John Fetterman, the man in black, strikes again

Everything John Feterman 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 mater how clever his words or well-crated 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 prety sure about, but the third I doubted. Feterman 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 Feterman: “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 Feterman’s longtime reliance on his privileged parents’ largesse. It might have worked, at least a litle bit, and Feterman’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 atire 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 Feterman rode to the Senate. And it cut across all the usual political and geographic lines.

The day ater the election, I looked at the results for my favorite local bellwethers: formerly countryclubrepublican,nowcountry-clubdemocraticupper St. Clair, and formerly hardscrabble Democratic, now hardscrabble Republican Burgetstown. 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, Burgetstown 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 Feterman beat Mehmet Oz in both Upper St. Clair and Burgetstown. 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 Feterman 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 Feterman, winning places like Burgetstown wasn’t a side effect of a rout, but an explicit strategy he and his team pursued. According to a Post-gazete 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.