The House primary giving hints about where the national Democratic Party is heading

Competing messages from candidates like Bob Brooks and Ryan Crosswell highlight a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party in a swing district in Pennsylvania.

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Bob Brooks kept his message to the point in a six-minute address to union leaders and supporters on Monday.

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Brooks, the head of the state firefighters union and a Democratic candidate for a battleground House seat in the Lehigh Valley, described himself as a “working-class candidate” and “working-class person” who has been working since he ran a paper route at age 10. “The whole system is rigged against us,” he said — and the only way to combat such an imbalance of power is by “sending people like us to Washington, D.C., to represent us.”

Across town, Democratic rival Ryan Crosswell, a Marine veteran and former federal prosecutor whose headline-grabbing resignation from the Justice Department preceded his campaign, offered a very different message. In an interview with NBC News, he described leaving the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section — over an order to drop a corruption case against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams — as “a real No Kings moment,” pointing to the anti-President Donald Trump protest movement.