New reporting from The Washington Post highlights how vulnerable Congressmen Rob Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie lied to Pennsylvanians by promising to lower costs but instead have voted to make life more expensive.
As candidates, Bresnahan accused his opponent of “gaslighting” Pennsylvanians about rising costs while Mackenzie said that his opponent and the media “gloss over that and tell you how great things are.”Â
But 18 months into their time in Congress, the Washington Post highlights how Bresnahan and Mackenzie have only made things more expensive after voting repeatedly for a cost-spiking war in Iran.
 DCCC Spokesperson Eli Cousin:
“Rob Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie are liars. They campaigned on a promise to lower prices, but instead have repeatedly voted for a cost-spiking war in Iran while unleashing rising prices on gas, groceries, and health care. That’s the record they will be judged on in November.”Read key details from The Washington Post below:
The Washington Post:Â Pennsylvania Republicans won on lowering prices. Then came the Iran war.
By Dan Merica and Cat Zakrzewski | July 15, 2026
- Before defeating a House incumbent in the 2024 election, Republican Rob Bresnahan accused Democrats of “gaslighting” voters by arguing that grocery prices were not surging.
- Now Bresnahan is seeking reelection in his Pennsylvania swing district and running ads acknowledging that grocery prices are still too high. “Grocery receipts are getting shorter, but the price keeps going up,” Bresnahan says to the camera.
- Those circumstances highlight the bind that Republicans — especially those who flipped seats in 2024 — are in ahead of the 2026 midterms. After successfully running on bringing prices down, Republicans face an economy jolted by President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, while rising gas prices imperil the party’s hopes of keeping control of the House.
- Pennsylvania is home to four of the most competitive House districts. Two are represented by freshman Republicans who unseated Democrats in 2024 with an economic message that also helped Trump defeat Kamala Harris by two percentage points in the key battleground state.
- […] The average price for a gallon of gas in Pennsylvania hit $3.97 on Tuesday, up from $3.79 a week ago. Renewed fighting and Trump’s announcement Monday that he would reimpose a blockade on Iranian shipping raised Brent crude futures, a key benchmark for energy prices, by nearly 6 percent over the last five days.
- Voters continue to face higher inflation than they did when President Joe Biden left office in January 2025, when the consumer price index was 3 percent. And strategists expect higher prices will continue to be top of mind for voters as they head to the polls later this year.
- […] [Bresnahan] was a fixture on local radio during the campaign, often lambasting Democrats for failing to understand how rising prices were affecting his would-be constituents.
- “We’re fed up with paying too much at the grocery store. We’re fed up paying too much for groceries. We’re fed up paying too much for rent. We’re fed up paying for utilities that are out of this world,” Bresnahan said on the conservative “Bob Cordaro Show” a week before Election Day in 2024.
- A year after ousting Cartwright, Bresnahan’s Thanksgiving message on X assured Pennsylvania voters were “finally getting to feed their families for less” because of “lower prices.”
- But government data released shortly after Bresnahan’s tweet found prices, particularly for food, rose between November and December in 2025, higher than they were at the same time in 2024. The trend has continued into 2026, when the same government data found inflation climbed at its fastest rate in nearly four years, in part because of the war with Iran.
- Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, the Democrat challenging Bresnahan, has repeatedly accused him of violating his promise to lower costs by backing the president’s war and other policies. “Instead of focusing on lowering costs, he’s sending our tax dollars overseas while our prices keep rising at home,” she posted on June 4.
- Republican Ryan Mackenzie, the other Pennsylvania GOP freshman in a competitive reelection race, [won] in 2024 by promising “real change” on inflation and blaming Democrats for ignoring it.
- “Right now, families all across our country are getting crushed by inflationary prices,” Mackenzie said at a debate in September 2024. In interviews, he said people were having to “change their lifestyle just to put food on the table,” and that “the Democrats and the mainstream media want to gloss over that and tell you how great things are.”
- While Mackenzie often notes that “more work remains” on bringing prices down, he has argued that inflation and prices are falling. “After four years of uncontrolled inflation, American families are finally seeing price stability,” he wrote on X in 2025.
- And Mackenzie, who is running against Democratic firefighter union president Bob Brooks, campaigned alongside Trump earlier this year when the president claimed that “prices are coming down right now at levels that you’ve never seen.”
- […] “They were not subtle about this in 2024. There were these signs all over Pennsylvania that said Trump, low prices; Kamala, high prices,” recalled J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “So they have created for themselves this permission structure to have to own all the prices for themselves.”
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