John Fetterman Is A Predictable Chaos Agent

In a postindustrial decay shot worthy of the Levi’s advertisement that helped put him on the map 16 years ago, John Fetterman stood in front of the Mon Valley Works last Wednesday night and told a Dallas arena full of Republicans who he was. "Yes, I'm a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I'm a common-sense Democrat," he said in a prerecorded video that introduced U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick to the Republican midterm convention. "I'm always going to stand with America. I'm always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life." The Pennsylvania delegation stood and applauded. Within hours he had issued a statement calling himself "a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party" and promising to remain "the 51st vote that I ran on" if the Senate flips in November.

The switch gave Democrats their path to a filibuster-proof 60 votes but only gave Specter a little over a year. Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak beat him in the May 2010 primary, and Toomey proceeded to beat Sestak to claim the seat that fall. Unfortunately for Specter, Democratic primary voters did not want a political lifer who had switched to save his job.

Fetterman, by contrast, already has the support of the voters he would gain by changing his affiliation. Seventy-seven percent of Pennsylvania Republicans approved of his job performance in Quinnipiac's June survey, and independents in the Siena poll rate him higher now than they did in 2024. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in July that he and other Republicans have talked with Fetterman about "the challenges he faces in his caucus" and would welcome him. Fetterman and McCormick launched a joint fundraising committee called Common Ground PA. However, some delegates in Dallas told Newsweek they do not need him to change his registration. After all, a man who can stand in front of a steel mill and denounce socialism to a Republican convention while clinging to his Democratic committee assignments is a uniquely valuable commodity in the hyper-partisan world of 2026. 

My maternal uncle's take on the U.S. Senator is "You never know what he'll do next," which he clearly intends as a compliment. I wrote last year that other relatives and neighbors love Fetterman's loose-cannon nature and ostensible unpredictability — Fettermania was running wild among them — and that hasn’t changed. 

Of course, neither has Fetterman. He’s been predictably unpredictable throughout his career, something the people that he served as mayor of Braddock know all too well. I spent Community Day there back in August alongside the documentary filmmaker Tony Buba, who has known Fetterman for 20 years, and talked with Jim Phillips, who has run the event since 2014. Phillips told me the mayor never helped him with it, noting that Fetterman even showed up one year with his own ice cream truck and parked it a few blocks outside the boundary of an event where every other vendor had registered and paid the $50 fee. If nothing else, the big man could hold a king-sized grudge over the most trivial of slights.

And he has nursed many other irrational grudges, both before and after the stroke that badly limited him during his 2022 senate campaign. In November 2010 a surveillance camera caught the mayor rearranging the letters on the marquee of Club 804, a bar he considered a nuisance, so that "will reopen soon" read "We will not be reopening soon." Buba's summary to WHYY in 2022 was that Fetterman "doesn't take criticism well" and that in his speeches "there's never a 'we.' It's always a 'me' or 'I.'" 

Israel is Fetterman’s pet cause, and in July he drew a do-not-cross line regarding support for the nation: if the party "just makes it official as the anti-Israel party, that's when I would leave." Pet peeves include many of his fellow Democrats. Ostensibly to promote bipartisan cooperation, he voted to confirm Pam Bondi as attorney general, which former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb told the Washington Post was where his own break with the senator began. In a May Washington Post op-ed, Fetterman described himself as "pro-choice, pro-weed, pro-LGBT, pro-SNAP, pro-labor and even pro-rib-eye over bio slop" but neglected to note he wasn’t big on playing nice with his own team.

The same fixity of character occasionally produces the kind of boorish comedy my relatives enjoy, delivered in the same awkward, wooden way Fetterman delivers everything. In June 2023 he met Joe Biden on the tarmac in Philadelphia to talk about the collapsed stretch of Interstate 95 wearing a Carhartt hoodie and gym shorts. This June, asked by a CNN reporter about Graham Platner, the Bernie Sanders-backed Maine Senate candidate who had allegedly been using the messaging app Kik to talk to various women he was interested in, Fetterman answered, "Oh, P-Hustle? P-Hustle? Yeah, he's around. Apparently we didn't match up on Kik." Platner withdrew from the race a month later. 

I suppose my uncle is right in one sense. Nobody knew Fetterman would make a video for the midterm RNC until Axios reported it last week. But everyone who had been following Fetterman closely could guess the broad outlines of what the video would say, and most of us expected he would still be a Democrat come Thursday morning. With Fetterman, you come to expect the unexpected. Then it arrives, and it is exactly what you thought it would be, just like the man himself.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.