Pennsylvania's Democratic senator says he will refuse to help his own party unseat his Republican counterpart, and the two have already registered a joint fundraising committee with the FEC.
Sen. John Fetterman told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that he will not campaign against Sen. Dave McCormick when the Republican faces Pennsylvania voters again in 2030. Fetterman stopped short of saying he would endorse McCormick but left no ambiguity about where he stands on efforts to defeat him.
"I would never, ever move against my friend," Fetterman told the Washington Examiner. The remark landed days after McCormick praised Fetterman publicly on Sunday, calling him a "good partner in Pennsylvania."
The mutual admiration is not just talk. Federal Election Commission records show the two senators registered a joint fundraising committee called Common Ground PA on July 6. The committee links Fetterman for PA and Friends of Dave McCormick, a bipartisan fundraising arrangement that is unusual in today's Senate and unheard-of between senators who share a state and sit on opposite sides of the aisle.
A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in July found 48 percent of Pennsylvania voters approved of Fetterman's job performance, against 41 percent who disapproved. But the partisan breakdown tells a sharper story. Republicans approved of Fetterman 77 percent to 12 percent. Democrats disapproved 69 percent to 19 percent.
Those numbers represent a near-total inversion of the coalition that elected him. Fetterman won his Senate seat as a progressive populist. Now his strongest supporters are on the other side.
And 52 percent of Pennsylvania voters said they wanted Fetterman to leave the Democratic Party entirely.
Fetterman said last month he has "no plans" to switch parties. But he attached a condition: he would reconsider if Democrats formally became what he called "the anti-Israel party," describing support for Israel as a matter of "moral clarity."
Fetterman's break with his party runs deeper than rhetoric. In April, the Senate voted on multiple resolutions aimed at restricting President Trump's authority to continue military operations against Iran without congressional authorization. Fetterman was the only Senate Democrat to vote against those resolutions, siding with the Republican majority.
He also joined a smaller group of Democrats who resisted efforts to block U.S. weapons sales to Israel, pushing back against a campaign led by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. On foreign policy, Fetterman has positioned himself closer to the Republican conference than to his own caucus on the issues that generate the most heat on the left.
McCormick, for his part, has framed Fetterman's popularity as a product of defiance. He argued on Sunday that Fetterman has gained support by challenging what McCormick called Democratic Party "craziness." McCormick called Fetterman a "great guy", language Fetterman has used about McCormick as well.
Joint fundraising committees between senators of the same state but different parties are rare enough to qualify as a political statement on their own. Common Ground PA, registered with the FEC barely a month before Fetterman's public pledge not to oppose McCormick, formalizes a relationship that most Democratic operatives would consider a betrayal.
The two senators have also collaborated on legislation and appeared together publicly, though the specific bills they have worked on together have not been detailed. The optics alone, a Democratic senator raising money alongside the Republican who holds the seat Democrats will need to flip if they want a Senate majority, are a problem for party strategists looking ahead to 2030.
Fetterman faces his own reelection in 2028. With Republican voters backing him at 77 percent and Democrats opposing him at 69 percent, his path to a second term looks nothing like the one he took the first time. Whether he runs as a Democrat, an independent, or something else, his political survival now depends on the voters his party has spent years antagonizing.
Pennsylvania Democrats who hoped Fetterman would be a reliable progressive vote in the Senate got something else entirely, a senator who votes his own way, fundraises with the opposition, and tells his party he will not lift a finger to defeat a Republican colleague he considers a friend. The party can complain about it, or it can ask itself what drove him away.
