Republican and Democratic challengers are both using the issue to attack members of Congress as unethical, seizing on a common practice that enrages voters.
Since the day she began her campaign for Congress, Paige Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton, has centered her pitch to voters on the prodigious stock trading of the House Republican she is seeking to unseat, Representative Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania.
“This year he’s already made 600 trades,” Ms. Cognetti said in the announcement video for her campaign in September. “Sold Chinese stocks the week of a tariff. Buys missile stocks before a war. Buys jet stocks before a big contract. Oversees crypto? Buys crypto stocks before a vote.”
It may be the district where the issue rings the loudest. Democrats are running ads highlighting how Mr. Bresnahan profited from a data center development by trading stocks related to the industry, and recent polls show Ms. Cognetti with a narrow lead. But she is not alone in zeroing in on stock trading by members of Congress as a potent line of attack in this year’s midterm elections.
Like many members of Congress who trade substantial amounts of stock, Mr. Bresnahan, the wealthy former chief executive of an electrical contracting company, has said he relies on a financial adviser to make his trades and never knows about the transactions before they happen or when they occur.
Mr. Bresnahan’s campaign said that Ms. Cognetti’s descriptions of his trades were “lies” and that he has “taken legitimate steps to ban congressional stock trading.”
Still, at a time when many voters are experiencing economic hardship and have grown increasingly suspicious that the political system is rigged, the mere possibility that a member of Congress could be profiting from the job has become politically toxic.
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