The Convalescence Campaign

John Fetterman is trying to flip Pennsylvania's open Senate seat while fending off a celebrity doctor and recovering from a stroke that almost killed him.

- By Rebecca Traister

Even before John Fetterman became the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat—one of the pivotal few that could flip from Republican control—he had attained folkloric stature. He was six-foot-eight, bald, bearded, and almost always in a hoodie. He had a Harvard postgraduate degree and a home in a converted auto dealership across from a steel mill in Braddock, the struggling former steel town in western Pennsylvania where he had been mayor from 2006 to 2019. An enormous white man who had played offensive tackle in college and appeared to be built of all the XXL parts at the Guy Factory, Fetterman made arguments for a higher minimum wage and prison reform and abortion access and legalizing weed at a frequency that could be heard by Rust Belt voters, and he had been regularly reelected mayor ofhis majority-Black town before becoming lieutenant governor. He was a Democrat who defied the right-wing caricatures of the contemporary left as elite, effete, and out of touch because he was self-evidently none of those things.

Political reporters were gobsmacked; they'd never seen anyone like him before. Sure, on some level, he was exactly the same as every other senator in Pennsylvania history, a white man. But he wore shorts in January!