Meet Bob Harvie, Democrats’ best chance at defeating Brian Fitzpatrick and helping win back the House

For the past decade, Democrats in Bucks County have tried — and consistently failed — to do one thing: beat U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.

The moderate Republican’s hold on the purple district has been impenetrable thanks to his name recognition and massive fundraising war chest. He’s also carefully curated an image that straddles the line between independent thought leader and a reliable vote for the GOP.

But Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, 54, who has received local Democratic committees’ backing in the May primary against Lucia Simonelli, a grassroots candidate, to face Fitzpatrick in the fall, thinks he can crack the code to winning the 1st Congressional District — one of four Pa. swing seats that both parties are heavily targeting in this year’s midterms.

“The pain is more real for people now,” Harvie said in an interview with The Inquirer last month. “I mean, people should ask themselves, ‘Brian Fitzpatrick’s been in office for 10 years, are their lives better now than they were 10 years ago?’”

At the core of Harvie’s campaign are bread-and-butter affordability issues and the confidence that comes with being the first battle-tested opponent of Fitzpatrick, 52, in the politically diverse district, which encompasses all of Bucks County and a sliver of Montgomery County. Harvie won countywide races for Bucks County commissioner in 2019 and 2023.

Democrats are also banking that growing backlash to President Donald Trump — along with popular Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s presence on November’s ballot — will have enough residents voting straight blue.

If Harvie is successful in November, he would be the first Democrat since 2011 to represent the area on Capitol Hill and could help determine which party controls the U.S. House.

But it’s by no means a clear path to success.

In a race against an experienced GOP incumbent who consistently outperforms his party and survives blue wave after blue wave, Harvie will have to contend with more scrutiny and more money being spent against him than he ever has before. Fitzpatrick ended last year with more cash on hand than any other swing district Republican incumbent in the country and local and national GOP groups are already sharpening their attacks on Harvie.

The nonpartisan Cook County Political Report has rated the 1st Congressional District race as “likely” Republican.

“Bucks County, in particular, it’ll break your heart if you let it,” said Ashley Ehasz, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran against Fitzpatrick in 2022 and 2024. She noted how momentum for her party ebbs and flows in the county, such as when Democrats swept the row offices in 2025.

“And then you get to the congressional seat and it’s like, all the brakes get put on,” Ehasz said.

Harvie is a lifelong Bucks County resident and his roots are embedded in the Lower Bucks community, which his allies say helps inform his campaign platform.

His family emigrated from Scotland, Italy, and Ireland and settled in the predominantly working-class community between the late 1800s and early 1900s, working in the wool mills and a World War I-era shipyard. Harvie’s great-grandfather sold his vegetable and dairy farm in the 1950s to “father of the modern American suburb” William Levitt — a real estate developer and the namesake for Levittown.

Despite never finishing high school, Harvie’s grandparents were able to land good jobs, take vacations, buy new cars, and raise their families — an “American dream” experience he wants to make attainable again.

He spent almost 16 years as a Falls Township supervisor and two decades as social studies teacher and department chair at Bucks County Technical High School. He still tries to attend a weekly Friday breakfast meetup with his former teacher crew to talk about sports or their families.

“Bob doesn’t forget who he is,” said Connie Rinker, 76, the former principal at Bucks County Technical. “Bob doesn’t forget where he came from.”

During his tenure he was seen, according to former student Joe Wenzel, as a “firm but fair” teacher who didn’t “coddle” anyone in class.

“Bob was always a teacher that everybody took seriously,” said Wenzel, 39, a former student of Harvie’s who is now a construction superintendent and serves on Bensalem’s town council.

At the high school, Harvie saw families struggling to put food on the table, kids wearing the same clothes day after day, and his students believing there were limited “pathways to success.” As supervisor, he saw senior citizens in Falls Township struggling to afford both their homes and medical costs.

“They’re just angry about what’s happened in this country, how hard it is,” Harvie said of local residents. “They’re working harder than they have before, and now they can’t get ahead.”

Affordability issues are taking center stage of Harvie’s campaign for the 1st Congressional District, after the topic was a marquee issue for the party nationwide and aided in the blue wave across the country last fall. This year, local Democrats say Harvie is a credible messenger for this issue.

“Bob is highlighting that in a much more forceful way,” said State Sen. Steve Santarsiero (D., Bucks) and chair of the Bucks County Democratic Party, who was Fitzpatrick’s first general election opponent in 2016.

“He grew up in a working-class family and he saw from a personal perspective, just how hard it was for his parents to make ends meet,” he said.

Harvie’s priorities include a $15 minimum wage, affordable housing, and lowering healthcare costs.

He’d also support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 decision that enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.

The Democrat won’t commit to supporting articles of impeachment against Trump, saying that he’d have to evaluate the evidence presented and that it shouldn’t pull the party’s focus from cost-of-living issues.

“I think people are tired of the back and forth,” Harvie added. “They’re tired of the hyper-partisan politics, because none of it makes milk cheaper. None of it helps people buy a new house.”

Bucks is one of the most purple counties in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania.

In 2024, Trump was the first Republican to win the county in a presidential race since the 1980s, but the 1st Congressional District overall went to former Vice President Kamala Harris by 0.3 percentage points (while Fitzpatrick won it by nearly 13). The following year, Democrats won countywide offices by around 10 percentage points — the largest win margin in a decade.

Democrats have routinely attempted to tie Fitzpatrick to Trump. Ehasz, the Democrat who tried to oust Fitzpatrick in 2022 and 2024, focused on Fitzpatrick’s record on abortion after Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices struck down the right to abortion in 2022.

But Fitzpatrick’s popularity withstood the attacks and he remained the last Republican U.S. lawmaker in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Likely part of why the former FBI agent has maintained that status is that Fitzpatrick, at times, criticizes his own party and has strayed on various issues, like Ukraine, or when he voted against the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act on final passage (though he cast a key vote to move an earlier version forward). He also co-chairs the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and is the only House Republican in Pennsylvania who has not yet been endorsed by Trump.

“People know him, and that’s why he survives,” Pat Poprik, chair of the Bucks County GOP said. “Both parties vote for him because he’s there and they don’t think of him as political, they think of him as governmental.”

This year, the county GOP says it will use Harvie’s background in elected office to their advantage, such as invoking when the Democratic commissioners voted in 2024 to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballots during a heated U.S. Senate recount, which violated a state Supreme Court ruling.

“Bob Harvie has a track record that we’re thrilled that we can use,” Poprik said.

Harvie, in an interview, defended the commissioners’ work on the elections board, which he chairs, and said that Trump and the local Republican Party “doesn’t want people to actually have a chance to vote.”

The commissioner is also trying to shatter the moderate brand that Fitzpatrick has crafted, arguing that the Republican votes with his party when it counts, including last month when the House passed the SAVE Act, a controversial national voter ID bill.

“Those are things that Trump has pushed, but they’re things Brian Fitzpatrick is responsible for regardless of if they’re Trump policies or not,” Harvie said. “So I’m looking at the record Fitzpatrick put together, which is not one that’s helpful to people in this district.”

Fitzpatrick’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Harvie’s greatest task will be to sell that message to the elusive Bucks County voters, many of whom have been loyal to Fitzpatrick for the past decade.

“Bucks County is an interesting place,” said Brittany Crampsie, a Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania. “It’s been the center of the political universe. I remember people talking about it in the 2000 presidential election. They’re not reliable for any one party.”

Harvie has held five town halls since April and believes his support of law enforcement and efforts as county commissioner to help small businesses during the pandemic are examples that could help draw voters across the political spectrum.

Bucks County Commissioner Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia said when she and Harvie were campaigning in the commissioners race, she saw Harvie appealing to voters of all walks of life — sharing his family’s agricultural background to rural voters in Upper Bucks, his teaching background in Central Bucks, and his roots in Lower Bucks.

She also took particular note of former students and their parents recognizing Harvie on the campaign trail as Democrats gained control of the board for the first time in 40 years.

“That’s kind of an amazing thing to watch somebody have an effect on people’s lives as a teacher and people remember them, that’s kind of important,” she said.

It’s that deep connection to his hometown that those closest to Harvie believe will help him succeed in November.

“Bob’s homegrown,” said Rinker, the former principal.