.
The battle for the 7th District
Across the state, Democrats are targeting four House districts held by Republicans in Pennsylvania — among the highest number of seats the party is targeting in any state.
One of those four seats is Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, which includes the Lehigh Valley. Incumbent Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican, is set to try to win a second term in Congress, and is unopposed in the Republican primary.
In 2024, he flipped the seat once held by then-Rep. Susan Wild, a Democrat, by just 1 percentage point, but he says he’s confident he’ll be able to hold the seat.
“What we’ve seen is that all four of the [Democratic] candidates have raced to the left, and they’ve all mirrored each other on the radical-left policies,” he told ABC News, saying later that he feels voters trust him on delivering for the region.
The four-way Democratic primary in the district has both candidates with distinct backgrounds as well as some party infighting.
Gov. Josh Shapiro himself has thrown his support behind Bob Brooks, a union leader and former firefighter. Brooks has excited supporters with his blue-collar bona fides and the chance for him to galvanize working-class Pennsylvanians to support him.
However, Brooks has faced scrutiny from both Democrats and Republicans over how he appeared to get so much institutional support — including from Shapiro and from progressive stalwart independent Sen. Bernie Sanders — before the primary.
“I’m a 20-year firefighter, union leader, and baseball coach, and I’ve had nearly every job in the book — dishwasher, snowplow driver, bartender, and Teamster…. A lot of politicians want to talk about the affordability crisis. I’ve lived it,” Brooks said in a statement to ABC News.
Ryan Crosswell, a former federal prosecutor, is also on the ballot and has decried the institutional support going to Brooks. Crosswell is a former Republican who resigned from the Justice Department in February 2025 because he disagreed with how the DOJ wanted to drop corruption charges against then-New York City mayor Eric Adams.
“I’m the only candidate in this race who hasn’t either been a career politician or been hobnobbing around them, and that includes Bob Brooks. So I think I had a lot more in common with everyday Americans,” Crosswell told ABC News in an interview.
Brooks’ campaign has emphasized local support for him from state lawmakers, local Democratic groups, and local labor groups.
The other Democrats on the ballot in Pennsylvania’s 7th District are Lamont McClure, a former Northampton County executive, and Carol Obando-Derstine, who served as an aide to former Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.
Other key districts
The other three districts that are likely to be battlegrounds are Pennsylvania’s 1st, 8th and 10th districts. Similar to Mackenzie, none of the Republican incumbents in those districts have any primary opponents.
In the 1st District in the Philadelphia suburbs, incumbent Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick is set to try to win a sixth term in Congress. Bob Harvie, a Shapiro-backed Bucks County commissioner, and Luca Simonelli, a mathematician and political newcomer, are vying in the Democratic primary for the chance to flip the seat.
And in the 8th District, Rep. Rob Bresnahan is set to try to win a second term in Congress after flipping the seat previously held by then-Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright in 2024 by a slim margin. Paige Cognetti, the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, will be set to be Democrats’ standard-bearer to flip the seat. She faces no primary challengers.
In the 10th District, incumbent Rep. Scott Perry, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, is set to try to win an eighth term in Congress. The Democrats vying to unseat him in their own primary are Janelle Stelson, a Shapiro-endorsed former local television anchor who was the district’s Democratic nominee in 2024, and Justin Douglas, a Dauphin County commissioner.
Another key race to watch in Pennsylvania, although not one is considered a battleground, is the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 3rd District. The deeply-blue district, which covers a swath of Philadelphia, is opening up as incumbent Rep. Dwight Evans is retiring.
State Sen. Sharif Street, progressive state Rep. Chris Rabb, and pediatric surgeon Ala Stanford are the frontrunner candidates. Whoever wins is on a glide path to Congress as no Republicans are running for the seat.
ABC News’ Julia Cherner contributed to this report.
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