Susan Wild

Susan Wild (née Ellis; born June 7, 1957) is an American attorney and politician from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

A Democrat, she is a member of the United States House of Representatives from PA's 7th congressional district.

The district is in the heart of the Lehigh Valley, and includes Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, and Bangor.

Wild volunteered on Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign.

She graduated from American University in 1978.

She earned her Juris Doctor at George Washington University Law School in 1982.

She studied under John Banzhaf.

Wild became a partner at the law firm Gross McGinley in 1999.

In the 117th Congress, Wild voted with Speaker Nancy Pelosi 100% of the time.

Wild ran for Lehigh County Commissioner in 2013, but lost.

She was appointed the first female solicitor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in January 2015.

She served as Solicitor of Allentown starting on January 7, 2015, when she was confirmed by the Allentown City Council.

Dent's district had previously been the 15th, represented by seven-term Republican Charlie Dent.

She won a six-candidate Democratic Party primary election with 33% of the vote, narrowly defeating Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, and faced Republican Lehigh County Commissioner Marty Nothstein in the November 6 general election.

She defeated Nothstein in the general election with 53.5% of the vote to Nothstein's 43.5%.

On the same day, Wild also ran in a separate special election for the balance of Dent's term; he had resigned in May after announcing the previous fall that he would not run for reelection.

The former 15th had stretched from the Lehigh Valley into heavily Republican territory between Lebanon and Harrisburg, by way of a tendril in Berks County.

The new 7th district is a more compact district centered in the Lehigh Valley, and includes a sliver of the Poconos.

Wild ran for reelection to a second term.

She was unopposed in the Democratic primary and faced former Lehigh County Commissioner Lisa Scheller in the general election.

Wild defeated Scheller with 51.9% of the vote, less than was expected.

On December 31, 2017, Wild resigned from office to pursue her candidacy for the United States House of Representatives to succeed retiring representative Charlie Dent (R) in 2018.

Wild spent the last two months of 2018 as the member for PA's 15th congressional district after Charlie Dent resigned in 2018.

From September 2022 to January 2023, she was chair of the House Ethics Committee.

She continues to sit on the committee as ranking member.

She also co-chairs the New Democrat Coalition Climate Change Task Force and is vice chair of both the Congressional Labor and Working Families Caucus and the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations.

Wild is the first woman to represent the Lehigh Valley in Congress.

Wild is the daughter of Norman Leith and Susan Stimus Ellis.

Her mother was a journalist.

Her father served in the United States Air Force during World War II and the Korean War.

Wild was born at Wiesbaden Air Force Base, West Germany, while her father was stationed there.

She also lived in France, California, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C.

On November 15, 2018, it was announced that Wild had won the 15th congressional district's special election, receiving 130,353 votes to Nothstein's 129,593 votes.

There was a closer margin in the special election because that election was under the former 15th district, which had been thrown out by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in February 2018.

Following the 2020 census, Wild was redistricted into a more competitive congressional seat.

She was criticized by some district residents when she said of her new district, "Carbon County has many attributes, but it is a county that—although it was once an Obama county—it since has become a Trump county. I'm not quite sure what was in their heads because the people of Carbon County are exactly the kind of people who should not be voting for a Donald Trump, but I guess I might have to school them on that a little bit. But most of all, it is a very rural county."

In a rematch of the 2020 election, Wild defeated Scheller.

In 2021, Wild cosponsored a resolution to expel Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress, saying that Greene "advocated violence against our peers, the Speaker and our government".

As of November 2022, Wild had voted in line with President Joe Biden's stated position 100% of the time.

In 2020, Wild co-sponsored a bill to reauthorize the Older Americans Act for five years with a 35% increase in funding.