This year's midterm elections are going to come down to a number of nail-biters, and there's no guarantee that the Republican Party will hold on to its current control of House and Senate. That's up to the voters, and it's up to Republicans to get out and vote to win beyond the margin of fraud, since the Senate was unable to pass the SAVE America Act.
President Trump, though, there's a man who knows how to hedge his bets. He has once more turned his eye on the Last Moderate Democrat(tm), that being Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). The President, on Saturday, repeated his invitation for Senator Fetterman to switch sides.
President Donald Trump openly encouraged Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania to switch parties and become a Republican just weeks before the midterm elections could reshape control of Congress.
“I'd love to see him as a Republican,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Saturday as he returned to Washington from a rally in Tennessee. “He does better as a Republican than he does as a Democrat.”
Senator Fetterman isn't entertaining any such notions.
Fetterman has repeatedly rejected the notion of becoming a Republican, writing in The Washington Post in May that he would be a “terrible Republican who still votes overwhelmingly with Democrats.” His relationship with fellow Democrats became more tenuous after he recorded a video for the Republican midterm convention last month praising his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Republican Dave McCormick, suggesting there were extremists in his party.
“I’m always going to stand with America,” Fetterman said in the video. “I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.”
That's all to the good, but it doesn't appear as though any plum committee assignments or anything else are liable to entice him across. And we should remember that, while Senator Fetterman holds many positions that Republicans like, he's staunchly pro-Israel, he's pro-capitalism, and he has vocally opposed the "democratic socialist" wing of the Democrat Party, on many occasions.
It's easy to understand the temptation to try to get the Senate's last sane Democrat to, as it were, cross the Jordan. For one thing, there are election scenarios that could easily produce a tie in the Senate, and having one Senator tempted to swap sides isn't exactly an unusual event. (I'm looking at you, Arlen Specter.) Such a scenario may have Senate Republicans barking up every likely tree to convince one Democrat to cross the aisle, and let's face it, right now, the way things stand with Senate Democrats, the only tree worth barking up is the one with John Fetterman in it.
Still, this is the longest of long shots. Democrat Senator Fetterman is, and Democrat he's likely to remain, and before we toss out the red carpet to invite him across the aisle, we might note his voting record, in which he has walked the party line in 90 percent of his votes, crossing lines only four times — and he has a strong record of showing up to vote.
No, we are going to have to win a Senate majority the old-fashioned way: Turning out every Republican and right-leaning independent voter with a pulse, and getting them into a voting booth.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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