Democrats debate in Bethlehem with Carbon County math hanging over PA-7 race

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Four Democrats made competing cases Wednesday for the right to challenge Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country.

The candidates—firefighter and union president Bob Brooks, former Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure, energy engineer Carol Obando-Derstine, and ex-federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell—spent 60 minutes at a forum hosted by the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce.

Underlying much of the debate was a single number from 2024: 11,000.

That’s roughly how many votes Mackenzie’s margin over Susan Wild was in Carbon County two years ago. That margin erased Susan Wild’s leads in Lehigh and Northampton and handed Republicans a seat they now hold by one point. The May 19 primary is six weeks out.

Each candidate offered a different account of how to close that gap.

McClure

McClure made the most direct claim to Carbon County, arguing Mackenzie would not repeat his 2024 margins there if he were the nominee.

“He is not beating me 70 to 30 in a county that can rightfully call me a favorite son,” McClure said, pointing to his roots in Weatherly, where he graduated high school in 1988 and where his late father ran the housing authority for 40 years.

Mackenzie’s actual margin in Carbon County in 2024 was roughly 66 to 34, according to official results.

McClure served eight years as Northampton County executive and chose not to seek another term. He said it was the early months of Trump’s second administration—the pace of cuts, Elon Musk’s role in federal agencies—that pushed him into the race.

“The chaos that Musk and Trump were sowing really inspired me to get in this race because I knew I had the experience and the courage to take on Trump and fight back,” he said.

He largely ran on his governing record. McClure said he returned $25 million to taxpayers through a property tax cut and distributed another $25 million to small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

FEC records show McClure raised $480,615 through the end of 2025 and had $287,590 cash on hand, though $200,000 of his total receipts came from a personal loan he made to his own campaign, leaving roughly $280,000 raised from outside donors.

On the economy, he said: “If we can spend a billion dollars a day sending missiles into Iran, we can have health care for our citizens in the United States.”

Crosswell

Crosswell spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor across three postings — Baton Rouge, San Diego and Washington, D.C. — before serving in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which handles corruption cases against public officials. He is also a Marine Reserve lieutenant colonel.

Public records show he switched his registration from Republican to Democrat in December 2024, shortly before his February 2025 DOJ resignation—a timeline his opponents have cited as opportunistic.

Crosswell has said he voted for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris while still registered as a Republican, and that the Democratic Party better aligns with his values.

His entry into the race traces directly to a single decision: on Feb. 17, 2025, he resigned from the DOJ after the Trump administration ordered his section to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

“When Donald Trump tried to force my section to drop the criminal case against Eric Adams, I refused, and I resigned,” he said.

At a recent Carbon County event of roughly 55 people, he said more than half signed up for his campaign. He cited 27 combined years of military service and federal prosecution as the basis for his argument that his résumé speaks to voters in the district’s reddest parts.

“I am the one person that Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller do not want you to send to Congress,” he said.

On the economy, Crosswell said groceries are up 8 percent in 2025, “well ahead of the national average.” According to the USDA Economic Research Service, food-at-home prices rose 2.3 percent in 2025.

Federal data show that specific categories, such as beef and eggs, increased significantly more, but Crosswell did not cite a source for the figure during the debate.

Crosswell said he has raised more than the other three candidates combined last quarter. The most recent FEC filings, covering through Dec. 31, 2025, show he raised $1,144,864 and had $612,249 in cash on hand, the largest war chest in the Democratic field.

First-quarter 2026 fundraising figures, which would cover the period Crosswell referenced at the debate, are not yet due to the FEC and were not available at the time of publication. All fundraising figures in this article reflect filings through Dec. 31, 2025.

All four candidates expressed opposition to Citizens United on Wednesday — the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to unlimited corporate and outside spending in federal elections — even as each operates within the system it created.

McClure was the most specific, calling the ruling “baffling” and arguing the Supreme Court was wrong to treat corporations as having First Amendment rights. He called for a constitutional amendment to overturn it.

Brooks, the second-leading fundraiser in the Democratic field based on available FEC filings, was the most candid about the tension. He said Citizens United should be “done away with,” but added: “You can’t hate the player, hate the game. You’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt.”

Obando-Derstine agreed that the system drowns out candidates’ important messages. Crosswell said he was the first in the race to pledge not to accept corporate PAC money.

Brooks

The Bethlehem firefighter and state union president described filling three diesel trucks at twice the usual cost, a son who left a Penn State satellite campus with more than $105,000 in student debt and a moment of choosing between a mortgage payment and a medical bill.

On the question of how to engage the Trump administration, he was direct: “You’ve got to fight fire with fire—no pun intended. You can’t always take the high road when they go low—no more strongly worded letters.”

Brooks is the only candidate in the race with no prior experience in public office. As president of the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association, he spent nearly a decade lobbying Harrisburg for post-traumatic stress injury coverage for first responders.

That effort produced Act 121, signed by Gov. Shapiro in October 2024 and in effect since Oct. 30, 2025, which removed the legal burden requiring first responders to prove “objective abnormal working conditions” to qualify for workers’ compensation benefits related to PTSI.

He said Gov. Josh Shapiro and Rep. Chris Deluzio encouraged him to run, and that once he decided to get in, he concluded he was the best candidate for the job. He is endorsed by Shapiro, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, among others, and noted that most of his campaign staff are in their mid- to late 20s.

FEC records show Brooks raised $609,957 and had $340,767 cash on hand through the end of 2025, covering the period from July through December.

Obando-Derstine

Obando-Derstine left her position at PPL Electric Utilities in April 2025 and launched her campaign two weeks later. She said Wild, who chose not to seek a fifth term, asked her to run.

“She did ask me to run. She didn’t want to do it again, and she thought I had the best chance at beating Ryan Mackenzie,” Obando-Derstine said. “And I said yes — because why not me?”

The Colombian-born immigrant and former PPL engineer repeated a list of credentials she said no other candidate in the field—or the general election—can match: the only woman, the only immigrant, the only Spanish speaker, the only energy engineer.

“I am not sitting on the sidelines when Trump is trying to make it feel like it’s a crime to be Latino in America,” she said.

On energy, she made her most specific case. At the debate, she said the district is facing “a resource adequacy issue” and “unprecedented demand” driven in part by data centers connecting to the grid — and that navigating it requires the kind of technical expertise she said Congress currently lacks.

In a post-debate interview, she went further: “We have to be laser-focused on ensuring that they don’t shift costs to working families and small businesses. I know how these systems work, and I know who they fail when they don’t.” She added: “Politicians promise, but engineers deliver.”

On immigration, she was more pointed than she had been on stage: “Who better than an actual immigrant who went through the immigration process to fight Trump’s ICE?”

Obando-Derstine is endorsed by Wild and EMILY’s List. FEC records show she raised $431,919 from May through December 2025 and had $123,508 cash on hand at year’s end, the lowest cash position in the Democratic field heading into the primary stretch.

ICE

The debate over ICE enforcement has been active in the district well before Wednesday’s forum. In January, Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel evicted ICE and the Department of Homeland Security from a county-owned office in Allentown after the agency failed to pay more than $115,000 in rent over nearly three years.

Lehigh County Controller Mark Pinsley, who had briefly run for this congressional seat before dropping out, framed the move bluntly: “We’re going to deport ICE.” Mackenzie called Siegel and Pinsley “self-interested extremists.” None of the four candidates on Wednesday called for abolishing the agency outright.

Brooks was the most direct: “With ICE, we have armed men running around, throwing people in vans. They’re killing people.”

Crosswell, whose law firm is currently suing ICE over illegal detentions, proposed legislation requiring agents to remove masks and identify themselves.

He drew a line between what he called appropriate enforcement in normal circumstances and the current administration’s conduct. “In normal times, ICE can serve an important function—they would deport people here illegally that were violent, dangerous, some sort of threat, felons,” he said. “The problem right now is they’re deporting people that have been here for 10 to 15 years.”

McClure pointed to his 2020 executive order banning ICE arrests at the Northampton County Courthouse and said of the agency: “If it can’t be reformed, it needs to be abolished.”

Obando-Derstine connected the issue to her own background: “What Trump is doing is targeting people who look like me and my family.”

In a post-debate interview, she stopped short of calling for abolition but said: “When a system is targeting people just because of the way they look and doesn’t care if they’re citizens or not — that’s wrong. They don’t have sufficient training. They’re unaccountable.”

Mackenzie, the incumbent they are all running to unseat, has staked out a different position. He voted to triple ICE’s budget as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill and has broadly defended the administration’s enforcement approach.

He has also said that agents operating in plain clothes should be identifiable, telling Lehigh Valley Political Pulse in January that “I think these individuals need to be properly identified.” Crosswell, on Wednesday, proposed legislation requiring agents to remove their masks and identify themselves by name.

Fetterman

Brooks referenced Fetterman’s signature look. “First of all, I’m not able to wear a hoodie anymore,” he said. He added that he hadn’t spoken to Fetterman in over a year and that “I think some things have changed in his life that have made him take different opinions,” without elaborating.

Obando-Derstine said: “I have a problem with people who say one thing and do another.”

McClure answered in a single sentence — he said he had endorsed Conor Lamb over Fetterman in the 2022 Democratic Senate primary — and left it there.

Crosswell said he values compromise but not what he saw from Fetterman. “I think John Fetterman thinks that he’s doing something noble by just totally turning on his values,” he said. “It’s not acceptable.”

The debate episodes will air on April 6th and 13th at 7:30 PM on WFMZ’s Business Matters.

The primary is on May 19. The general election against Mackenzie is on Nov. 3.

Pennsylvania’s primary is closed — only registered Democrats may vote. The registration deadline is May 4. Voters can register and request mail-in ballots at vote.pa.gov.