John Fetterman is the perfect populist package
Democrats should follow in his footsteps
By Jacob McKissock
Guest Writer
Like many people in America, I found myself completely fixated on the Midterm Elections, especially the Senate race in my home state of Pennsylvania. Unlike most observers of this race, I was fairly certain that despite the polls, John Fetterman would eventually succeed in securing a majority.
While Mehmet Oz’s less-than-stellar campaign provided an advantage to any candidate running against him, I knew from the beginning of this race that Fetterman represented a novel phenomenon, one that I hope the Democratic Party will embrace.
I’d like to preface with some context on my person because this piece is primarily anecdotal. While I believe that I provide some insights that aren’t entirely obvious to most people, this piece is a reflection of my character and my experiences.
I am a sophomore here at GW, and while I’m technically undeclared at the moment I plan on pursuing Political Science, which I’m sure is very surprising. While most students at GW are liberal urbanites, I’m here precisely because I don’t fit in with that mold, and hoped to expand my horizons and learn from the other side of the aisle.
While I’m far from any partisan extreme, I consider myself a conservative and I grew up in the small town of Warren, Pennsylvania, surrounded by conservatives and their ideology.
Most of the people I have the deepest respect for are conservatives, yet unlike many of them I’ve found myself deeply concerned with the appalling moral and intellectual degradation of the Republican Party over the past few years.
While liberal elites like to blame the rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA constituency on the ignorance and bigotry of the latter, I understand as many people with my type of background do that a liberal establishment has been fueling the growth of this cancer for decades. Somewhere down the line, the Democratic Party that once championed the culture of the working class American has abandoned them for college educated elites and urban politics.
This is not necessarily fact, but sentiment, and I am far from the only person who holds it. Just ask any older conservative from a small town when the left stopped caring about “real Americans,” and they’ll be happy to identify where that moment falls in their minds.
White working class Americans slowly but surely became the primary voter base for the perfectly acceptable establishment Republican candidates. These people, who despite having gone to the same prestigious universities as their Democratic counterparts, managed to convince the common man that they were different enough to earn their vote.
The new Republican Party became another established sect of American political life, supported by the working class, and led by people who never really understood them. It’s no surprise that when Trump came along with his nationalist rhetoric, flamboyant personality, and supposed support for the little guy that he would see such major success.
One of the many signs that Trump has a significant impact with his approach can be seen in 2016 exit polls, where Trump was shown to have won white voters without college degrees by nearly 40 points compared to Romney’s lead of 26 four years earlier.
Trump was a wake up call for the Democratic Party, or at least he should have been.
It’s been almost seven years since the birth of the MAGA disease and the liberal establishment still refuses to see what they’ve been doing wrong by framing their policies against the white working class, instead of with them.
I think John Fetterman first became such an interesting case study to me when I found myself in a discussion with the stepfather of a good friend while I was back in Warren on break.
Much to my surprise, this middle-aged, hard-working, conservative father, who is very much the embodiment of the Republican, working class voter, began to rail against the “joke of a candidate” that was Mehmet Oz. In this man’s mind, the idea that anyone could be fooled into thinking Oz represented the people of Pennsylvania and their best interests was absurd.
While my friend’s stepdad certainly disagreed with Fetterman on a variety of issues, he made it quite clear that Fetterman understood people in his situation and was very much the antithesis to the celebrity elite he was running against.
While this man is in many ways an outlier in Warren, a county that voted 63% for Oz in the election, he did provide some context behind Fetterman’s frankly impressive win on Election Day.
It becomes immediately clear when you look at John Fetterman that he is an unusual candidate. Standing at a staggering 6’8”, with a bald head and goatee, Fetterman could be seen on the campaign trail donning casual street wear so much so that he’s almost unrecognizable in a suit.
To the establishment politicians — people who have spent their lives in Washington playing politics for personal gain — Fetterman looks almost cartoonish, and to the working class Pennsylvanian he looks like them.
While Dr. Oz spent the last decade selling pharmaceuticals on TV, building a personal fortune of over 100 million dollars, John Fetterman was the mayor of the small town Braddock, Pennsylvania. Oz is a phony, who rode off the coattails of Trump, and Fetterman is a genuine man who built his brand around his humble beginnings and his family.
John Fetterman is, as Republicans have been stating throughout the summer, a progressive. Fetterman supports abolishing the filibuster, increased gun control, and universal health care proposals backed by government spending. He is far from the moderate Democrat that many might think is required to win a swing state like Pennsylvania.
Despite his policy objectives, Fetterman managed to win over plenty of moderate conservatives in rural counties throughout Pennsylvania that Biden could not. While Fetterman secured a meager 33% of Warren’s vote in the midterm, Biden only managed to receive 29% in 2020, and Clinton, the embodiment of the liberal establishment got 27%.
These differences might seem small, but these few points make all the difference, especially in a state like Pennsylvania.
Warren, and rural Pennsylvania as a whole has not gotten more liberal over the past few years, arguably the opposite. Despite this, John Fetterman the progressive is able to win some of them over.
Fetterman demonstrated what most people with friends in the working class have known forever: politics is about people, not policy.
The liberal elite may have spent their developing years entrenched in ideology and deep political thought that has given them some intellectual insight about America and its future, but a great deal of conservative voters simply don’t give a shit.
The only thing policy papers accomplish is further convincing the educated elite of their supposed superiority to the inferior masses, while neglecting the beliefs of the real people who keep the country running.
Americans do not want armchair politicians — they want leaders. They don’t want facades or platitudes — they want people who portray character and integrity. Humans are not rationalists, even the heavily-educated ones. We all vote on how people and ideas make us feel, not on how they are, at least in the America I know.
Liberals chalk up Trump’s success to his appeal to the bigotry and hatred they’re convinced every conservative hides in their heart. In reality, Trump won the hearts of the white working class by pretending to be genuine and transparent.
It never really mattered what his policy agenda was, so long as it wasn’t blatantly liberal.
Conservative America had spent the past decades voting for whichever candidate the establishment had told them to, when out of nowhere their populist champion appeared to confront the seemingly vile and soulless devil that was Hillary Clinton.
Trump is not some evil genius. His terrible actions are not a result of some convoluted plot to overthrow the good people of the world. He’s a narcissistic megalomaniac, who was in the right place at the right time.
The people who voted for Trump, and continue to defend him are not evil souls corrupted by their prejudices and greed. They’re good, hard-working Americas who got swept up in a cultural movement led by a heartless demagogue, and their pride prevents them from dropping him.
The white working class’ obsessive relationship with Donald Trump is one of abuse and manipulation. Their therapy is not more liberal ideology — it’s people like Fetterman, and what they represent. Fetterman brings the embodiment of the working class, and applies progressive theory to their lives. He’s the perfect populist package.
I’m aware that more populism is a hard sell, and it’s certainly not the solution I want to support, but our options are limited. I’m not suggesting that we all subserviate our support to the next charming figure to appear onto the national stage so long as they oppose Trump, but we need to support candidates who represent all facets of America.
This might seem like an obvious solution, but the Democratic Party continues to insist on bland, policy-focused politicians who haven’t stepped foot outside of Washington in decades.
If you want to defeat Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, you need to unite America around a younger, genuine candidate who the working class can respect, just by looking at them. Good policy can follow second.
If the Democratic Party wants to attract people from across the aisle, they should support candidates who have the character and charisma to separate themselves from their party.
Voters, especially in America, do not vote on politics or policy. They vote on people.
Fetterman gets that, and so do I.
Jacob McKissock is a sophomore who plans to major in Political Science.
