John Fetterman
Pennsylvania

John Fetterman won the Democratic primary handily on May 17, even though shortly before the election he suffered a minor stroke (he has since said the medical problems which caused the stroke were quickly remedied, and he suffered no cognitive impairment).

The Pennsylvania Democrat is often likened to U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. In fact, Sanders endorsed Fetterman when he ran for Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania in 2018. Fetterman went on to win that race. Now he is running for U.S. Senator.

Fetterman is a self-styled populist. He’s out to win back Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt and rural residents who used to be Democrats but drifted to Trump in 2016. He says he understands why. He believes he can get these voters’ support, but also pick up college-educated white suburbanites and voters of color in cities including Philadelphia.

Fetterman has raised much more money in donations than any of his opponents, Democratic and Republican, and he leads dramatically in polling. But Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party has declined to endorse him (or any other candidate). High-ranking Democratic politicians have also ignored him.

He believes his outsider status flies in the face of the Democratic Party’s tone deafness towards working people’s needs. He has vowed to stump every county in Pennsylvania. “Wherever people might feel they’ve been forgotten and marginalized,” he has said, “that’s where someone like me needs to be.”

He doesn’t look like a typical politician. (“I do not even look like a typical person,” he quips.) His clothes — cargo shorts, Dickies work shirts, and Carhartt jackets — make Bernie Sanders seem like a fashion icon. At 6-foot-8-inches tall with a shaved head and chin beard, Fetterman looks like the Hulk in normcore. He has a zip code tattooed on one arm and five dates on the other. Each date commemorates the death by violence of a young person in Braddock, a crisis-ridden, overwhelmingly Black town near Pittsburgh, where Fetterman served as mayor. Fetterman was elected at the height of homicidal violence in the community. It rapidly declined during his tenure.

Fetterman grew up in an affluent family and got a master’s degree from Harvard. As a young man he worked with working-class people in the Pittsburgh area, then moved to Braddock, a dying steel town. Twenty-thousand people lived there a century ago; when Fetterman arrived there were about 2,000, and poverty and violence abounded. After he became mayor in 2005, he was re-elected multiple times. He used the office to encourage economic development based on racial equity and pro-worker policies. He married an immigrant woman whose family fled violence in Brazil and were undocumented for a time in the U.S. The couple are raising their children in Braddock.

Fetterman may confront backlash from an incident in 2013 when he heard what he thought were gunshots and brandished a gun at a man he saw running. The man turned out to be a jogger who was Black, and the loud noise wasn’t from gunshots. (Fetterman said he didn’t know the man’s race.) Fetterman was recently absent from a campaign forum in Philadelphia’s Black community that he’d been invited to. (He said he was too occupied with state business to travel.) Critics questioned his judgment for missing the event.

Fetterman tells Pennsylvanians that they’ll “always know exactly where I stand. I haven’t had to ‘evolve’ on the issues because I’ve always said what I believe is true and I’ve been championing the same core principles for the last 20 years.”