It’s a bleak winter morning in Millvale, a tiny municipality just outside of Pittsburgh. As one bypasser puts it, with the frankness lovingly associated with western Pennsylvania: “What a shitty, rainy day, huh?” But inside the diner where second-term Democratic congressman Chris Deluzio is sitting, the lights are auspiciously bright.
Tucked into a booth, Deluzio is the picture of politician-style rectitude: hair combed neatly, gold wedding ring glinting, a half-zip sweatshirt proudly bearing his name and the crest of the U.S. Congress. But there is something exceptional about him.
Deluzio represents Pennsylvania’s District 17, where we’re currently sitting. Because of its mix of working-class and college-educated voters, the district has been called a national bellwether. Ahead of the 2024 election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee saw Deluzio — a populist Democrat — as “vulnerable” in his Rust Belt district.
Instead, this past November, Deluzio not only managed to easily swat away his Republican opponent but also outperformed the Harris/Walz ticket. Beaver County, the traditional Republican stronghold in District 17, moved farther toward Trump. It also moved toward Deluzio. To a Democratic Party in crisis, a guy like Chris Deluzio just may hold the key to salvation.
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Inside the Millvale diner, old-timey crooner music reverberates. Framed photos of old white guys in suits dot the walls. The waiters putter around happily in T-shirts reading “TIME TO EAT.” Amid the pleasant bustle, Deluzio orders a cup of coffee and a Pittsburgh hash. (Base components: kielbasa, sauerkraut, melted Swiss.) Then, with a hushed swagger, he tells me, “The overall results in Pennsylvania swung toward Republicans. For me that didn’t happen at all — I swung it the other way.”
Deluzio outran Harris by roughly two points in District 17. In Beaver County, where he lost, he still performed better against his Republican opponent than Harris did against Trump by over six percentage points. For Deluzio, the reason is simple: “I had a strong economic argument. The economic argument from the top of the ticket was… less direct.”
This is Deluzio’s core argument: Corporate consolidation has made Americans’ lives worse. Fighting corporate greed — and loudly trumpeting that you’re doing so — is a powerful strategy for Democrats across the country. The Democrats largely abandoned that message in the 2024 election. For Deluzio, it’s critical they bring it back.
“There isn’t always a win-win. Sometimes there is a bad guy or a villain, and you’ve got to take sides and fight,” Deluzio tells me. If you spend any time around Deluzio, you’ll likely hear him say some version of that phrase. It is as well-worn as it is resonant.
“People are mad at the system,” he continues. “They’ve seen social mobility get worse. They’ve seen growth stagnate. It’s not believable that there’s not a bad guy because there is a bad guy. Maybe that’s a style thing, but it’s also a substantive thing — you gotta be willing to say who you’re fighting for and who you’re fighting against.”
Brian Rosenwald, a political historian at the University of Pennsylvania, says, “You can’t overstate how bad the performance was” from Democrats in Pennsylvania on election night. Not only did Harris lose to Trump, but three statewide Democratic incumbents lost their seats to Republicans, including Sen. Bob Casey, who’d been in his position since 2006.
Rosenwald is hesitant to read too much into Deluzio’s decisive victory, pointing out that we may look back years from now and see that the 17th District is moving leftward. “But it’s also possible he’s got some sort of special sauce,” Rosenwald says. “And if there is some special sauce then, yeah — Democrats need to learn something from Chris Deluzio.”
How Deluzio Became An Enemy of Big Rail
Born and raised in the district he now represents, Deluzio, 40, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served with a civil affairs unit in Iraq before returning home to work as a cybersecurity policy expert at the University of Pittsburgh. Inspired by the lessons he learned during his time in uniform — namely, you “don’t leave people behind” — Deluzio ran successfully for Congress in the 2022 cycle. Since then, he’s called out consolidation and price gouging in sectors from groceries to baby formula, attacked junk fees from food delivery apps and online ticket platforms, and worked to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States with his “Make Stuff Here” campaign.
Two weeks after the 2024 presidential election that saw Trump solidify his support from working-class voters, Deluzio delivered a speech in Congress to bash home his big points.
“There’s no freedom when families are struggling to meet basic needs,” he said on the floor of the House of Representatives. “There’s no liberty if we’re ruled by oligarchs. No one will say profits don’t matter. They do. But something else has to matter, too. Our safety has to matter. Our jobs have to matter. Our communities have to matter. Our country has to matter.”
Above all, Deluzio’s fight has been with the railroad industry. In February 2023, a train run by the Norfolk Southern rail company carrying the cancer-causing material vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, just across the border from Deluzio’s district. As plumes of smoke followed, no one knew exactly what they were breathing in.
“Saw it on the news like everybody else,” Deluzio said, remembering his initial reaction. Then “we saw the toxic fireball” caused by the controlled burn of the hazardous materials. “People were just worried about their safety. Their families, their farms, their animals, their kids, you name it. They wanted to get resources on water testing, soil testing, air testing.”
Initially, Deluzio’s role was to provide federal resources for all that testing. It became clear quickly that there was a “bigger problem,” he says. “Once we learned this was preventable, we started digging in on rail safety legislation.”
Within months of the derailment, Deluzio introduced the Railway Safety Act, a bill that would mandate a series of safety procedures from minimum staffing on trains to increased fines for rail carriers’ negligence to stricter regulation on hazardous material transport. As The Lever has reported, Norfolk Southern’s lobbying efforts were critical to scuttling more stringent rail regulations in the years before the East Palestine derailment.
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Despite bipartisan support, the bill has not been advanced by Republican leadership. In the spring of 2023, the backers of the Senate’s version of the bill — including Vice President-Elect JD Vance — watered down the legislation. Three weeks later, Occidental Petroleum, a major hazardous chemicals manufacturer, donated $2 million to a Senate GOP super PAC.
Another major opponent of the legislation is the massive manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries, which ships billions of gallons of hazardous raw materials every year — and could see lower profits if such reforms ever passed. Koch Industries has spent millions lobbying on the issue and backing Republicans who have opposed the legislation.
Toward the end of 2024, Deluzio made a renewed push to advance a version of his legislation. In a statement announcing his move, he did not mince words: “Some powerful forces may want us to move on,” he said, but “I refuse to let us be treated like collateral damage in the way of corporate profits.”
Deluzio won’t be giving up once Republicans assume power. “If Donald Trump wants to be the guy who signs this, great — let’s pass the damn thing,” Deluzio says. “To my constituents, this is not a partisan fight. It’s a fight about corporate greed and our safety.”
Deluzio’s commitment to the issue matters to people like Curtis Lloyd, a Carnegie Mellon master’s student and the father of two grade-school children who lives in Beaver County, just a few miles from the East Palestine train derailment. On the day of the controlled burn, his kids’ school was canceled, so they stayed home — but, since their home was actually closer to the site than school, the family had no idea if that decision would keep the kids safer. “The lack of information was damning. We were just looking for information and really not finding it much anywhere except for [Deluzio] and his office.”
Lloyd eventually communicated with Deluzio and his office about the derailment so regularly that he grew close with the Congressman and his staff. (He was eventually featured in Deluzio campaign ads.) Lloyd knows Deluzio hasn’t been able to break through the industry-backed opposition to his rail safety bill, but he takes heart in Deluzio’s effort.
“An area like this — it’s not super populated, there’s not a whole lot of industry — it’s really easy to overlook,” Lloyd says. “He’s the only one that’s still pushing actual legislation. You can’t even stand in my front yard without hearing a train whistle on that same exact line every day and there’s no way of knowing what’s on any of those trains. You just have to hope and trust that regulation will come out.”
Meanwhile, Norfolk Southern has secured a settlement offering compensation ranging from $70,000 per household down to a few hundred dollars to people throughout the affected area. “The area was sort of forced to sign for what could be pennies on the dollar,” Lloyd says. “The average income out here is so low I don’t blame anyone for signing it. There’s no real way to fight against that level of greed.”
Deluzio’s work on rail safety is a bedrock of his popularity, says Austin Davis, the Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania. For people in this region, “Norfolk Southern became a symbol of corporate excess and greed,” Davis says. “Chris stood up to fight for those communities, and that’s why voters rewarded him.”
How The New Class Of Economic Populists Wins
Deluzio’s opponent in his 2024 election was Rob Mercuri, a former Republican member of the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives. “The first endorsement my opponent took was from the Koch network’s Americans For Prosperity,” Deluzio says, “which was lobbying against the [Rail Safety Bill].” During his campaign then, Deluzio was able to tell a story “not just about safety and corporate power but politics. Who funds these candidates? Who are they fighting for?” It all played out in plain sight, Deluzio says: on television.
“Our TV market during this election — every Steelers game, Pirates game, local news — every commercial was campaign commercials,” he says. “The reality of how much money flows through politics is serious, and people here see it because we have these contested elections and it overwhelms our TV markets.”
The unexpected strength of his victory in 2024 has appeared to motivate him to push his gospel of economic populism further.
“You’ve seen folks run and succeed on these issues across the ideological spectrum on the Democratic side,” he says. “From [Congressional Black Caucus] to New Dems to Blue Dogs. It’s a wide variety of folks and they all had populist impulses.” Deluzio quickly ticks off names of the politicians he considers his fellow travelers: New York Rep. Pat Ryan, Maine Rep. Jared Golden, Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, and Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig.
Rep. Ryan has fought corporate pollution and introduced legislation to fight “forever chemicals.” Rep. Gluesenkamp-Perez has pushed for “right to repair” regulation, which can save people money by mandating that corporations allow access to spare parts for their products. These are people, Deluzio argues, who have managed to win elections by taking issues specific to their districts and tying them to national issues wrought by corporate power.
Just in his own state, Deluzio has worked closely with Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D), who himself has successfully crafted an image as a populist protector of the working class. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov., Josh Shapiro, has also succeeded in part by pointing fingers at corporate greed.
For his constituents, Deluzio believes, there’s a natural understanding of how corporate decisions have destroyed livelihoods. Deluzio was born in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, just after “the bottoms of the steel industry collapsed.” In his district, he says, “No one needs a lecture from me about bad trade deals and how we were, frankly, stripped for parts by big business. Those were generational jobs in those mills.”
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Deluzio’s populist economics formula didn’t work for all Democratic candidates in 2024. Eugene DePasquale is a former Democratic Pennsylvania auditor general who lost his race in November to be the state’s attorney general. DePasquale says he also tried to focus on consumer protection issues like prescription drug pricing in his race, but relative to the national Democratic operation, he felt out on his own with that messaging. “Harris came out of the shoot talking about price gouging and going after corporations,” he says. “Then it sort of went away.”
DePasquale brings up the work of Lina Khan, the outgoing commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, and her aggressive fights against Big Tech and Big Pharma. He believes the Harris campaign should have taken “the great, technical work that’s being done there” and “found a way to tell that narrative. I don’t know if there were 10 voters that had any idea that was going on.”
One reason Harris did not publicly back the aggressive antitrust work of the Federal Trade Commission may be that the agency is investigating Uber, where Harris’s brother-in-law and close adviser Tony West is a senior vice president. During Harris’s campaign, various prominent Democratic Party supporters took aim at Khan directly; Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, called on Harris to fire Khan if elected.
DePasquale and Deluzio are pals. “I’m in the bag for him, so this is not nuanced,” he says, of his analysis of Deluzio’s success. “But first of all, Chris is a regular guy.” He watches college football. He drinks “bad beer.” That means Deluzio “talks like a regular human being.”
That manifests in the way he reaches out to voters: one Deluzio campaign shirt featured the phrase “No Corporate Jagoffs,” utilizing a beloved local colloquialism for “idiot.” And, DePasquale says, it shows in his politics. When the Norfolk Southern derailment rocked the region, DePasquale says, Deluzio “was all over that. He fought those corporate bastards. He took them on. He did it right away.”
Is The Democratic Party Learning Anything?
Deluzio knows the Democratic Party and its professional consultant class are now awash in postmortems on what went wrong in 2024. “And that’s not useful,” he says, “if it’s consultants giving us poll-tested messaging. Talk to people who worked on the ground, union organizers, volunteers — talk to voters. That’s the most useful thing the party can do if it’s trying to understand what happened
The Democratic National Party is now choosing a new chair between two front-runners, but the process has mostly been rife with infighting rather than any genuine soul-searching. Right now, Deluzio worries that Democrats still aren’t facing their failures, choosing instead to cast blame for their catastrophic loss in November on, for example, voters for not being receptive to their messaging.
“There’s a tendency by some to scold voters,” he says. “That is insane to me. People know their own interests. They know their values. Voters are smart.”
Jesse DiRenna is the business manager of the Local 66 branch of the International Union of Operating Engineers, which represents thousands of heavy machine operators throughout western Pennsylvania and Ohio. He explains that he supports Deluzio because Deluzio supports union jobs, at times above all else.
In early 2024, when the Biden administration was crafting American manufacturing-boosting tax incentives around the Inflation Reduction Act, Deluzio fought to include incentives that would support an energy source known as blue hydrogen, specifically through a regional hydrogen hub that would create union jobs in western Pennsylvania.
While the Biden administration boosted blue hydrogen, which is created from natural gas, as a clean energy, its critics argue it’s associated with an increase in greenhouse emissions. Effectively, Deluzio could be seen as supporting union jobs over climate concerns.
“I know that Democrats sometimes say things like ‘we need a just transition’” to green energy, DiRenna says. “These are very wholesome words. But that doesn’t pay the bills.”
For DiRenna, Deluzio’s push for blue hydrogen was an admirable example of his winning pragmatism. In November, for Democrats in Pennsylvania, DiRenna says, “It looked like a bloodbath.” For Deluzio to win against “such headwinds,” it showed that he’s a “realistic guy” who “doesn’t take on fringe issues. I wish that Democrats across the country would pull from his playbook.”
That playbook can be tricky to parse. A member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Deluzio is also a staunch backer of law enforcement and supports a bill that mandates the detention of undocumented people charged with minor theft.
With his qualified support of Trump’s potential tariffs, Deluzio, too, may find himself an outlier among his peers. Trump has promised a wide array of tariffs, meaning taxes on imports from other countries, as a way to support domestic companies and create American jobs, a policy that mainstream Democrats have historically opposed. “Listen: This country did not trade correctly for a long time,” Deluzio says. “There are tariffs that guys like me support.”
And Deluzio believes his views win elections. “Democrats would be wise to understand that in places like the Rust Belt, we had industries that should have been protected. And we have to win in places like the Rust Belt. That is the reality of 270 for the presidency. And if you ever want to control the Senate again, we’ve got to have two senators in Pennsylvania. You gotta pay attention to districts like mine.”
Before he can finish his Pittsburg hash, Deluzio is on the move. He’s flying back to Washington D.C. later today, but first, he’s scheduled a visit to the West View Water Authority, a municipal facility in need of nearly $200 million in upgrades.
As we get up to leave, Deluzio is collared for a handshake by Wayne, a tall sixtysomething with a strong mustache, who wants to thank him: Deluzio’s office recently helped Wayne get students from a foreign exchange program in to tour the capitol building in Harrisburg. Excitedly, Wayne says, “I’m happy to back Chris! Keep it going! You need me in Washington, I’ll come fight!”
Smiling, Deluzio says, “That was not a plant.”
Fighting For Farmers
Deluzio’s car is an endearingly lived-in Chevy Bolt. There are basketballs and bike helmets shoved in the hatchback; one car seat is installed in the back seat, and a part of another is sprawled loose below. I sit in the back, moving a confusing child’s toy — a long stick with a Mickey Mouse-esque hand attached — out of my way. Deluzio’s wife, Zoë Bunnell, recently gave birth to their fourth child. “The timing was… funny?” he says. “First week of October, right before the election. I was on the campaign trail all day, every day. But I was also home every night.”
As we drive, Deluzio narrates: “We were in the city of Pittsburgh for a bit. Now, we’re going out toward the west hills of Allegheny County. This is Ambridge here. Named after the American Bridge Company.” We pass churches, schools, bowling alleys. Staples of small, proud communities. He points to the Ohio River below us. “There is still a lot of activity. There’s still manufacturing. It’s not 1950. But we still make a lot of stuff around here — including steel.”
The conversation keeps clicking back to fights Deluzio has found himself in. He tells me about sitting down with the Beaver/Lawrence Farm Bureau and hearing about their issues getting pushed around by the meat processors. The Farm Bureau folks are a “conservative bunch,” Deluzio says. “They’re not going to agree with me on everything. But I was with them on that. You see that play out a lot, where the economics scrambles the politics.” In response, Deluzio pushed the Biden administration to enforce regulations in the federal Packers and Stockyards Act intended to prevent large meat processors from bullying small farmers. “If the processors are jamming up the farmers, and we’re buying the meat, we’re all paying for it,” he says.
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From the micro, we drift back to the macro. Deluzio has an easy facility with this stuff. He can click into the big themes of his argument, even in a cramped compact electric vehicle. “After World War II — for decades upon decades — if you told someone you’d be better off than your parents, they’d probably believe you,” he says. “That happened in America for a long time.” Now, he says, “The idea that you can work hard and play by the rules and retire with dignity isn’t the reality for a lot of people.”
We pass strip malls full of KFCs and Eat N’ Parks, faded signs for tire shops, and lawn signs advertising buy-one-get-one-free deals on fireworks. We drive through misty, expansive woodlands and past an abandoned cement block on which someone has spraypainted “MAGA.” Then we pull up to the West View Water Authority, a cluster of industrial buildings carefully guarded behind tall fencing and fronted by a massive American flag.
“You didn’t get the most glamorous tour,” Deluzio says. “But this is it, man: the nuts and bolts.”
Can The Democratic Party Actually Change?
At the Water Authority, Deluzio is greeted by a gaggle of good-natured middle-aged men wearing dress shirts embroidered with their work logo. “Ready for the big game?” one of the men asks cheerily, meaning the upcoming college football game between the United States Military Academy and Deluzio’s alma mater, the Naval Academy. Another apologizes if he moves slowly, explaining he “screwed up his back” cleaning his patio that weekend. The workers walk us through the control panel and the sludge dumpster room, proudly explaining obscure but critical infrastructure.
Throughout, Deluzio is the perfect eager student, always asking the right question over the nearly-deafening industrial hum of the plant at work. “What is your actual requirement now? You can double your capacity?” He elicits laughs, warns about cyberattacks, and points to specific federal grants applicable to the security of the plant, all with equal ease.
As we get back in the car, Deluzio explains he spent much of his first term handling exactly these kinds of issues: supporting community institutions and local municipalities. Finding ways to funnel federal money through state entities down to institutions like wastewater plants and backing massive projects like the Montgomery Lock and Dam that promises the creation of 28,000 union construction jobs. While these projects fit in neatly with his greater vision of economic populism, it’s just his bread-and-butter work, the kind familiar to any congressperson doing their job right.
Deluzio’s heading to the airport now, to get back to D.C. What is meant to be a fairly straightforward congressional session focused on pushing through the spending bill to keep the federal government running will, a week or so after we talk, dissolve into bitter, dysfunctional infighting and the threat of a government shutdown, pushed in large part to satisfy the financial interests of billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk. Within that morass, Deluzio is still figuring out how to provide for his constituents — and how to push his particular brand of populism.
If Deluzio has plans to run for higher office, he isn’t sharing them yet. For now, he’s broadcasting his message in hopes of seeing it spread throughout the Democratic Party.
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“If Democrats don’t have a real answer for ‘This economy doesn’t work well for a lot of people,’ and the alternative is Trump saying, ‘I’m going to change everything’” — he sighs, exasperated — “You’re going to be in a tough spot politically! You’ve got to have an argument. And you gotta say, ‘And oh, by the way, the people bankrolling the other side are often to blame for why things aren’t good.’”
The rail lines running along the Ohio River have been following us all day. On the riverbanks, the industrial infrastructure and its billowing smoke under the still-overcast sky suggest jobs and danger, too. Then, a Norfolk Southern train rattles by us. “On cue!” Deluzio shouts.
“Nearly half of my constituents live within a mile of tracks,” he continues. “Ninety-five percent live within five miles. The density in this district, like a lot of places in the country, is around the tracks. Should there be something like East Palestine again — it’s not that far from where we are now — the potential to hurt a lot of people is there.” Before the derailment, “It was something people knew in their guts that was something to be worried about.” Now, “people are scared.”
For Deluzio, it all ties back to his core argument, the one he urges the Democratic Party to listen to. If corporate interests are pushing their agenda, you push back. If Big Rail tries to kill your bill, you just keep going.
Since the Norfolk Southern derailment, he says quietly, “The laws haven’t changed. People think that’s unacceptable. I do, too.”
