John Fetterman: Last of a Dying Breed

Here's a number that should stop you cold: according to a Quinnipiac University poll of 895 Pennsylvania voters taken July 9 to 13, Sen. John Fetterman posts a 77 percent approval rating with the state's Republicans and a 19 percent approval rating with the Democrats who put him in office. 57 percent of his own party's voters think he should quit the Democrats altogether. If a hedge fund manager posted numbers like that, cheered by the people who bet against him and booed by his own investors, you'd call it a contrarian trade gone spectacularly right or wrong depending who's asking. In the Senate, they're calling it treason.

Is Fetterman the last commonsense Democrat, the final holdout against a party that traded working class instincts for ideological purity tests? Probably not the last. But he may be the last one with a big enough platform and a thick enough skin to say so out loud in public, on camera, at his own party's expense. That distinction matters more than his critics want to admit.

Wednesday night in Dallas, Fetterman's face lit up the jumbotron at the Republican Party's midterm convention, an event some reporters nicknamed “Trumpapalooza.” Standing outside a Pennsylvania steel plant, he told the crowd, “Yes, I'm a Democrat,” then called himself a commonsense Democrat and vowed to “reject the extremes and socialism” creeping into his party. He praised Republican Sen. Dave McCormick as a friend and pledged to help President Trump protect Pennsylvania steel jobs. Republicans in the arena applauded politely. The two senators didn't stop at a friendly video, either. They launched a joint fundraising committee together this summer, the kind of arrangement that would get a lesser-known senator run out of his own caucus meeting. Democrats back home reached for their phones and started drafting his political obituary.

One lesson never changes: the crowd is usually wrong at the extremes, and the people willing to say so out loud pay for it long before they get credit for it. Howard Marks built a career on that principle. Fetterman is living it in real time, and the numbers back him up more than his critics let on. He still votes with the Democrat caucus roughly 88 percent of the time since taking office. But he broke from his party's position on nearly 20 percent of the party unity votes tracked in 2025, the highest defection rate of any Senate Democrat, according to CQ/Roll Call's annual vote study, and in March he cast the deciding committee vote to advance one of President Trump's nominees, the only Democrat on the panel willing to do it. Sen. Peter Welch tried to defend him to colleagues by noting Fetterman still “votes with us over 90% of the time.” Apparently that's not good enough anymore. In my expert witness work I spend a lot of time explaining fiduciary duty to juries: you serve the people who hired you, not the loudest voices in the room. Constituents are the client. The activist wing of a party is not, no matter how much noise it makes online.

His colleagues didn't just disagree with him on Israel, immigration, and socialism. They came after his character. State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who lost to Fetterman in the 2022 Senate primary, called him “Benedict Arnold, but lazy.” Rep. Chris Deluzio said Fetterman was “too lazy to do it in person,” a jab tied to a Wall Street Journal investigation reporting that Fetterman skipped committee hearings, canceled on constituents, and once claimed he was sick to dodge a meeting with paralyzed veterans so he could appear on Fox News instead. The same investigation reported he brushed off Children's Hospital of Philadelphia representatives who wanted to discuss Medicaid and vaccine policy, joking in a text that they just wanted a free trip to Washington. Rep. Brendan Boyle recycled a label he coined a year earlier, calling him Trump's favorite Democrat for the second time in twelve months, as if repetition made it truer. Former Rep. Conor Lamb, who also lost to Fetterman in 2022, put it plainer: “John, if there is a decent bone left in your body, just quit.” Notice the word half of them reached for. Lazy. Not wrong. Not misguided. Lazy, and disloyal, and a national embarrassment, all inside 48 hours.

Compare that to Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill, a conservative president and a liberal Speaker who fought over taxes and spending by day and shared a drink after 6 o'clock. They disagreed hard and often, and neither man ever suggested the other belonged in exile. Fetterman's colleagues aren't debating his votes. They're treating a break with the party line the way Tony Soprano's crew treated a made man who talked to the Feds. Whatever you think of Fetterman's work habits, breaking omerta shouldn't be a capital offense in a functioning political coalition.

Fetterman is no conservative hero, and I'm not claiming he is. He still votes for his party's tax, healthcare, and climate agenda most of the time, and Pennsylvania Republicans shouldn't confuse one joint press conference for a conversion. But that's exactly the point his critics are missing. A party that can't tolerate a senator who sides with it 88 percent of the time, simply because he won't toe the line on the other 12 percent, isn't a coalition anymore. It's a purity test with a donkey logo.

Fetterman isn't the last of a dying breed because he's uniquely wise or uniquely brave. He's the last one loud enough to say what a lot of quieter Democrats in swing districts already believe and won't admit out loud. A field of primary challengers is already lining up for 2028, and that lineup will tell you everything about where his party is headed. Watch what happens to him over the next two years. If Pennsylvania Democrats manage to primary him out for the crime of independent thought, they won't just lose a senator with a 77 percent approval rating from the other team. They'll prove his point for him, on camera, for free.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.

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