Sen. John Fetterman, perhaps the last of the ‘moderate’ Democrats in Congress, just made the majority of his party colleagues angry. Again.
Fetterman told an interviewer this week that he will never campaign against his friend and fellow Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick: “I would absolutely never move against my friend.” He called McCormick “a great guy” and declined to say whether he’d go as far as endorsing him — but the promise not to work against him is remarkable on its own.
In 2026, saying you won’t help defeat a Republican colleague is apparently the most radical thing a Democratic senator can do. Let that sink in.
The Fetterman-McCormick relationship is one of the few genuinely wholesome stories in a Washington that has forgotten how to produce them. The two senators have organized a joint fundraising committee — Common Ground PA — that accepts donations from Pennsylvanians who want to support both of them simultaneously. When Governor Josh Shapiro refused to set up Pennsylvania’s booth at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall — in what appeared to be a political snub tied to his ongoing tensions with Trump — Fetterman and McCormick joined forces and made sure Pennsylvania showed up.
This is what actual bipartisanship looks like. Not the performative kind where senators occasionally have lunch together before voting along party lines on everything. The kind where two men from opposite parties genuinely respect each other, trust each other, and act like adults who share a state rather than enemies who share a building.
Fetterman is up for reelection himself in 2028, which makes McCormick’s future posture equally interesting — will he stay neutral when the shoe is on the other foot?
The honest political reality is that Fetterman is doing what his constituents sent him to do and what the increasingly radicalized Democratic caucus refuses to acknowledge: representing a purple state as a senator, not as a party warrior. Pennsylvania is not California. Pennsylvania is not Massachusetts. It is a state that swings, that has legitimate conservative and moderate communities, and that deserves a senator who acts like he knows it.
The DSA wing of the Democratic Party — the same people who just won primaries in Michigan, New York, and Colorado — views Fetterman’s friendship with McCormick as a betrayal. They called him a communist last month. He called them communists back. He’s right. They’re not going to forgive him for refusing to treat his Republican colleague as an enemy.
Good. That’s the point. Fetterman is the last Democrat in national politics who still talks like he remembers how to win Pennsylvania. His colleagues are busy nominating Abdul El-Sayed and explaining why God is nonbinary.
He’s not perfect. He’s often wrong on policy. But he remembers that the man across the aisle is a colleague, not a villain — and in a party being eaten alive by people who think otherwise, that matters.
McCormick’s seat is safe until 2030. Pennsylvania voters will spend the next few years watching whether Common Ground PA is a slogan or a real thing. So far, it looks real.
