Folks,
There’s new polling out of Pennsylvania this morning, and I need you to sit with the numbers for a second.
According to Siena, alleged Democratic Senator John Fetterman is now 42 points underwater with Pennsylvania Democrats. With Pennsylvania Republicans, he’s at plus 52 favorability. Read that again. The guy we elected as a progressive insurgent is now more popular with Republicans than he is with the people who actually put him in office. He is, in fact, more popular with Pennsylvania Republicans than Dave McCormick, the actual Republican senator from Pennsylvania who votes with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement basically 100 percent of the time.
Republicans are all over the internet this morning celebrating their new golden boy. And I get it. He goes on Fox almost every night, sits across from Sean Hannity, and repeats their talking points while attacking our candidates like Abdul El-Sayed and plenty of others. He’s a gift to them. I’ve been arguing for months that Democrats need to build a Fetterman-proof Senate majority, 52 seats in November, because if we don’t, I believe this guy switches parties or betrays us at the worst possible moment. Trump has essentially offered him a bribe, promising to fund his reelection if he runs, and if Trump gets another Supreme Court vacancy in the next couple of years, I think Fetterman folds. Partly because he wants the Fox airtime. Partly because the check has already been written.
I still believe all of that. But today I want to talk about something else, because this poll isn’t really a story about John Fetterman. It’s a story about how morally bankrupt the MAGA movement and the Republican Party have become.
Today’s rant is sponsored by Ground News.
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The Daily Caller says Members of Congress, referring to them as ‘swampers’, bemoaned the $40 trillion national debt amid debate on how to address the deficit.
Same story. Completely different framing.
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Here’s the thing that makes me want to pull my hair out. As frustrating as Fetterman is, and he is, he still votes with us 85-90% percent of the time depending on the day. His views on abortion, on gay rights, on a whole list of issues are basically in line with mine. Yes, he’s gone off the reservation on Israel and a few other things in ways that make no sense to me. But in how he talks and how he votes, he is still a Democrat.
What’s killing him at home is how he spends his time. He doesn’t introduce legislation. He doesn’t do constituent services. He has never given a single speech on the floor of the United States Senate. He spends his energy on cable news parroting Republican talking points instead of doing the job. That’s why he’s so unpopular in his own state.
And Republicans have flocked to this guy anyway. Not because he votes with them. He literally votes against them. They love him for exactly one reason: he pisses off people like you and me. That’s it. That’s the whole appeal.
They prefer a Democrat who makes liberals mad on the internet to a Republican who actually delivers for them on the floor. Think about how empty you have to be for that to be your standard.
Because that’s the defining characteristic of the modern MAGA movement. It doesn’t believe in anything except annoying its opposition. It’s what drove Trump’s reelection in 2024. It’s what drives the army of MAGA influencers being paid unbelievable sums by Trump’s super PAC and by foreign governments pumping money into this thing.
None of them have a meaningful solution for anything. Not for ending this war, not for fixing the economy, not for rooting out the corruption in our government, not for building a single program that would make your life or your family’s life stronger. Which is what government is supposed to be about. It’s that Paul Wellstone quote I bring up all the time: politics is about the improvement of people’s lives. We are so far from that right now it makes me sick.
The Republican Party today is not a party of ideas. It’s a party built entirely out of grievance. They’re still mad Barack Obama got elected in 2008, so it’s fine if Trump steals billions of dollars, because we didn’t like Trump the way they didn’t like Obama. It’s fine for Trump to use the power of the federal government to go after his political enemies because Roseanne Barr got fired from ABC. You hear this shit constantly.
There’s a grievance and a rationalization for everything, and it has rotted them to the point where they see Fetterman trashing Democrats on Hannity over a couple of issues and say, he’s our guy, we love him.
Framing can completely change a story when you’re only seeing one version of it. Ground News brings together coverage from 50,000+ sources, giving you different perspectives so you can see the full picture and decide for yourself what you think.
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And here’s the part Fetterman himself doesn’t seem to understand. Washington Republicans are playing the same clever game they always play. They’re making him feel powerful and special and important. They’re lining up the next act for him, the Fox News contributor gig, exactly what they did for Joe Manchin, who is on TV every single day trashing Democrats and, I’m sure, being paid handsomely for it by somebody.
But when Fetterman’s not in the room, they mock him. I’ve got a clip I’m playing on YouTube later today of them making fun of how he was dressed just a few days ago.
That’s the deal. Flatter him to his face so he stays a useful idiot against Democrats through the midterms, laugh at him behind his back, and the minute he stops being useful, pull his airtime and send him back to being as irrelevant as he was before he got to the Senate.
What makes it maddening is that most of what Fetterman now complains about in the Democratic Party is exactly what got him elected. He ran as a progressive insurgent. If he’d run as a moderate and governed as a moderate, fine, that’s what Manchin did in West Virginia, and I didn’t love it, but Manchin was probably the best we were ever going to get out of West Virginia.
Fetterman is nowhere close to the best we can get out of Pennsylvania. We can do so much better, and I cannot wait for the inevitable primary. He can’t win a Democratic primary. His only path is as an independent or maybe as a Republican, and I’m not convinced he wins that either, McCormick numbers or not.
Zoom out and this is the whole picture of Washington right now. A petty game. So many of the people we spend all day arguing about and pleading with to move legislation that might actually improve your life are just pieces on a board, moved around by a handful of entities hoping you don’t notice the real story.
Your life is getting worse every single day, and Donald Trump’s life is getting better every single day, because he’s stuffing money into his own pockets and the pockets of his family and people like Jared Kushner and the billionaire buddies who are all over the Epstein files.
I don’t enjoy spending this much time on a member of my own party. I track the Fetterman story this closely because he represents something deeply broken in our politics.
And I don’t believe him when he says he won’t switch. I think he waits for the moment it hurts the most. Democrats win 51 seats, he hands the Senate back to Trump, and Trump shoves another Supreme Court justice down our throats. It’s disgusting. We can’t look away from this just because he’s got a D next to his name. Something is wrong here, and it’s a symptom of the whole damn broken system.
With urgency,
—Mike
I have diehard MAGA cousins in PA and they have said time and time again they wish Fetterman would move to the Republican party - they admire him more than the actual Republican, who they view as a "RINO." To them, it's all about protecting Israel. My cousins are Evangelical nutbags who claim Israel must be protected even over the United States to ensure Jesus beams back down. I joked "from planet Vulcan." They didn't appreciate that joke. Sadly there are millions in this country who believe this lunacy.
Fetterman is what my generation would call squirrelly. He's like a squirrel in the street. You can't be sure where he'll go.