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bob brooks
'We're Making Progress!' Says Bernie Sanders as Union Leader Bob Brooks Wins PA Primary
"This November, we're going to unite our party and welcome working people who are ready to come home," said the working class champion.
May 20, 2026
Bob Brooks, president of the largest firefighters' union in Pennsylvania and a champion of working-class politics, came out victorious in the Democratic primary race for the state's 7th district on Tuesday as he vowed to unify voters during the general election and flip a seat currently held by first-term Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie.
"This November, we're going to unite our party and welcome working people who are ready to come home," Brooks told a crowd of supporters, many holding union signs back the candidate, at a victory rally in Bethlehem, the historic steel town in the state's western Lehigh Valley.
Brooks, backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a long list of national and regional unions but also endorsed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, overcame a crowded field—that included Lamont McClure, Ryan Crosswell, and Carol Obando-Derstine—to win the contest with nearly 48% of the total vote.
As Common Dreams reported, Republican forces launched a mysterious spending effort to thwart Brooks' campaign in the final weeks before the primary, with an outside group called Left PAC launching a $1 million ad campaign against him.
I am honored to be the Democratic nominee for PA-07.
On to November. pic.twitter.com/wsYngHqPrk
— Bob Brooks (@VoteBobBrooks) May 20, 2026
"Bob Brooks just showed what can happen when Democrats run unapologetically as working-class economic populists," said the progressive advocacy group Our Revolution in response to the win. "A firefighter and union voice running in tough political terrain by directly taking on corruption, concentrated wealth, and a system failing ordinary people."
Democratic strategist Lis Smith echoed many who said the fight to flip the 7th District from red to blue will be key in the effort to take the House away from Republicans in the fall.
"We need Bob Brooks and more Bob Brooks’s in Congress," said Smith. "This is one of Dems’ best flip opportunities."
And Sanders also weighed in, placing Brooks in the context of other progressives who won primaries this season and look to change the makeup of Congress come next year.
"Congratulations to Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter and union leader, on winning the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District," said Sanders. "His win follows the recent progressive victories of iron worker and union leader Brian Poindexter in Ohio, and union organizer Analilia Mejía in New Jersey. We’re making progress!"
Also in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, democratic socialist candidate Chris Rabb won his primary race in Pennsylvania's 3rd District, which represents large portions of Philadelphia.
The Working Families Party noted that the Brooks and Rabb victories, taken together, point Democrats toward a very important lesson.
“These are two candidates who centered working-class issues," Nicholas Gavio, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Working Families Party, which backed both candidates, told Politico. "They’re obviously from different districts and demographics. But the message of populism—in Philadelphia and in the Lehigh Valley—sells and works."
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GOP Spends Big Against Working-Class Progressive Leading Democratic Primary in PA
"I think they're afraid of a working-class person," said firefighters union president Bob Brooks after a Republican PAC dumped $1 million to blunt his momentum in the Democratic Primary for Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District.
May 19, 2026
Republicans are pulling out all the stops to prevent a working-class populist from snatching the Democratic nomination in the heart of Pennsylvania coal country on Tuesday and earning the right to challenge one of the GOP's most vulnerable incumbents, Congressman Ryan Mackenzie.
In the waning days of the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's 7th congressional district, a deceptively named Republican-aligned political action committee (PAC) called Lead Left—created just weeks before—dumped $1 million into the race to run ads against Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter from Bethlehem and president of the largest firefighters' union in Pennsylvania.
Even in the GOP wave of 2024, the freshman congressman barely edged out the former Democratic Rep. Susan Wild, by about 4,000 votes. With Republicans' approval ratings collapsing nationwide, his seat in the Lehigh Valley has become one of the juiciest targets for Democrats in November.
“I think they’re afraid of a working-class person,” Brooks said of Republicans’ decision to spend against him in the primary during a speech in Allentown on Sunday. “I think they’ve been voting against us for years, and they’re gonna continue to do that. They don’t want to see a working-class guy run against their boy in the general."
"I've worked every job this side of the Mississippi—most of them two, three jobs at a time," said Brooks, who worked as a bartender, dishwasher, snowplow driver, landscaper, and many other jobs before the age of 30, according to his campaign website. "Ryan Mackenzie's never had one. He's gone from Harvard to the state House, straight to Washington. It's about time he fills out an application."
Brooks—who advocates a progressive platform that includes Medicare for All, a repeal of Citizens United, an increased minimum wage, and policies to strengthen unions—has pulled into a comfortable lead in the four-way primary, with help from a broad coalition of backers that spans the ideological field of the Democratic Party.
He's attracted the expected progressive support, including from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has described him as someone with "the guts to stand up to corporate greed and a corrupt political system," and the Working Families Party, which praised him as an exemplar of "real working-class leadership," noting that he “spent time in dozens of jobs before becoming a firefighter and running into burning buildings.”
But Pennsylvania's centrist Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro was also among his earliest big-name supporters, even though his opponents boasted deeper institutional ties to the state's Democratic Party. At a rally for Brooks on Sunday, Shapiro described him as someone who "understands what real people are dealing with, isn’t afraid of anybody, and... can bring people together to get stuff done.”
His roster of prominent supporters runs deep and wide. He has the backing of a slew of local unions and local politicians. He's secured both left-wing stalwarts like Justice Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus and conservative Democrats in the Blue Dog PAC. And he's being cheered by big-name Democrats ranging from Sen. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.).
Brooks' broad appeal stands out at a time when Democrats have an opportunity to win back Rust Belt voters disillusioned as Trumpism decays into something without the barest figment of populist appeal.
Where Democrats would have once pushed for a reactionary Blue Dog or highly educated party lifer to run in a district like PA-07, Dustin Guastella, a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, described Brooks' surge toward the nomination over a trio of more credentialed insiders as a sign of a welcome shift in strategy.
"Working-class voters simply prefer blue-collar candidates. They like electricians and schoolteachers more than attorneys and executives. That’s because working-class candidates better speak to the economic challenges most workers face, and they do so in plain language," Guastella wrote in The Guardian on Tuesday.
"Brooks hasn’t had the privilege of a college education. He’s a veteran firefighter and now the head of the statewide firefighters union. His grandfather was a Teamster truck driver. He was raised by a single mother who worked as a bartender. He’s a varsity baseball coach at Nazareth High School," he said.
But Guastella noted that Brooks' appeal goes far beyond aesthetics. "How can progressives win back the working class? For those concerned with this question, populism has proven the obvious answer," he argued. He noted the success of other candidates in traditionally red constituencies like Nebraska, where independent Dan Osborn, a former union leader, looks poised to unseat Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts on the back of a similar worker-focused platform.
"He’s got what it takes to flip this district," Guastella said of Brooks. "Which is why the Republican Party is already spending big money to influence the election. That’s frustrating, but it’s also a sign that Brooks is a real threat."
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