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John Fetterman, one of Joe Biden’s loudest defenders during calls from within his own party to step down, still believes that the incumbent president could have beaten Donald Trump a second time.
The freshman senator from Pennsylvania elected in 2022, was one of the many Democrats who refused to call for Biden to step aside in the wake of a whispery, wandering performance at a June debate with Trump in Atlanta.
But Fetterman, who suffered a stroke and battled his own issues with speech impairments in the final days of his winning 2022 campaign, took things a step further as he suggested that Biden’s critics in the Democratic Party were helping Trump win — a charge that seemed at odds with polling that showed Biden behind the former president long before the outpouring of Democratic whinging began.
In a mid-July interview that ended up taking place just days before Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, Fetterman told Fox News Sunday: “That whole abandon Biden thing — that’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard...I mean, if you are more inclined to vote for a Democrat or be a Democrat, if you’re willing to walk away from Joe Biden — you’re by defecting helping Trump.”
On Sunday, he had hardly changed his tune and told CNN’s State of the Union that he believed Biden would have defeated Trump a second time, despite what all available polling and the trajectory of the race after the June debate indicated.
Dana Bash, the show’s host, asked Fetterman about those comments specifically and whether they’d been born out by the reality of where the race is now at the beginning of September.
“No,” Fetterman seemed to concede, before adding: “But what I said was, I do believe, fundamentally, that Joe Biden would have beaten Trump. And it was going to be very close, and I have always predicted that as well too. And now Harris. And she’s had an amazing run so far...it’s going to be very close.”
Even his latest answer seemed to acknowledge the reality that Harris remains largely neck-and-neck with Donald Trump in the key battleground states either candidate will need to win in November despite, as Fetterman said, her “amazing” run of campaigning successes since she took over the Democratic ticket in July.
Harris’s team pulled in more than $500m in her first month in the race, while achieving a comeback in the polls that has put her in striking distance not only in states like Georgia and Arizona, which sealed Biden’s victory in 2020, but states such as North Carolina and Florida which went for the Republican ticket in the last cycle.
.@DanaBashCNN asks @JohnFetterman about his past support for President Biden staying in the race: "I do believe fundamentally that Joe Biden would have beaten Trump, and it was going to be very close, and I have always predicted that as well too, and now Harris." pic.twitter.com/kW8y7cSM5C
— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) September 8, 2024
Her recovery to mathematic contention in such a wide range of states — while she has not pulled ahead with a substantial lead — seems to suggest that at least a fair portion of Harris’s gains can be attributed to regaining lost ground with voters who were leaning Democratic already but were turned off by concerns about Biden’s age and mental faculties.
Her surging poll numbers in Florida and North Carolina, however, suggest that she may also be winning over voters who opposed Joe Biden or didn’t vote at all in 2020.
Fetterman, once a darling of the progressive left thanks to a populist attitude and outspoken support for transgender rights, marijuana legalization and support for health care as a human right, has undergone a rapid political evolution since taking office. His outspoken support of Israel’s military onslaught against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has led to more than 40,000 Palestinian deaths, is reviled by his once-allies and has led to his mockery on social media by progressives. His evolution was made concrete in an interview with NBC News earlier this year — the Bernie Sanders-endorsing, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-backed lawmaker declared, “I’m not a progressive” to a journalist.
The shift has reportedly alienated once-close staff and led to an exodus of his communications team. Just last month, he saw a very public rejection of his views on foreign policy by his own currently-employed communications director.
"I don't agree with him," Carrie Adams, Fetterman's communications director, told The Free Press of her boss’s views in August. “I have a sense that his international views are a lot less nuanced than my generation, because when he was growing up, it was might makes right, and for my generation and younger who, of course, are the ones protesting this, they have a much more nuanced view of the region."
