What to know about one of the country’s most competitive Congressional races that happens to be in Pa.

On a Friday afternoon in early April, supporters of Republican congressional candidate Maria Montero milled around a small suite at the Penn Harris Hotel in Camp Hill, Pa.

The hotel — 90 miles away from the district where Montero is running — hosted some of the country’s biggest conservative names as part of the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference. And Montero had taken the opportunity to raise money in support of her campaign for the GOP nomination to take on incumbent Democrat U.S. Rep. Susan Wild in the Lehigh Valley in the fall.

In attendance were U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, who called Montero the perfect candidate to beat “San Fran Susan Wild,” and Daniel Garza, the Texas-based president of the conservative LIBRE Initiative, which seeks to engage Latino voters.

The main event was former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who referred to Montero as “Congresswoman.” Ramaswamy, whose parents immigrated from India, praised Montero, whose father immigrated from Peru, for taking a hard-line stance on border policy.

“Does this look like two white supremacists up here?” he asked, gesturing at himself and Montero.

Montero is running against businessman and military veteran Kevin Dellicker and State Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in the high-profile Republican primary race for the Seventh Congressional District.

Wild won reelection by just 2 percentage points in 2022.

The swing district is one of the key battlegrounds in the presidential race as shown by former President Donald Trump’s Saturday rally in Lehigh County. All three candidates said they planned to attend the rally in Schnecksville.

The candidates have adopted Trump-aligned positions. Each of them called for making it harder to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

They also all engaged in varying degrees with Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election: Dellicker said he believed there was “plenty of fraud” in that election and Mackenzie said Trump was within his rights to challenge the results. But both said they did not believe the election was stolen. Montero avoided the question, saying only, “I believe that Joe Biden is our president.”

The three GOP candidates all called for reducing federal spending as a way to curb inflation.

Wild, 66, the former city solicitor of Allentown, is a moderate Democrat who supports abortion access and LGBTQ rights. She touts her support for industry and her ability to work with Republicans.

“The reality is, as one of the most bipartisan members in Congress, she has delivered time and time again on the issues that matter most to her community — including lowering the cost of health care, investing in local infrastructure, and protecting the rights of working families and seniors,” Natalie Gould, spokesperson for Wild’s campaign, said in a statement.

By the end of last year, Dellicker had raised the most of the three, with $205,000 cash on hand, but it’s a fraction of the $1.5 million Wild had at the end of December. The candidates are to file new campaign finance reports Monday detailing their fundraising through March.

Dellicker, 53, believes his 28 years of military experience are what make him the man for the job.

“It’s not something I read about in the history books or studied in college,” he said, of national security and foreign affairs. “I live it just about every day.”

A father of three, Dellicker runs the cybersecurity and broadband infrastructure business he founded 25 years ago. He’s also a part-time Air Force squadron commander with a master’s in military operations. He worked as an economic policy adviser for then-Republican Gov. Tom Ridge in the late 1990s and, after 9/11, he was deployed to Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom.

This is his second time running for Congress — he lost to Lisa Scheller in the 2022 primary by 1,800 votes. This time around, he’s gotten endorsements from several police unions in the Lehigh Valley and former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta.

To him, safety and security are the most pressing issues, whether from “foreign adversaries, like the Chinese Communist Party, the Russians, and the Iranians” or crime in such cities as Allentown. Strengthening the military is among his top priorities.

Dellicker notes he is not a career politician. If elected, he said, he would see it as a deployment. He would not say how many terms he would serve.

“I’m not doing this for my livelihood,” he said. “I already have a job. I’m doing it to serve my country, same as I’ve served my country overseas four times in the combat zone.”

Mackenzie, 41, said he is the only candidate who has been able to get bills passed and improve people’s lives.

The state representative for the 187th District since 2012, Mackenzie noted that he has gotten 11 bills passed since he’s been in office. Those bills focused on such issues as eliminating the inheritance tax for small businesses and “actually doing something about illegal immigration” with his E-Verify law, which requires construction companies to run immigration checks on workers.

“Lots of people can identify a problem,” he said. “Then the challenge is can you come up with a solution that can get bipartisan support, be enacted, actually have the impact that you’re looking for?”

After getting his MBA, Mackenzie, a ninth-generation Lehigh Valley resident, worked as policy director for the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, where he authored a change to the state’s unemployment compensation system that he said ultimately ended up saving the system.

Mackenzie has called himself the first candidate to publicly endorse Trump and speaks highly of the former president and how he brought attention to “the rising threat from China” and how the country destroyed the U.S. manufacturing industry. Mackenzie has also been supported by Americans for Prosperity, which sought to stop Trump from clinching the Republican nomination.

Though Mackenzie said he believes in term limits, he said it would not be wise to set a timeline to leave office: “What you’re going to do is make yourself a lame duck.”

Mackenzie, a new dad, said he’s running because he wants to leave a better world for the next generation.

“I’m very concerned that’s not going to happen for the first time,” he said.

Montero, 47, the daughter of a Peruvian immigrant and a scientist from a Carbon County coal mining family, said she’s running to restore the American dream — something she knows well from her own family’s experience.

Her father won a visa lottery than allowed him to come to the U.S. in search of a better life. “He knew the only country in the world that could provide that was the U.S.,” she said. He worked in the hospitality industry before starting his own businesses.

And Montero, too, said she faced her own struggles when she became pregnant and had a son while she was an 18-year-old undergraduate attending St. Joseph’s University.

A graduate of Widener Law School, Montero works at a personal injury firm. She previously held roles in former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration, as the executive director of both the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs and the Pennsylvania Commission for Women.

The 151,000 Latinos who live in the 7th District make up 20% of the population, according to U.S. Census data.

One of her top priorities is developing Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry so that the U.S. is not dependent on other countries. “That is our national defense,” she said. Asked about climate impact, she said natural gas has the lowest impact on the climate compared with other fossil fuels.

Montero received endorsements from election deniers, such as former U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette and Tom Carroll, chair of the Lehigh Valley Tea Party, who asked Ramaswamy at Montero’s fundraiser what could be done about the “stolen election.”

Montero pledged to serve three terms if elected. She also said she would not work for a lobbying firm after leaving Washington.