By Farrah Tomazin
Erie, Pennsylvania: Three months after a stroke nearly killed him, John Fetterman – a tattoo-covered, hoodie-wearing Democrat who could tilt the balance of power at the midterm elections – is standing on a stage in Pennsylvania, recalling the moment he almost died.
Fetterman was on his way to an event in May ahead of his successful primary race to become a candidate for the US Senate, when his wife, Gisele, realised something was wrong.
John Fetterman, lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and Democratic senate candidate, arrives on stage during a campaign rally in Erie.Credit:Bloomberg
Before he knew it, he was being rushed to hospital, where doctors discovered a blood clot had blocked a major artery in his brain.
“Gisele saved my life,” he tells the 1400-strong crowd who spent hours lining up along the shores of Lake Erie on Friday evening to watch the 52-year-old return to the campaign trail.
“I’m just so grateful. And I’m so lucky. So thank you for being here tonight.”
Joe Biden might also consider himself grateful and lucky that the popular Pennyslvania lieutenant governor is back to run for a seat in Washington.
After all, Pennsylvania is shaping up to be the marquee race of the midterm elections because it’s regarded as the Democrats’ best chance of flipping a seat in the Senate – the all-important chamber that determines everything from future Supreme Court nominations to Biden’s first term policy agenda.
With less than three months before voters head to the polls, Republicans are tipped to take back the House of Representatives amid sweeping discontent over everything from soaring gas prices and inflation rates, to Biden’s overall fitness for the job.
But in the evenly split Senate, where Democrats hold a slim majority by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, the party’s fortunes rest on a few key races.
Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, the GOP candidate for US Senate.Credit:Bloomberg
Chief among them is Pennsylvania, where Fetterman, a Bernie Sanders-backer with the ability to energise the progressive base, will take on Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, a celebrity TV doctor endorsed by Donald Trump.
Polls shows Fetterman with a sizable lead over “Dr Oz”, but the race may tighten significantly before Election Day, as the candidates battle for the spot made vacant by retiring Republican Pat Toomey, one of the few GOP senators who voted to impeach Trump.
This, after all, is a quintessential swing state: Democrats held the Pennsylvania for 24 years, but Trump surprisingly won the battleground against Hillary Clinton in 2016 by wooing rural and working-class voters outside the major cities such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Biden was able to regain it at the 2020 election, but the race was tight, and in a last-ditch effort to stave off defeat, Trump’s team filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent the state from certifying the votes.
Notably, one of the officials who tried to help Trump overturn the results is now the Republican candidate to be Pennsylvania governor: far-right state senator Doug Mastriano.
If Mastriano is elected over his Democratic rival, Josh Shapiro, he’d have the power as governor to appoint the Secretary of State – the chief official who certifies votes.
State Senator Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania.Credit:AP
The stakes of this contest are not lost on the voters in Erie, a “bellwether” town about 677 kilometres from Philadelphia, where Fetterman deliberately chose to hold his comeback rally on Friday night. As he told his supporters: “whoever wins Erie wins Pennsylvania”.
In the audience was a mix of (mostly white) young activists, families, unionists and senior citizens. One man wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “I don’t watch Fox News for the same reason I don’t eat out of the toilet.” Another woman held a life-size cut-out of the Democratic candidate: his 6-foot-8 frame, shaved head and biker goatee hard to miss.
Also in the crowd was school nurse Melissa Rohd, who admits she didn’t know much about Fetterman but his policy positions – protecting abortion, supporting the LGBTI community, increasing the minimum wage – aligned with hers.
“I just feel like we’re at a tipping point at the moment,” she adds. “I remember how people used to say: ‘oh Trump will never get elected’ and then he did. And then they used to say: ‘oh, they’ll never take away our bodily autonomy’ and they did [referring to the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v Wade]. The least I can do is work within my community and show up.”
Dotted with picturesque houses and lakeside eateries, Erie has a population of about 94,000 people, of which the average age is 35. It’s also home to a growing number of independent voters, says Jezree Friend, a member of the local Republican committee, who watches the demographics carefully.
He says these voters often won’t officially register as Republican, but “won’t necessarily vote for someone like Fetterman either, because he espouses more of the progressive left than the moderate left”.
“Most people are middle-of-the-road and they’re becoming so disgusted with both sides that they’re without a home,” says Friend. “Those are the people who are going to decide the next election.”
In downtown Erie, 71-year-old Charles Dirkham, a self-described “constitutional Republican who believes in the right to bear arms” is clear where he stands. He continues to support Donald Trump and says he’s happy to back anyone that the former president has endorsed.
“What’s going on in this country is hard to believe,” he says.
“Things have changed so much in the last few years. We’re starting to lean more towards socialism than we are capitalism, the open borders are unbelievable, and there’s censorship everywhere. Trump was fixing all that and now the elitists are tying to stop him from ever running again.”
Whether the former president has another shot at the White House in 2024 is yet to be seen, particularly in the face of this week’s extraordinary raid at his Mar-a-Lago home.
For now, however, the focus is on the midterms, where the success or failure of Trump-backed candidates could be a big factor in his decision.
John Fetterman poses with fans in Erie.Credit:Bloomberg
The Democrats made up some ground in 2020, but its “rural problem” in battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania remains.
As University of California law professor Lisa Pruitt wrote in a recent opinion piece in Politico: “Even as Trump’s popularity has waned among some demographics, Democrats have shaved little off the GOP’s rural margins.
“Indeed, few Democratic campaigns seem to have tried to claw back rural ground, with many candidates appearing simply to cede the rural vote to the MAGA crowd.”
Fetterman, however, bucked the trend, she adds, campaigning – repeatedly – in as many of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties as possible, no matter how rural or “ruby Red”.
As a result, he ended up securing the Democratic nomination to run for the Senate with 59 per cent of the vote – an unusual outcome for a bloke whose policy positions also include legalising marijuana and abolishing the Senate filibuster rule to advance a progressive agenda.
But then again, Fetterman is an unusual politician. His “fashion” involves gymwear instead of suits. He has a masters in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School but speaks in everyday vernacular, with words such as “youse” or “yinz” (western Pennsylvanian slang for “you”). And much of his campaign plays out on social media, where he regularly trolls his Republican opponent with hilarious memes and cutting jibes.
The jibes against Oz continued at the rally on Friday, in a 10-minute speech that lacked policy detail but was well received by an enthusiastic crowd.
Perhaps this was to be expected: Democrats had waited three months for his return to the campaign trail after his near-death experience. Whether they can keep up the momentum to help flip the seat and hold on to the US Senate is another thing altogether.
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