The historic election Tuesday proved a woman’s place is increasingly in local politics.
By January, Scranton will have its first female mayor, Paige Cognetti, its first elected city councilwoman in years, Jessica Rothchild, also the first openly gay council member, and a school board with fewer men than women. Tara Yanni, Sarah Cruz, Ro Hume and Catherine Fox won election Tuesday and will join Katie Gilmartin and Barb Dixon on the nine-seat board.
Lackawanna County government will have its first Democratic woman commissioner, Debi Domenick, only four years after the election of the first woman commissioner of any political stripe, Laureen Cummings, a Republican.
In Dunmore, the borough council will add a second councilwoman, Beth McDonald Zangardi, and maybe two more if the official count confirms write-in candidate Janet Brier’s campaign panned out. Mayor Tim Burke, convinced Brier won a council seat, thinks Dunmore has never had two female council members, let alone three. Councilwoman Carol Scrimalli is serving her third four-year term.
In heavily Democratic Carbondale, an unknown woman, Sarah Sweet, a Republican, of all things, apparently piled up hundreds of write-in votes in a bid to defeat incumbent Democratic Mayor Justin Taylor.
All that comes on top of 114th state House District voters electing a woman, Bridget Kosierowski, in March as their new representative. Kosierowski became the first woman county resident elected to the House since the 1960s.
Marie Killian, chairwoman of Progressive Women of NEPA, whose six endorsed female candidates all won election Tuesday, said women’s local political involvement comes “100 years after women fought for and won the right to vote.”
Too often, working women in the past faced an eight-hour workday followed by the need to care for their families when they got home, Killian said. She thinks President Donald Trump’s election changed the political calculation for many women, referring to the president’s past statements and handling of women.
“We want to do it,” she said. “We are taking this very, very seriously ... We’re progressive women who have many men we love in our lives. This isn’t anti-man.”
While the president certainly spurred the Progressive Women group’s increased activism, other, individual reasons prompted the candidacies of many of the women elected locally. Cognetti jumped into the mayor’s race in response to ex-mayor Bill Courtright’s guilty plea to federal corruption charges. Brier ran her last-minute write-in council campaign to oppose Keystone Sanitary Landfill’s expansion. Also opposed to the expansion, Zangardi said she ran because she’s always been active in the community and decided she needed to do more.
“I think we’re just sick of it, to be honest with you,” Zangardi said. “Good people need to step up and stand up ... Really it doesn’t change anything until we step up.”
Sweet, 22, a recent political science graduate of Penn State, saw Taylor unopposed for re-election and heard some voters express dissatisfaction with him.
Earlier this year, Taylor had refused to pay tens of thousands of dollars in 2018 property taxes as part of a planned federal lawsuit he won’t explain and because he’s upset the way the school taxes are collected.
Sweet decided to challenge him with an intentionally under-the-radar write-in-vote campaign that relied on word of mouth and social media. More than 400 people cast write-in votes in the mayor’s race. How many voted for Sweet won’t be known until the official count, which starts Friday. Taylor won a fifth term with an unofficial 744 votes.
Sweet did not follow the other women’s campaigns.
“It’s amazing to see how many women were out there and getting elected,” she said.
Rothchild said the lack of city councilwomen factored into the many reasons she ran.
“Same goes for the LGBTQ community,” she said. “It’s pretty incredible (so many women ran and won). It’s also about time. We’ve waited way too long for this.”
Contact the writer: bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9147; @BorysBlogTT on Twitter.
It felt Wednesday like the whole world knew Scranton voters elected Paige Cognetti as the city’s first female mayor.
Cognetti, 39, helped the feeling along with a mid-afternoon interview on CNN, but a couple of pretty well-known Democrats called to congratulate her after she won the election Tuesday, too.
Former Vice President Joe Biden called her cell phone Tuesday night and left a voice mail while reporters interviewed her, she said.
“He said he was proud of me and proud of Scranton and to call him if I needed anything,” Cognetti said.
On Wednesday morning, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called, a call arranged by a mutual friend. Cognetti worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Clinton, whose father, Hugh Rodham, grew up in Scranton and owned a cottage at Lake Winola, told her she met people named Cognetti during visits to the cottage, Cognetti said.
“We laughed about that,” she said. “It was really special to hear from these people.”
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro and her soon-to-be former boss, state Auditor Eugene DePasquale, also called. Cognetti took an unpaid leave of absence from her job as DePasquale’s special assistant to run for mayor.
“I’m still not sure this (her election) is really happening,” Cognetti said.
— BORYS KRAWCZENIUK