Senator John Fetterman wasn’t in Washington for the first Trump administration. But he has a few ideas about how Democrats should handle the second.
He wants his party to accept its losses. He wants his party to chill out a little. And he wants his party to please stop with all the hot takes about what went wrong in November, since Democrats have four long years to figure it out.
Fetterman has some experience taking on President-elect Donald Trump’s G.O.P. He won his seat in 2022 after overcoming a near-fatal stroke and beating the Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has since become the president-elect’s pick to run Medicare. As the Democratic Party reckons with its losses in places like Pennsylvania — where Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris by 1.7 percentage points and Bob Casey, a third-term Democratic senator, lost his seat — I called Fetterman.
Our conversation was the first in a series of interviews I’ll do in this newsletter about the path forward for the Democratic Party. Drop me a line and tell me about others you want to hear from.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Incumbent parties struggled or lost elections around the world this year, particularly in Western democracies. Do you think the Democrats’ losses in November were inevitable?
That’s a question worth asking. I had a lot of concern — there was a couple of one-offs. One of them was the assassination in Pennsylvania. I think some people seem to forget that, or how incredibly dangerous that was for a nation, God forbid, if he would have been mortally wounded. But the kind of imagery and the kinds of energy that emerged from that, absolutely, I witnessed that on the ground in Pennsylvania. I thought, well, that might be ballgame.
