DAVID MARCUS: Can John Fetterman save the Democratic Party from itself?
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman is the most anomalous politician in America today. Often willing to buck his fellow Democrats, he appears to be a one of a kind on Capitol Hill, even though his ideas are shared by the majority of Americans, including a lot of Democrats.
It is not entirely clear how Fetterman went from being a progressive, and failed, candidate for Senate in 2016 to winning in 2022 and becoming the moderate thorn in the side of the ever-left lurching Democrats. Some believe his medical issues changed him, but the answer might be far more simple.
In fact, it may not be so much that Fetterman moved away from his party, but that his party moved away from Fetterman.
One glaring example is Israel. Even five years ago, support for the Jewish state was as widespread among elected Democrats as E-Z Pass is on American highways. But today, the absurd and fabulist consensus in the party is that Israel has committed genocide.
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Fetterman, along with a few others like Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., have fought back hard against these anti-Israeli narratives, even as nominally pro-Israel voices, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have shamefully kept their heads down on the issue.
More recently, on the current shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, Fetterman is once again sticking it to his own party leadership by insisting that the agency should be funded full stop, without any conditions.
He is the only Democrat in the upper chamber taking this sensible stand.
Fetterman is also pretty much the only Democrat who is willing to cheer the deaths of the brutal regime leaders in Iran as the rest of his party all but undermines the war effort with nonsensical attacks against Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Meanwhile, when it comes to the communist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, one of the most popular figures in Democratic polling, Fetterman said of him last year, "Everything that I’ve read on him, I don’t really agree with virtually any of it, politically. That’s just where I’m at as a Democrat. He’s not even a Democrat, honestly."
But here Fetterman appears to be wrong. In fact, Democrats lined up to support and endorse Madman Mamdani and his merry band of capitalism-hating DSA darlings, and it is Fetterman who is losing support among party voters.
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But he isn’t losing support among all voters.
According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, a whopping 72% of Republican voters in the Keystone state approve of Fetterman, while a mere 22% of Democrats do, with independents split about 50/50.
This is the strange place where we have found ourselves, more Republican voters in Pennsylvania approve of Democratic Sen. Fetterman than Republican voters in Texas do of Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
This has all led to speculation that the hoodie-wearing maverick might switch parties and run for his seat as a Republican in 2028. But that is not the sense that I get from Fetterman’s words and actions.
Fetterman wants to save the Democratic Party, not to abandon it.
The best way for Fetterman to achieve this goal is not by defending his Senate seat two years from now, but by running for president.
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Recently I have been polling some insiders I know on both sides of the aisle, asking if Fetterman really has a chance to win the presidency in 2028. The most usual answer has been, "yes," with a smattering of "absolutelies."
The logic here is that every other potential Democrat who could stand on a presidential primary debate stage is in lockstep favoring the loony leftist ideas that Fetterman stands athwart.
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Especially now that sports media celebrity Stephen A. Smith has announced he will not be running, owing to the financial hit he would take, Fetterman would be the only Democrat in the field offering a way back to centrist politics.
The odds are firmly against Fetterman in his quixotic mission to restore sanity to America’s oldest political party, but then again, what were the odds of this guy ever being a senator in the first place?
All Americans should be glad to have this single senator who speaks plain sense regardless of party talking points, marching orders or the flickering winds of public opinion. Maybe it is naive to believe these qualities still matter to voters, but if so, then call me naive.