18 Time May 23/May 30, 2022
campaign in ive counties that Trump
won by at least 35 points.
Fetterman doesn’t expect the hard-
core MAGA crowd to vote for him.
“Some people think it’s about trying to
go in and have some mass conversion
by laying hands on Republicans,” he
says. “That’s not gonna happen.” But
“there are plenty of people in Pennsyl-
vania that are open to the argument,”
he adds. “And if you don’t make it, then
you can’t blame them.”A few hours after our hot dog lunch,
Fetterman lumbers into the United
Steelworkers union in Bethlehem. A
leak from the ceiling drips into a plas-
tic garbage can. In the distance, the
old Bethlehem Steel mill looms over
the town like an abandoned cathedral;
it’s now a music venue adjacent to a
casino. “We need to keep making sh-t
in this country,” Fetterman says, vow-
ing to protect what he calls the “union
way of life.” As United Steelworkers
Local 2599 president Jerry Green put
it: “He’s one of us.”
When I mention to Fetterman that
he doesn’t look like a typical politician,
he makes a tremendous efort not to
roll his eyes. “I am a conventionally un-
attractive person. This is how I dress,
and that’s all I have to say about it,” he
says. “If I wear a suit, I get sh-t; if I wear
shorts, I get sh-t.”
Fetterman, 52, was born to teen par-
ents and grew up in York, Pa. His father
worked a union job at a grocery before
becoming successful in the insurance
industry; both of Fetterman’s parents
are conservative Republicans. He was
all set to follow his dad into insur-
ance until a tragedy knocked him of
course: in 1993, a friend was killed in a
fatal car accident on the way to picking
him up. Fetterman began volunteering
with the Boys & Girls Club. He joined
AmeriCorps in Pittsburgh, got a degree
from the Harvard Kennedy school, and
started teaching GED classes in Brad-
dock, a western Pennsylvania town
that had been decimated by the loss of
local steel jobs.
After two of his students were
gunned down, Fetterman ran for mayor
of Braddock in 2005. For the next 13
years, he worked to revitalize a town
once known as the “murder capital” ofJohn FeTTerman walks inTo a brewery in
Easton, Pa., with his arms outstretched like a
wrestler. The state’s lieutenant governor—6 ft.
8 in., bald and goateed, wearing his trademark
Carhartt sweatshirt and athletic shorts—doesn’t
bother with his stump speech right away. Instead,
he starts working the crowd. He asks if they’re
Eagles fans or Steelers fans; crows, “Shorts, 365!”
to another year-round-shorts guy; kneels on the
ground to accept a “lucky penny” from a little
girl; and takes photos with arms so long he calls
them “selie sticks.”
Fetterman is the front runner in Pennsylva-
nia’s May 17 Democratic Senate primary, a mar-
quee race that could have been a microcosm of
the split within the party. His opponents include
U.S. Representative Conor Lamb, a telegenic
moderate marked as a rising star since lipping
a House seat in a conservative district, and Mal-
colm Kenyatta, a Black gay progressive state rep
from Philadelphia. Yet Fetterman is the clear fa-
vorite for the nomination, boasting huge leads in
the polls and a big cash advantage thanks to his
base of small-dollar donors.
The day after his brewery visit, Fetterman
explains his philosophy to me over hot dogs
with mustard and onions. He thinks the left-
vs.- moderate divide that dominates Demo-
cratic strategy discussions is largely a Washing-
ton paradigm; that normal people don’t care as
much about policy positions as much as political
wonks think they do; and that Pennsylvania vot-
ers mostly want somebody who bothers to travel
to the far reaches of the state to meet them. “I
just show up,” he says, squeezed into a booth at
Yocco’s hot dog grill near Bethlehem. “And I just
try to be me.” The voters he meets make their de-
cisions based on a “visceral” feeling, he says, that
“it’s someone they believe is a good person or
gonna be honest at the end of the day.”
In recent elections, Democrats have focused on
turning out Black and young voters while winning
the suburbs. Fetterman is the rare Democrat who
sees white working-class and rural voters as a key
part of a winning coalition. He thinks many GOP
areas are more magenta than ruby red. “We can-
not aford to cede a county 80/20, like has been
done in the past,” he tells the crowd in Easton. He
spent the second to last weekend of the primary
The second ladySwim timeCrossover appealBattling the
big lieIn shorts and a sweatshirt,
John Fetterman aims
to draw a ‘new map’
for Democrats
BY CHARLOTTE ALTER
THE BRIEF TIME WITH