PITTSBURGH — Lt. Governor John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a liberal Democrat with a blue-collar, blunt-spoken style, won his party’s Senate nomination Tuesday as he recovers from a stroke. The victory, called by The Associated Press, set the stage for a fierce general election battle in a state that could determine control of the chamber.
Fetterman prevailed handily over his main Democratic rival, Rep. Conor Lamb, a polished Marine Corps veteran from western Pennsylvania who has had a warm relationship with President Joe Biden. The two other contenders were state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta of Philadelphia, who attracted some left-wing and labor endorsements, and Alexandria Khalil, an activist and a member of the borough council of Jenkintown.
The early stage of the general election, though, may be muted: Fetterman has been off the campaign trail since Friday, when he had a stroke. In a statement Sunday, he said that “the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage” and that he was on his way “to a full recovery.”
But it was unclear when he would return to in-person campaigning. He was still in the hospital Tuesday, when his campaign announced that he would undergo “a standard procedure to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator,” which his team later said was successful. His campaign said that he would remain in the hospital “resting and recovering” instead of attending his election night rally Tuesday.
Many party leaders had been skeptical of Fetterman. In his uniform of hoodies and basketball shorts and with his bar stool vernacular — “I’m just a dude that shows up and just talks about what I believe in, you know?” he said recently — he did not look or sound like a leading candidate. But many Democrats inside Pennsylvania and beyond now hope that Fetterman has the kind of engaging personal brand that will help him outrun challenging headwinds for the national party.
Several of the Republican candidates in the Senate primary, one of whom he will face in the fall in the general election, have embraced far-right positions, including promoting or indulging Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims. Democrats hope that such views will be disqualifying in the eyes of many swing voters, and they also believe a Republican nominee who backs overturning Roe v. Wade may face significant challenges in such a closely divided state.
Republicans, for their part, plan to paint Fetterman as too far left for the more centrist suburbs that favored the Democrats in the Trump era. They hope to tap into a national mood of urgent concern around inflation and the economy, in what has amounted to a challenging year for the president’s party. They also intend to tie Fetterman to Sen. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist whom Fetterman supported in the 2016 presidential primary.
Fetterman and his team argue that his priorities — including raising the minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, promoting criminal justice reform, and battling for voting rights, abortion rights and protections of LGBTQ people — reflect Democratic ambitions with broad popular support, and he has not leaned into the left-wing mantle in the primary.
In an interview last week, Fetterman characterized his platform as “all pretty much relatable, important things that your average Pennsylvania voter, I think, supports, but certainly can at least identify with.”
During the primary, Fetterman’s opponents highlighted a 2013 episode that could shape how Black voters view him. When Fetterman was the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, he brandished a shotgun to stop an unarmed Black jogger, telling police he had heard gunshots. He has declined to apologize or say he did anything wrong, and some party strategists worry that the episode could become a liability in the general election in November.
Throughout the primary, however, there were few signs that criticisms of Fetterman’s past or his political bent resonated widely with Democratic voters. Fetterman plainly connects with younger, progressive voters, but he also focuses on voters of all ages who live in areas that Trump dominated. His hope is to reduce Republican margins of support there, while retaining Democratic inroads in the suburbs and galvanizing turnout in the major cities.
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Fetterman, a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School who has nonetheless cultivated a blue-collar image, benefited from strong name recognition dating to his time as mayor of Braddock, a struggling old steel town he worked to help revitalize. Even as some Democrats worried about how his personal style might be perceived by buttoned-up swing voters, Fetterman fans delighted in it.
“If somebody thinks I’m smarter if I’m in a suit, so be it,” Fetterman said in an interview Thursday after an event in York, Pennsylvania, his hometown. “I would rather have people know what they’re getting, and this is who I am.”
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Pennsylvania Democrats elect Josh Shapiro as their nominee for governor
Josh Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, won the Democratic nomination for governor, setting up a titanic clash in this fall’s general election, in which the future of abortion access and suffrage will be on voters’ minds.
With a Republican-controlled legislature, Pennsylvania is likely to pass sharp abortion restrictions if it elects a GOP governor and the Supreme Court throws out Roe v. Wade as expected. Shapiro has vowed to veto such a bill. Republicans in the Statehouse who embrace the myth of a stolen 2020 election may also move to ban ballot drop boxes and rescind no-excuse mail voting, which the General Assembly passed with bipartisan support in 2019. Shapiro has pledged to veto restrictions to mail voting.
Pennsylvania’s governor appoints the secretary of state, who will play a pivotal role in overseeing the 2024 presidential election. Former President Donald Trump’s false claims that fraud cost him a win in 2020 in Pennsylvania have radicalized members of the legislature, a majority of whom urged rejecting the state’s electors.
Shapiro’s victory was called by The Associated Press on Tuesday night. He ran unopposed in the primary and was long the top choice of Democratic leaders in the state. They rallied behind him to try to keep the party’s hold on the office after the retirement in January 2023 of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat who is term-limited.
Shapiro, 49, gained a national profile for successfully fighting multiple lawsuits brought by Trump allies challenging President Joe Biden’s win in the state.
First elected attorney general in 2016, Shapiro ran on a record that included a two-year investigation of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The investigation led to a grand jury report involving 1,000 victims and hundreds of priests. It accused the church of a decadeslong cover-up.
Shapiro’s Republican challenger will surely accuse him of defending the Wolf administration’s pandemic policies, which critics blame for hurting small businesses and restricting personal liberty.
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In two previous statewide elections, Shapiro won more votes than anyone else on the ballot in Pennsylvania, including Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. But he faces the same strong headwinds as all Democrats this year from high inflation, $5 gas on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and public disapproval of many Democratic officeholders.
Wolf’s approval rating has fallen to 37%, with 51% disapproving, according to a Muhlenberg College poll from January.
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— TRIP GABRIEL
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.