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Since the day she began her campaign for Congress, Paige Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton, has centered her pitch to voters on the prodigious stock trading of the House Republican she is seeking to unseat, Representative Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania.

“This year he’s already made 600 trades,” Ms. Cognetti said in the announcement video for her campaign in September. “Sold Chinese stocks the week of a tariff. Buys missile stocks before a war. Buys jet stocks before a big contract. Oversees crypto? Buys crypto stocks before a vote.”

It may be the district where the issue rings the loudest. Democrats are running ads highlighting how Mr. Bresnahan profited from a data center development by trading stocks related to the industry, and recent polls show Ms. Cognetti with a narrow lead. But she is not alone in zeroing in on stock trading by members of Congress as a potent line of attack in this year’s midterm elections.

Like many members of Congress who trade substantial amounts of stock, Mr. Bresnahan, the wealthy former chief executive of an electrical contracting company, has said he relies on a financial adviser to make his trades and never knows about the transactions before they happen or when they occur.

Mr. Bresnahan’s campaign said that Ms. Cognetti’s descriptions of his trades were “lies” and that he has “taken legitimate steps to ban congressional stock trading.”

Still, at a time when many voters are experiencing economic hardship and have grown increasingly suspicious that the political system is rigged, the mere possibility that a member of Congress could be profiting from the job has become politically toxic.

Roughly a quarter of legislators on Capitol Hill have traded individual stocks this term, with some buying and selling millions of dollars in shares. Since the start of this term in January 2025, members and their families have collectively traded $160 million to $664 million in individual stocks, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected from members’ required financial filings by 2iQ Research, an analytics firm.

An overwhelming majority of voters in both parties view stock trading by lawmakers with great suspicion and say they support barring them from doing so. The public backlash has fueled efforts by members of both parties, so far unsuccessful, to enact new legislation banning the practice.

In the meantime, both sides are leveraging the issue in the fight for control of Congress.

Democrats and Republicans alike are seeking to weaponize incumbents’ trades, particularly those where they can show the appearance of a conflict of interest, and putting them at the forefront of ads and campaign attacks in the country’s most competitive districts. It is a way to portray their opponents as corrupt and out of touch with the financial realities of working-class Americans.

In Northern New Jersey’s competitive Seventh Congressional District, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been targeting Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. for continuing to trade stocks while missing more than 100 votes during an extended absence for what he later said was treatment for depression. Mr. Kean’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In Virginia, Democrats are attacking Representative Rob Wittman for trading more than $2.5 million in stocks between 2015 and 2023 while serving in Congress — including buying defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Honeywell while serving on the Armed Services Committee.

“There’s a vicious cycle in Washington: Politicians trade stocks in the industries they’re supposed to regulate, then protect those industries instead of you,” said the caption with a campaign video that his opponent, Shannon Taylor, a prosecutor, posted online. “Let’s ban congressional stock trading — for good.”

(An outside group supporting Mr. Wittman apparently views this line of attack as effective: This week, it began running an ad highlighting his vote for a watered-down stock trading bill that passed the House passed in July, noting that he voted to put an end to the “greed and corruption” of “fat cat lawmakers.”) Mr. Wittman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans have also identified the issue as resonant with their voters.

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Almost 60 percent of lawmakers in Congress own stock, according to an analysis by Common Cause, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on making government more accountable. Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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