In our area, there are three congressional districts - the 7th (which includes Northampton, Lehigh and parts of southern Monroe counties); the 8th, which includes the parts of Monroe not in the 7th District; and the 9th, which includes all of Carbon and Schuylkill counties.

Republicans would like to regain control of the 7th District from freshman Democrat Susan Wild and wrest the 8th District seat from incumbent Democrat Matt Cartwright.

After speaking to my sources in both parties within the three districts, here is how they handicap the three contests:

Incumbent Republican Dan Meuser is a near lock to retain his 9th District seat in the lopsidedly GOP district, and both of our local counties in his district are becoming more Republican by the minute.

The 7th District is leaning toward Wild, but a lot can happen between now and Election Day on Nov. 3. Lisa Scheller, of Allentown, president and chairwoman of Silberline Manufacturing in Tamaqua, emerged from the Republican primary after defeating Dean Browning of Lehigh County.

Scheller has tied her star to President Donald Trump. Depending on how he comes out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political protest for police reforms and other key issues could determine how well down-ballot candidates, including Scheller, will do.

The Republican Party believes its best shot, however, will be to take down Cartwright, who has weathered two elections in districts that are taking on a brighter hue of red.

Scranton is the star jewel of the 8th District, a traditionally Democratic enclave that is at the heart of Cartwright’s support. As the city has leaned farther toward the Democrats, the rest of Lackawanna County has been going the other way. One of the shockers in 2016 was when Trump took adjoining Luzerne County by 10 points, which had until then been pretty much a Democratic lock. Four years earlier, Republican Mitt Romney had lost the county to Barack Obama by 12 points.

Despite voting for Democrats for decades, Luzerne went for Trump in a 22% shift of allegiance. This pivot helped Trump win Pennsylvania by fewer than 50,000 votes and take the state’s 20 Electoral College delegates.

The Luzerne County story of that election was recounted in a book by Ben Bradlee Jr., who profiled 12 Trump voters in the county and showed how Luzerne was a microcosm of a divided United States.

The 8th District race is between Cartwright and Republican nominee Jim Bognet of Hazleton, a Trump loyalist who worked in the president’s administration. Bognet emerged from a tight GOP primary featuring six candidates. He received 27% of the vote, compared to 25% for Teddy Daniels and 24% for Earl Granville. The other three were far behind the top three.

Trump endorsed Scheller in the contested 7th District primary, but he did not endorse any of the six candidates in the 8th District. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy endorsed one of Bognet’s primary opponents, Granville of Lackawanna County.

Bognet leaves no doubt about his motivation for seeking office. “The impeachment fraud is the biggest scam in American history,” he wrote in introducing himself to voters. “Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media have hated President Trump since his first day in office.”

He said he left Washington to return home to Hazleton to run for Congress. “I will defend President Trump from a witch hunt that will happen again and again throughout his second term unless we send a message and win back the House of Representatives from the impeachers,” Bognet said.

To underscore how this contest has drawn nationwide media attention, it was featured in a recent Washington Post story profiling the candidates and the district. The article claims that the 8th District is a “a must-win seat if Republicans are to have any chance of retaking the House.” The article paints the Lackawanna-Luzerne area of the district in an unflattering way. “For many, it said, “the district now feels like one of the many forgotten places where the future happened yesterday.”

In 2018, when the district was reapportioned into its present configuration, Cartwright defeated Republican John Chrin, a Northampton County transplant who moved to Monroe County, by 55-45% or by about 23,000 votes.

In the 9th District, three weeks after the election, Meuser’s opponent has still not emerged from the primary. Gary Wegman of Oley Valley, Berks County, is leading Laura Quick of Palmyra, Dauphin County, by less than a percentage point with absentee and provisional ballots still being counted in some of the sprawling district’s counties, making the outcome too close to call.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com