Christopher Deluzio

Congressman Chris Deluzio is seeking a third term representing Pennsylvania’s 17th Congressional District, which straddles Beaver County and a broad swath of Allegheny County suburbs. But in an interview with WESA, he made clear that while he was focused on his Nov. 3 contest with his Republican rival, Beaver County Sheriff Tony Guy, he was also thinking about this political moment more broadly.

“If you’re my age or younger, you don’t expect to be better off than your parents,” said Deluzio, who is 42. “That’s a failure, and it didn’t just start with Donald Trump. I want us to pass big legislation that will juice manufacturing, that will tackle corruption, that will fix healthcare costs getting out of control.”

That begins with Democrats regaining control of Congress, and while the party’s prospects in the Senate are decidedly uncertain, most pundits expect them to capture the House. Deluzio himself is seen as well positioned to win reelection, and he didn’t mention Guy by name when asked about the choice before voters this fall.

(WESA has invited Guy to take part in an interview as well.)

“You’ve got full Republican control in Washington, which has been disastrous,” Delusion said. “Life has gotten more expensive. We now have a war overseas that Donald Trump and Republicans should not have started. Trade wars, including most recently jacking up tariffs on our neighbors in Canada. Corruption run amok. … I can’t imagine most folks look at this administration and say, ‘Yeah, we’d like more of that.’”

In his interview with WESA, Deluzio addressed a wide range of issues: what the Democratic agenda should be, his views on immigration, and what he makes of U.S. Senator John Fetterman.

On the agenda if Democrats retake the House

Deluzio said a House majority would have some low-hanging fruit, given a slew of stories raising questions about ethics in the Trump Administration.

“There’ll be some energy around finding wrongdoing and corruption in the government, and that’s the oversight we’ll have to do,” he said. “But I think our primary focus has to be what can our government do to make your life better off, to make your hard work translate into that American dream?

“That’s the bare minimum, just undoing some damage [Republicans] have done,” he added. “We should have a stronger positive message around not just affordability, but the good life, making your hard work actually mean you can afford the basics in life that shouldn’t be luxuries.”

Deluzio acknowledged that such measures would draw a veto from Donald Trump — assuming they could pass the Senate, where supermajority requirements often block either party from achieving legislative wins. But if nothing else, he said, the bills would demonstrate Democratic priorities to voters going forward.

“We’ll be tough,” Deluzio said. “I want us as Democrats to pass bills that are popular, that our nominee in 2028, whoever it might be, can point to [and say], ‘I’d sign that into law to make your life better off.”

On the rise of candidates with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, and what it means for a Democrat in a “purple district”

One defining trend of the 2026 elections so far has been the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, who have toppled more moderate Democrats in a number of primary races around the country. Deluzio said the party needed to understand why those candidates were succeeding.

“The Democratic Party has to be a big tent, and if your argument to the voters is you just want to defend things, or restore the way they were four years or six years ago, you are missing where the public is,” said Deluzio.

In some political circles, the concern is that while staunch progressives can win Democratic primates or even general elections in deep blue territories, they hurt Democrats running in districts with more moderate voters outside Democratic bastions.

But Deluzio, who represents a district where Democrats have more than a 10-percentage-point registration advantage, doesn’t see it that way.

“Being someone who stands strong against corporate power and the corrupt influence of that money in our politics, someone who wants to get healthcare to folks, those are not just good policies, those are popular positions,” he said. “And I think if the Republicans are gonna spend all their time yelling about candidates who wanna get healthcare to folks, the Republicans are going to lose.”

On John Fetterman, and whether Deluzio will run for Senate in 2028

It isn’t just Republicans who are raising alarms about DSA-affiliated candidates, however: Democratic Senator John Fetterman is as well, having warned that it would be “lunacy” for Democrats to “becom[e] the party of socialism.”

Deluzio has been a harsh critic of Fetterman, as recently as within the past several days after Fetterman appeared via video at a Republican convention and reports surfaced of his disengagement from many job responsibilities.

“Seventy percent of Democrats in Pennsylvania do not approve of the job John Fetterman is doing,” said Deluzio, referring to polls which show massive levels of discontent with Fetterman among his party’s own voters. “I spent the summer helping out other Democrats in Pennsylvania who are in competitive races. Those folks are not clamoring for John Fetterman to campaign with them. It will take a big tent of Democrats to win across the board. I don’t think yelling at your own party, as John Fetterman is doing on Fox News regularly, is a helpful thing.”

The fact that Deluzio has been appearing with other House candidates inside and outside Pennsylvania has spurred suspicion that he may be laying the groundwork for a Senate bid for Fetterman’s seat. Allies of Deluzio consider such a bid a very real possibility, and Deluzio acknowledges, “I’m thinking about it. I haven’t decided yet. My focus is us winning the midterms, winning my own race.”

But he added that there were plenty of reasons to support other Democrats regardless.

“My ambition is much bigger for this country than just what job I might have,” he said. With a number of competitive House races in the eastern part of the state, he said it’s “a no-brainer for me to go help some good candidates.

“The votes of Republican politicians affect my constituents” no matter what district those leaders represent, he added. “When they lose their healthcare because Republican congressmen vote to take it away, it hurts my constituents.”

On his own progressive credentials — and his fight with Trump

Deluzio won the 17th Congressional District seat in 2022, after former Rep. Conor Lamb decided not to run for reelection so he could compete with Fetterman for the Senate seat.

Lamb and Deluzio both shared a military background, holding noncombat positions in the Marines and Navy respectively, and strong support for and from organized labor. But while Lamb was seen as a moderate Democrat throughout his Congressional tenure, Deluzio has staked a claim to a number of progressive positions, like his support of Medicare for All proposals.

He’s a member of the House Progressive Caucus and proudly touts the support of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Deluzio says his own views haven’t changed much: From his 2022 campaign, he said, “I said and campaigned and told folks exactly who I would be. … I was running ads and talking about taking on corporate consolidation, taking on outsourcing of factory jobs, taking on monopolies from the beginning and when a lot of Democrats in competitive districts didn’t want to talk about confronting corporate power.”

Deluzio says his background also explains what may be the most dramatic development since taking office: a fight with the Trump administration over a video he and a number of other Democrats made urging servicemembers not to obey unlawful orders.

“I made clear, always, in running and standing in front of my constituents and voters, how deeply I believed in our Constitution and the rule of law and how much my military service informed that,” he said. He made the video to highlight “the threats posed by a president and others who seem to ignore it, who then confirmed suspicions by sending the Justice Department after us for stating the law.”

Trump’s recently appointed attorney general, Todd Blanche, has “talked about that he is rejecting the long-held norms of White House political influence shaping Justice Department decisions.”

The FBI reportedly sought to interview Deluzio and other Democrats about the tape, but Deluzio says he hasn’t heard from them since. “I have no idea what their plans are” now, he said.

A grand jury reportedly declined to indict the lawmakers.

Immigration

Immigration marks an area of clear difference between Deluzio and Guy, his Republican rival. The Beaver County sheriff’s department has a partnership with federal immigration authorities, while Deluzio has called out the Trump administration for a number of high-profile detentions involving immigrants who were taken into custody despite having work authorization and little-to-no record of criminal activity.

He and fellow Western Pennsylvania Democrat Summer Lee have also raised questions about operations at the Moshannon Valley detention center, the region’s largest immigrant-detention facility.

“So many of my constituents and my neighbors who’ve seen people who don’t have criminal records, who have valid work authorizations, ripped off the streets, often in front of their family,” said Deluzio. “They think it’s wrong, and I think it is wrong.”

Historically, Deluzio has not joined calls to abolish ICE entirely, as some Democrats have. But he says that, given the agency’s approach to immigration, which he says has been exacerbated by a flood of federal dollars, he “would support “rebuilding something very different with the rule of law central to the agency. We should start from scratch in building and creating something different around immigration enforcement.” That, he said, ”is really what’s needed, given the way ICE has behaved and has received all this extra funding and brought people in who are showing a willingness to break the rules.”

On data centers

The construction of data centers has become a minefield for candidates up and down the 2026 ballot. Much of that discussion involves state and local decisions about how to regulate their placement and construction, but Deluzio said he worries that “what we miss is the bigger discussion we have to have about AI’s role in these tech overlords and what the point of this technology is.

“They’re advertising openly how easily their technology can help you replace workers,” he said. “And these are serious existential threats to our existence, to education. I’ve got the education secretary, Linda McMahon, recently talking about little kids’ schools where they’re sitting there in front of a screen with their headphones on and an AI chatbot is taking them through the school day.

“I do not want us to lose the broader argument about what is AI’s role in our existence going to be and what is our government’s response to it, which at this point has been nothing.”

Deluzio has so far not signed on to a bill sponsored by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling for a moratorium, but says a robust federal response is desperately needed.

“If you stopped all data center construction right now, there’s still enough capacity here or elsewhere that it’s not gonna slow down the proliferation of these AI tools,” he said. “We have to put up guardrails. We have to understand the military applications of this and what our adversaries are doing.”

The debate over where and whether to build a data center, he said, was a way of talking about those broader anxieties. “If you were having some facility in your community that was producing something you loved, you might view it a little differently. So I think we have to have both debates. And I really think the debate about AI’s role in society has just been inadequate.

On the conduct of the 2026 election

Prior to his election in 2022, Deluzio worked on election security and voting rights issues, so he’s even more attentive to the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul mail-in voting, and for the potential to disrupt or unfairly discredit elections themselves.

Deluzio said that he had confidence in state and local officials. His district, he noted, is made up of Beaver County and portions of Allegheny County and “one is controlled by Democrats, one by Republicans. The folks who run elections are good and decent patriotic people.”

But, he added, “What I don’t know is what Donald Trump will do and those around him will do. Certainly, I don’t think folks would have predicted January 6th, 2021, as the response to Donald Trump losing the 2020 election or the test I continue to see him run for people who want to have his support, whether in elected office or to be appointed, where they have to lie about him having lost the 2020 election. It’s actually pretty dangerous.”

And what should voters do amid all the insecurity?

“Folks should vote,” he said.