Just six months after a stroke raised questions about his ability to run for office, Democrat John Fetterman won Pennsylvania's pivotal Senate race early on Wednesday, flipping a key Republican-held seat after a hard-fought campaign against Mehmet Oz, a celebrity surgeon and TV host.
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Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s towering and plainspoken lieutenant governor, who became a progressive hero as mayor of a downtrodden steel town, defeated Dr. Oz, the smooth-talking and wealthy heart surgeon-turned-TV celebrity.
Best known for favouring hoodies over suit jackets, the win was a personal triumph for Fetterman after suffering a stroke in May, just days before the Democratic primary election. His Republican opponent, best known as the host of “The Dr. Oz Show”, had questioned his fitness for office.
In his victory speech early Wednesday at a concert venue in Pittsburgh, Fetterman credited his “every county, every vote” campaign strategy.
“And that’s exactly what happened,” Fetterman, 53, told the cheering crowd. “We jammed them up. We held the line. I never expected that we would turn these red counties blue, but we did what we needed to do and we had that conversation across every one of those counties.”
During Fetterman's campaign, he made much of visiting the state's rural regions with talk of creating working-class jobs.
That effort paid off. While Oz largely won the same rural counties former president Donald Trump won in 2020, Fetterman outperformed President Joe Biden in those areas and that helped him win the state.
Tattoos with dates memorialising victims of violence
Born on August 15, 1969 in West Reading, Pennsylvania, Fetterman looked set to follow in his father's footsteps, working initially at an insurance firm.
But he resigned to become a social worker in Pittsburgh, in part inspired by his experience with the Big Brothers Big Sisters programme as a longtime mentor to an 8-year-old boy who was losing both parents to AIDS. Years earlier, his best friend had been killed in a car crash at 27, an event Fetterman has often cited as being formative.
He went on to join the AmeriCorps volunteer service before going back to school to earn a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
In 2001 he began helping high-school dropouts and at-risk youth in Braddock. Encouraged by his students, he ran for mayor in 2005 – winning by a single vote. Over the next 13 years as mayor he focused on rebuilding the town and community, from tackling inequality to creating jobs to establishing urban gardens on abandoned properties.
After an unsuccessful initial Senate run in 2016 he ran to be his state’s lieutenant governor, winning the post in 2018.
At 6-foot-8, Fetterman has a big presence. When a right-wing media personality questioned the tattoos that cover his forearms, Fetterman explained in a September NBC News op-ed that one is the ZIP code for Braddock while others are dates memorialising the victims of deadly violence while he was mayor.
Fetterman's stroke at 53 saw him put up a halting performance at a debate with Oz.
Rights to abortion and same-sex marriage
Following his stroke, Fetterman spent much of the campaign fending off attacks by Oz that questioned whether he was honest about the stroke's effects and was fit to serve.
He vowed to be the Democrats’ “51st vote” to pass foundational legislation to protect rights to abortion, health care, same-sex marriage, unions and voting, as well as to raise the minimum wage.
At his campaign events across the state, Fetterman attracted supporters who were persuaded by his defence of abortion rights following the June 2022 decision by the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
>> Read more: Democrats in Pennsylvania take up fight for abortion rights
Fetterman has likened his May 13 stroke – which left him unable to speak fluidly and quickly process spoken conversation into meaning, a common effect called auditory processing disorder – to getting knocked down and adopted that as a campaign mission.
He ran for “anyone that ever got knocked down that got back up", he told the crowd. “This race is for the future of every community across Pennsylvania, for every small town or person that felt left behind, for every job that has been lost, for every factory that was ever closed and for every person that worked hard but never gets ahead.”
(FRANCE 24 with AP and AFP)
