Everything John Fetterman and his team predicted about the 2022 elections came true.
They said he could claw back votes from rural counties and working-class towns that had abandoned the Democratic Party. He did.
They said Pennsylvanians would never warm to the slick television doctor from Cliffside Park, New Jersey, no matter how clever his words or well-crafted his politics. They didn't.
They said voters would look past the impairments caused by his May stroke, and maybe even reward him for his vulnerability. They did.
The first two I was always pretty sure about, but the third I doubted. Fetterman was visibly and audibly diminished once he returned to the campaign trail, and given the unpredictability of stroke recovery, it's unclear if he'll ever return to fluency.
The United States Senate isn't a debate club, but effective verbal communication is essential to the coat-room give-and-take that's really how a bill becomes a law, Schoolhouse Rock notwithstanding. I didn't think 50% of Pennsylvania voters would be able to imagine him in Washington.
I should have re-read my own April column about the primary race between the flawless Conor Lamb and the informal and unwieldy Fetterman: "The man in blue may be perfect, but perfect may not be what people want. Perfect may communicate a satisfaction with the status quo that few people are privileged enough to feel. The man in black says, not just with his words but with his campaign and his chaotic persona, that something is not right — something very deep, deeper than policy or data can conceive or correct."
Appearing on the debate stage visibly uncomfortable — which he would have been even before his stroke — and audibly herky-jerky alongside his (too) cool and (too) polished opponent played right to the Democratic candidate's strengths. He communicates not with his words but with his very person, oddly shaped and oddly dressed and now oddly spoken, that we live in odd times and that the usual rules no longer apply.
The hoodies could be dismissed as artifice, as working-class playacting. That's what Mehmet Oz and the Republicans tried to do by pointing to Fetterman's longtime reliance on his privileged parents' largesse. It might have worked, at least a little bit, and Fetterman's unfavorable numbers did tick up during the campaign.
But there was nothing artificial about the voice, the hesitation, the difficult-to-watch straining to find and to speak the right words, the words that were right there and just needed to escape from his brain, through his lips, to the world. That was more authentic than any attire ever could be.
Fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, co-workers — so many Pennsylvanians are one or two degrees of separation from someone who has suffered a stroke. It's not some exotic affliction for them. It's a challenge, but that's life. It's part of what it means to be a real person, and not a television character.
This feeling — this humaneness in our increasingly inhumane politics — more than any policy proposals is what John Fetterman rode to the Senate. And it cut across all the usual political and geographic lines.
The day after the election, I looked at the results for my favorite local bellwethers: formerly country-club Republican, now country-club Democratic Upper St. Clair, and formerly hardscrabble Democratic, now hardscrabble Republican Burgettstown. The first time both municipalities flipped colors in the same race was when Conor Lamb defeated Rick Saccone in their 2018 special election showdown. In 2020, Burgettstown even voted for Republican row office candidates, proving that it had completed its transformation from Democratic-with-Trump-characteristics to fully Republican.
Or so I'd thought. John Fetterman beat Mehmet Oz in both Upper St. Clair and Burgettstown. It was the first time both had gone blue in the relevant past. If the Democrats can do that consistently, the only way they'll ever lose the state again is if they hemorrhage support among Black and Latino voters.
This wasn't only a Fetterman phenomenon: Josh Shapiro also won both places, and by more than his Senate counterpart. But for all intents and purposes he was running unopposed, so it's hard to draw too many conclusions from his results.
For Fetterman, winning places like Burgettstown wasn't a side effect of a rout, but an explicit strategy he and his team pursued. According to a Post-Gazette analysis, he earned about 60,000 more votes in small, rural, deep-red counties than Joe Biden did in 2020. That only accounts for about 30% of his margin over Oz — that's because he pulled it off while still romping in the suburbs — but it will serve as a proof of concept moving forward for the Democrats.
The challenge for Fetterman, and for his party generally, will be to govern in a way that keeps both Upper St. Clair and Burgettstown on side. If he runs again in six years, he'll have a voting record to defend, and probably won't be opposed by an out-of-state daytime TV star who serves as a perfect foil for him. The feeling he generated this year will be tempered by political reality.
If his health — and his duties as a father to three children — allows it, Fetterman's best bet will be to continue to visit Fulton and Carbon and Warren counties regularly, to listen, and to defend his principles even in hostile terrain. That's the good kind of populism, one which respects the people enough to go straight to them and to reason with them in order to be able to represent their interests most effectively, all while seeding one's own principles in communities around the state.
It takes a once-in-a-generation politician to be able not just to read and to ride the waves of popular opinion, but to calm them and to change their course. Maybe the man in black is one of them, or maybe Washington will finally remove the mystique.
Right now, though, I wouldn't bet against him.
