When John Fetterman’s team told him he was going to be Pennsylvania’s next senator late on election night, the Democrat laughed. He smiled. Afterwards, overwhelmed by the emotional end to a campaign that included a near-fatal stroke five months ago, Fetterman cried.
Soon, he was standing in front of microphones as supporters chanted his name, shaking his head as if in disbelief. With his hand on his heart, he looked out and saw his slogan on signs in the crowd: “Every County, Every Vote.”
“And that’s exactly what happened,” Fetterman said, referring to his campaign’s plan to narrow the margins of defeat in rural counties while winning the suburbs and upping the ante in urban Democratic strongholds. “We blocked. Their. Up.”
Fetterman’s victory over Republican Mehmet Oz, the cardiothoracic surgeon-turned-TV doctor and former President Donald Trump’s running mate, overturned a seat held by the GOP for more than a decade and narrowed the Republican path to regaining the Senate majority . It was also the culmination of Fetterman’s own political journey, from big, brash small-town mayor in Western Pennsylvania—a idiosyncratic character who, even a decade ago, captured national curiosity—to the threshold of membership in one of the country’s more traditionally polite policies. institutions.
For Fetterman’s top aides, some of whom have worked with him since his failed 2016 Senate primary bid, the realization that victory was approaching felt like a “slow crescendo,” campaign manager Brendan McPhillips said. In the campaign boiler room, the legacy of past bad Democratic elections fueled an air of absolute caution.
But the dam burst when returns from Erie, a swing county in the northwest corner of the state, showed Fetterman with a nearly double-digit lead.
Because it was unclear at the time, shortly before midnight, when the race would be called, McPhillips, who first ran with the Democrat in 2015, told the candidate: “John, you’re probably not going to get your blue check. for a few days, but you will be the next senator.”
That’s when the first news outlets began calling the race for Fetterman, the culmination of a campaign that saw his stroke, a painful public recovery and raise the hopes of Democrats across the country.
For Rebecca Katz, the campaign’s top adviser, and McPhillips, this was their second round with Fetterman in a Senate campaign. Katz first met him in 2015 before the 2016 primary, when he finished a distant third behind Katie McGinty and Joe Sestak with less than 20% of the vote.
“We can’t tell the story of John Fetterman as a candidate for the U.S. Senate without talking about the origin story, in terms of what happened in 2015 and how we tapped into the real enthusiasm of the grassroots,” Katz said. “But we didn’t have the money to win the race.”
This memory promoted now-Lt. Governor Fetterman will officially launch his campaign in February 2021 – giving him a head start in a diverse and crowded primary field.
Fetterman, without a patron or endorser, won a resounding victory by winning all 67 counties, often by landslides, in what ended up being a four-candidate race. He even came out on top in Philadelphia, with nearly 37% of the vote. Fetterman also swept the collar counties around the city that would become key targets for him and his opponent in the fall, winning each by an average of nearly 25 percentage points.
But his triumph was tempered by a harsh new reality. On the Friday before the primary, Fetterman, who was feeling unwell but determined to attend a morning event, decided to go to the hospital at the insistence of his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman. The campaign went quiet for days before Fetterman revealed in a statement that he had suffered a stroke.
“I had a stroke caused by a clot from my heart in A-fib rhythm for too long,” he said. “I feel much better and the doctors say I have not suffered any cognitive damage. I am well on my way to a full recovery.”
The next two months – much of which Fetterman spent at home recuperating – turned out to be the most critical period of the Democratic campaign. Unable to hold in-person events, the campaign leaned toward an overactive social media presence, all aimed at defining Oz as an out-of-state elitist using a combination of memes, pointed tweets and, at times, the help of famous celebrities. .
Their featured labels, colored by high-flying stunts featuring “Jersey Shore’s” Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and a host of Oz owners — most memorably his wacky attempt to illustrate the effects of inflation by filming a video showing him he is shopping for ingredients for a ‘crudité’ in a supermarket, the name of which he picked up – ended up sticking.
“It wasn’t just a post,” Katz said. “It was a strategic plan to define Oz early and define him as not being from the Palestinian Authority or the PA.” Fetterman, he added, insisted the content is never “bad” and often spent time during his recovery pinging staff with memes and ideas to connect with constituents he couldn’t engage with in person.
But the success of the messages surprised even Fetterman’s top aides. The strategy caught on, garnered media attention and put Oz firmly on the defensive, forcing him to play down his Pennsylvania roots in sometimes uncomfortable ways.
“John was not on the path. He was resting and recuperating. But we couldn’t just give up in the summer,” said campaign spokesman Joe Calvello. “It wasn’t going to break if we were talking about an insert thing that plays well here. We had to define Oz.”
The stickiness of the attacks also hit Republicans.
“Oz came out of the most brutal Republican primary in the country. He had high negatives, he had no money and he had the ability to fund himself and go on the air and repair his image and he chose not to do that,” said a top Republican strategist who has worked on Senate races. “He had a Democratic opponent who was sidelined due to health issues. And he let go months – precious months – that could have been spent virtually unopposed repairing his image, doing nothing.”
Republicans quickly saw Fetterman’s caricature of Oz — especially the attacks that he wasn’t from Pennsylvania and couldn’t represent it effectively — resonating with voters, the operative said. The attacks began to create an image of the Republican as someone who would do anything to get elected, including moving.
The strategy, and the tactics that followed, were ratified for the last time on election day. In CNN’s exit poll on the race, 56% of voters said Oz had not lived in Pennsylvania long enough to effectively represent the state. Fetterman beat that team by nearly 70 percentage points.
One of the great ironies of the Pennsylvania Senate race, which drew the most money and attention in the critical period between Labor Day and Election Day, is that Republicans now believe Oz lost the election in the months that Fetterman went out of the election campaign.
“We set (Oz) while he was in Ireland or Palm Beach or wherever he was going” after the primary, Katz said. “We did it while John was recovering from a stroke.”
Armed with Trump’s support, Oz narrowly won his party’s nomination in May. But it was a close race that divided the party. Oz emerged victorious but devastated. He had little cash to work with, underwater approval numbers and dozens of conservative Republican voters are winning.
“Oz wouldn’t have won the primary without Trump. There’s no question about it,” said Ryan Costello, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania.
But once he won the nomination, Trump became less a weapon than an albatross. Oz won’t campaign with him again until the last weekend before Election Day.
Fetterman’s success over the summer gave him some breathing room, but his race with Oz — like many around the country — became more competitive after Labor Day as more voters tuned into the race and tens of millions of dollars from outside groups like the GOP . The Senate Leadership Fund and others led to ads covering the airwaves.
Republicans began to find some success questioning whether Fetterman had been honest with voters about his health, noting that he had never released complete medical records and, in increasingly blunt terms, pointing out the obvious: Fetterman often struggled to speak publicly because of the lingering effects of his stroke.
Fetterman’s campaign insists that he and his team have always been honest and forthright about what they knew about his condition and his recovery. But the gravity of what Fetterman would later discuss in the campaign as a near-death experience took some time. patient.
“I got there and it was just chaos. But the first thing, when I finally got around to talking to a doctor, the first thing they told me was that John is going to make a full recovery from the stroke,” she recalls.
In a campaign statement a few days later, Fetterman said “the campaign is not slowing down one bit.” It was true that top aides and staff went into overdrive, but the candidate wouldn’t return to the stump for nearly three months when he rallied with supporters in Erie on August 13. But even then, with…
