McCormick praises Fetterman’s willingness to ‘call out the craziness’ in Democratic Party

Give David McCormick some credit here. It's not every day you see a Republican senator go on record praising the guy from the other party who beat him to the punch on breaking with his own base. Fetterman has made a habit of it since he got to Washington: voting for Israel funding when half his party wanted to hedge, showing up to work in a hoodie while still doing the job, and generally acting like a guy from Braddock rather than a guy from a donor retreat. McCormick noticing that out loud, on a New York radio show, tells you something.

What's actually interesting is what McCormick is pointing at without quite saying it. Pennsylvania Democrats didn't nominate Fetterman because the party apparatus loved him. They nominated him because voters were sick of the machine picks. Now the same energy that produced Fetterman is producing primary challengers well to his left, the kind of candidates who'd rather lose a winnable seat than compromise on rhetoric. McCormick is basically saying: I'd rather run against a Democrat who talks like a normal person than one who talks like a Twitter thread, and I respect the guy willing to say that out loud to his own side.

There's a lesson in there for both parties, even if we're not going to pretend it's some grand bipartisan moment. Voters reward people who sound like themselves and punish people who sound like a press release. Fetterman gets grief from progressives for exactly the thing McCormick is complimenting him for. That should tell Democrats something about where their coalition actually is versus where their loudest activists think it is. It won't. But it should.