BRADDOCK, Pennsylvania — Last week, a memo circulated by Penn Progress, a group supporting Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania’s open-seat Senate race, warned donors that Lamb was trailing John Fetterman by 30 percentage points. At the time, many in Washington expressed shock that the golden child of the 2018 midterm elections was losing to the state’s sitting lieutenant governor, a man despised by his party’s establishment.
But spend any time in the state or talk to Democratic primary voters about what they really want, and none of the information comes as a surprise.
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var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_48498838", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"981848"} }); ","_id":"0000017f-d3f6-d0d9-a37f-dbffef500000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedDriving across the state, in cities, suburbs, and rural areas, it is Fetterman’s signs you see in voters’ front yards. You might even find Fetterman himself or his wife, Gisele, on that drive as they work the campaign trail shaking hands with voters and attempting to earn their votes. It is a grueling but important job that helps either introduce him to voters or persuade them to consider him. He has been doing it relentlessly since he first began running in the Democratic primary for Senate in 2015.
He lost that race, but he never stopped going out there and meeting with people, even when he went back to being mayor of this southwestern Pennsylvania city.
When he shocked the establishment and unseated sitting Democratic Lt. Gov. Mike Stack in the 2018 primary — no one had ever unseated a sitting lieutenant governor of either party in this state — the establishment dismissed him instead of embracing him.
Many in the party establishment locally and statewide have never warmed to the York County native who towers over everyone at 6-foot-8. He does nothing to hide his tattoos, prefers cargo shorts and bowling shirts to suits and ties, disobeyed state law and performed the county’s first gay marriage, and pulled a shotgun when he thought someone was involved in a shooting in his neighborhood.
Fetterman has a habit of not waiting his turn or observing the old rule of not stepping ahead of the party favorites. This time, he is treading upon the Lamb political dynasty — Lamb is both the grandson of a former state legislative majority leader and the nephew of the city controller who ran and lost a statewide row office bid in 2020.
To date, polling shows that Democratic primary voters don’t care about this dynasty. And recent history has shown they often don’t. In last year’s primary races, Democratic outsiders took out three incumbent Democratic mayors in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Allentown. That inside/outside sentiment does not seem to have dissipated. So while Lamb skips across the state racking up endorsements from labor unions and elected officials, Fetterman’s approach has been painstakingly granular. While no one was paying attention, he spent years building relationships where it counts most — with voters.
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And when he meets them where they are, it goes much further than waving around an endorsement from an establishment figure or institution.
To their great credit, establishment Democrats at the state committee made the wise choice not to endorse in this primary despite an aggressive push by Lamb to earn the party’s nod — the congressman failed in two ballots to earn the support from committee members for the state’s open Senate seat.
Both Fetterman and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who is also running in the primary, did little to try to earn the endorsement in that process.
Often, when political parties decide to endorse a favorite son, it backfires with the base voters. Consider how in 2010, the state party and the Obama White House backed Arlen Specter, but Pennsylvania Democrats chose Joe Sestak instead as their nominee. It all worked out really well in the general election for Republican Pat Toomey, who has served two terms in the time since.
The Edgar Thomson steel mill is the Fetterman family’s breathtaking view here in Braddock. Down the street, second lady Gisele Fetterman’s brainchild, the Free Store, stands as a repurposed resource for those in need of surplus donated goods.
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The store motto of “Be kind, take only what you need, and pay it forward” is the perfect example of how the wife and mother of three offers Democratic voters one more reason to choose Fetterman over Lamb.
Several weeks ago, when President Joe Biden was in Pittsburgh to tout his infrastructure bill, Fetterman declined to appear with him at the event. Lamb, however, did not. A bridge collapse changed everything. Fetterman, who lived nearby, was on the scene immediately in his capacity as the state’s second in command. He showed up in his usual gear: shorts and a bowling shirt.
He was rewarded with side-eyes from the rest of the elected officials, but they won’t be the ones who win this year’s primary contest in Pennsylvania. That will probably be Fetterman.
