PHILADELPHIA — U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna D-Calif., represents Silicon Valley, but this weekend, he’ll rail against President Donald Trump and GOP-proposed cuts to health care from podiums in Allentown and Levittown, two battleground communities in a state critical to the 2026 midterms.

For Khanna, a progressive lawmaker and an ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who views himself as one of the Democratic Party’s next generation of leaders, it’s a bit of a homecoming event. Khanna was raised in Bucks County, and his visit is expected to draw an audience that will include his former teachers and his parents, who still live there, as he aims to connect his Pennsylvania upbringing to threats he thinks Trump’s agenda poses to working-class families.

“Bucks County gave me my chance in life,” said Khanna, who is catching the Phillies’ Sunday matinee against the Pittsburgh Pirates before the political event in Bucks County later in the day.

“I had a good public education. I got student loans to go to school and get a college education. I had teachers and people who believed in me, and I feel like this Republican budget, by taking away funding for education, taking away student loans, taking away funding for Medicaid, is really depriving the next generation of the chances I had, and I wanted to go to my hometown, Bucks County, and say that.”

Khanna’s visit comes a week after U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., spoke in Bucks County, highlighting the importance of the region as Democrats lay the groundwork for the 2026 midterms.

And earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, 40, a Democrat who represents Western Pennsylvania, held town halls with Sanders in Harrisburg and Bethlehem. As he continues to travel around the state, Deluzio has increasingly garnered speculation that he may be eyeing a Senate run in the next three or six years.

The focus on the commonwealth illustrates the pivotal role Pennsylvania continues to play as Democrats look to reclaim the U.S. House in 2026 — and the White House two years after that. The state’s battleground districts remain fertile ground for media attention and message-testing for the young Democrats rumored to be considering more ambitious races of their own.

Gallego, 45, who was just elected to the Senate in November from a state Trump won, would not confirm or deny that he will run for president in 2028.

“Of course, I’ve thought about it,” he told reporters, adding that he has a third child on the way and a new Senate job to learn.

Ahead of his stop in Bucks, Khanna, 48, said his focus right now is doing work to win back the House for Democrats and pressure vulnerable Republicans to vote against the GOP budget bill working its way through Congress.

“If you look at my travel, it’s literally to red districts where we can either flip someone’s vote or flip that district,” Khanna said.

He added that he thinks voters want to see “a new generation” of people leading the party, naming Gallego, Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as some of the Democrats shaping “the national conversation.”

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” Khanna added. “But I want my vision of economic patriotism — which is to say we have a vision of what the future economy is gonna look like — I want that to be central to the conversation and then we’ll see what makes sense.”

Bucks County has long been a coveted bellwether for the key swing state — voting for former President Joe Biden in 2020 and then flipping to Trump, narrowly, last year.

Maureen O’Toole, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, called Khanna and Gallego “extremists who champion far-left policies.”

She said their support for Republican U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s challenger, Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, to represent Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District would harm Harvie’s chances.

“In other words, we can’t wait to see which far-left extremist Bob Harvie wraps his arms around next,” O’Toole said.

Putting Republicans in the hot seat

A slew of Democratic town halls nationwide have been aimed at calling out vulnerable Republicans for a lack of public events and support for unpopular policies, like Medicaid cuts in the GOP budget bill, which are proposed to help pay for Trump’s tax cuts.

A news release for Khanna’s appearance says it comes “as Republicans refuse to hold town halls” but does not explicitly name Fitzpatrick, a five-term Republican whose seat has been an elusive target for Democrats over the last decade.

Khanna said he has worked well with Fitzpatrick on a term-limits bill in Congress and the two have discussed a trip to China amid the ongoing trade war.

“He’s often the Republican that Democrats will say, ‘OK, we need a Republican. Let’s go to Brian.’ He’s cosponsored a number of bills,” Khanna said. “I told him I was coming, and I told him I respect my relationship with him, and I’m really there to talk about why I believe this budget is bad and wrong for Bucks.”

Deluzio, in an interview after his town halls with Sanders, said that as public frustration with some of Trump’s policies rises, it’s critical Democrats go on the offensive.

“People are mad at [Republicans], so I think it’s an important moment that the public has something to say here, and that leaders are meeting them where they are,” he said. “It’s never a bad time to make the case, and these Republican elected officials should be feeling some pressure from their constituents.”

‘Economic patriotism’

The economy largely won Trump the 2024 election, and as it has sagged and sputtered in the first three months of his term, Democrats see it as the best issue to reclaim voters who drifted to Trump.

Khanna’s pitch is “economic patriotism,” a concept he will also emphasize during a rally Saturday in the Lehigh Valley alongside people affected by the Mack Truck plant layoffs there.

“We need to have the technology, the robotics, the AI from my district, combined with the industrial know-how of people in Pennsylvania to finance modern steel, to finance biotechnology, to finance new industry,” he said.

Democrats, Khanna said, need to show they have a vision for the economic future and contrast it with Trump’s. “We want advanced manufacturing. We want new technology jobs,” he said. “And we have a 21st-century view of how to build America, not a 19th-century view.”

Deluzio also pitched what he termed “economic patriotism or economic populism” as he stumped with Sanders, a progressive political force whom swing-district Democrats might have avoided not too long ago.

“I think there is becoming more of a group of Democrats cutting across the old ideological split of progressive, moderate, whatever those labels may have been,” Deluzio said. “Who are taking this strong economic fight to the people.”

Gallego also focused on the economy in his remarks in Pennsylvania.

“This president has put us in a position, again — the richest country in the world, most modern economy in the world — with the most sophisticated trade in the world where now we have to go hunting to garage sales to find products because this president decided to arbitrarily start a trade war without any concept how to get F out of this,” he said.

From Council Rock to Congress

Khanna will speak to a crowd in Bucks that includes his former English and social studies teachers, family, and friends.

The Council Rock High School and Holland Junior High graduate got his political start in 1991 via a ninth-grade assignment to write a newspaper op-ed about the U.S. war with Iraq over Kuwait. His take wove in reflections on his parents’ emigration from India and his maternal grandfather, who was a leader in India’s independence movement. Parts of it were published in The Inquirer.

Khanna is one of six Indian American representatives in the House.

He called Bucks — where he spent his adolescence playing street hockey and Little League, and perusing the Feasterville Shopping Center and area flea markets for baseball cards — the place that grounds his sense of country, even as he represents one of the nation’s wealthiest districts.

“I’ve seen so much of the innovation and ingenuity, and represent a district with $14 trillion of wealth with Apple and Google, Intel, Yahoo, and Tesla,” he said. “How can we make sure that we have modern economic prosperity across this country? I understand sort of people who were overlooked or dismissed or people who didn’t have a chance. And how do we combine the chances that the country gave me with sort of the modern economic engine of prosperity?”

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—Staff writer Katie Bernard contributed to this article.

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