Let me just say right off the bat that Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) will never become a Republican. I've never believed he would — or should. Those who thought he might are only kidding themselves. That said, I'm starting to wonder why Fetterman doesn't just become an independent, though it seems inevitable that he will.
Fetterman made his latest comments against his party during a conversation with Nick Gillespie on Reason's Reason Interview podcast. Gillespie asked him to reflect on how his politics had evolved since he backed Bernie Sanders in 2016. The answer was revealing. But, according to Fetterman, he isn’t the one who changed.
"Well, I mean, you know, in 2016, it was much more about the minimum wage and some other very basic kinds of things," Fetterman said. "And now that's just turned into much more standing with Cuba, standing with Venezuela, standing with the Iranian regime, and turned that into much more becoming more increasingly anti-American for me. So my views really haven't changed that much."
Fetterman isn't wrong about that — and his willingness to say it out loud is exactly why the far left despises him.
His argument is simple: he hasn't moved. The party moved around him. He points to positions he's held for years as proof of ideological consistency. "What's really changed is the party," he said.
Fetterman says Democrats still haven’t learned the lesson of 2024. He admitted he saw Kamala Harris heading toward defeat on the campaign trail and blamed the party’s 2020 “excesses” for helping bring about Trump’s second term. He also warned that working-class union voters who once formed the backbone of the Democratic coalition have largely moved to Trump and aren’t likely to return.
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In his view, Democrats have become too consumed with opposing Trump instead of offering a coherent agenda of their own. As he put it in a Washington Post op-ed, the party “cannot simply be the opposite of whatever President Donald Trump says” — a striking rebuke of the Democrats’ anti-Trump-centered strategy from a sitting Democratic senator.
Yet there he sits — still a Democrat. Still someone who "votes overwhelmingly with Democrats” yet describes himself as "lonely" in his own party, given the ways he’s spoken out against them, such as on Israel, Iran, border security, heck, even the reflecting pool.
So what exactly is he sticking around for?
There's really no going back at this point. The radical left-wing base isn't going to forgive him, and the Democratic primary electorate in Pennsylvania is not going to reward a senator who openly says the party has become anti-American. A primary challenge in 2028 isn't a possibility — it's inevitable. His best shot at keeping his seat is to run as an independent. He'd almost certainly be more competitive that way than trying to survive a primary against someone from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.
I think it’s obvious that Fetterman can see what's happening to his party. He's been saying it out loud for months. The only question left is whether he's willing to act on what he knows.
