FETTERMAN REFUSES TO CAMPAIGN AGAINST GOP COLLEAGUE — DEMOCRATS ERUPT
FETTERMAN SAYS HE'LL NEVER CAMPAIGN AGAINST REPUBLICAN DAVE MCCORMICK — AND THEIR UNUSUAL PENNSYLVANIA ALLIANCE IS GETTING HARDER TO IGNORE
Sen. John Fetterman has made an extraordinary promise about the Republican who shares Pennsylvania’s Senate delegation with him.
If Dave McCormick runs for reelection in 2030, Fetterman says he will not campaign against him.
Not because they agree on everything.
Not because Fetterman is changing parties.
But because, in his words, McCormick is his friend.
“I would absolutely never move against my friend,” Fetterman said when asked whether he would support or oppose McCormick in a future race.
He stopped short of promising an endorsement.
He did not say he would campaign for the Republican.
But he repeated the point anyway.
He would not campaign against him.
In a political system built around defeating the other party, that is unusual enough on its own.
What makes it more remarkable is what happened before the friendship.
In 2024, Fetterman was not neutral about Dave McCormick.
He backed Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, raised money for him and publicly attacked McCormick during one of the closest Senate races in the country.
McCormick ultimately defeated Casey and joined Fetterman in the Senate.
Then something changed.
The two men who had been on opposite sides of a bitter Pennsylvania campaign started working together — and eventually started calling each other friends.
That relationship is no longer just a collection of friendly interviews or bipartisan press releases.
It now has a federal campaign-finance filing behind it.
In July, political committees associated with Fetterman and McCormick formed Common Ground PA, a joint fundraising committee registered with the Federal Election Commission.
The filing lists four participating committees: Fetterman for PA, Friends of Dave McCormick, Fetterman’s Every Vote PAC and McCormick’s Pennsylvania Honor.
That is an unusual structure for politicians from opposing parties.
Joint fundraising committees are common in federal politics.
A Democrat and Republican creating one together is not.
Common Ground PA allows donors who support the senators’ partnership to contribute through a single fundraising vehicle benefiting their political organizations.
And the senators have been explicit about what they say the arrangement represents.
Fetterman calls it “Team Pennsylvania.”
He has also rejected speculation that the committee means he is preparing to leave the Democratic Party.
“I’m not about changing my party,” he said while explaining the partnership.
That distinction matters.
Because Fetterman’s willingness to work with Republicans has repeatedly produced speculation that he is drifting toward the GOP.
His actual voting record does not support the idea that he has simply become a Republican.
Democratic Sen. Peter Welch, defending Fetterman’s place in the caucus, recently noted that Fetterman still votes with Democrats about 95% of the time.
Fetterman himself has repeatedly rejected the idea of switching parties.
What has changed is not his party registration. It is his willingness to openly reject the assumption that working with — or personally liking — a Republican is some kind of political betrayal.
And McCormick is the clearest example.
The senators have co-sponsored legislation, appeared together publicly and repeatedly emphasized their shared responsibility to Pennsylvania.
Then came one of the strangest examples of their partnership.
Pennsylvania was initially absent from President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair on the National Mall, part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.
The original political version of that story quickly became: Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro refused to participate, so Fetterman and McCormick rescued the state from a partisan snub.
The documented story is more complicated than that.
Shapiro’s administration initially intended for Pennsylvania to participate.
State officials later said they could not secure a private business sponsor in time and that the governor was unwilling to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on the fair.
Shapiro also criticized Trump for politicizing the celebration, so politics clearly surrounded the dispute.
But there is no need to invent a simple boycott when the actual sequence is already interesting.
Pennsylvania’s booth opened without a formal state presence.
Then McCormick and Fetterman stepped in.
Working with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Pennsylvania organizations, they secured private support for a pavilion without using taxpayer money.
The Democrat and the Republican did together what the state government had not managed to complete before the event opened.
Weeks later, Pennsylvania’s pavilion was recognized with a “Best in Show” honor.
That episode explains why the Fetterman-McCormick relationship has attracted so much attention.
It is not merely rhetorical.
They have created a fundraising vehicle together.
They have worked on legislation together.
They have intervened together in a high-profile Pennsylvania event.
And now Fetterman is saying publicly that, even if party control of the Senate were at stake in 2030, he would not personally work to defeat McCormick.
That is where this stops looking like ordinary Senate collegiality.
Fetterman’s own political future makes the situation even more interesting.
His Senate term expires in 2028.
He has not yet committed publicly to seeking another term.
McCormick’s seat does not come up again until 2030.
So the immediate question is not whether the two men will face voters at the same time.
It is whether McCormick would extend the same courtesy if Fetterman runs again in 2028.
The Washington Examiner asked McCormick’s team that question.
No reciprocal promise was provided.
At least not yet.
That asymmetry is worth watching.
Fetterman has made his position clear.
McCormick has not publicly matched it.
And there is another reason the relationship matters beyond Pennsylvania.
The Democratic Party is in the middle of a very public argument over its ideological direction.
Democratic socialist candidates have won a series of high-profile primaries in 2026, including contests in New York, Colorado and Michigan.
Fetterman has responded by becoming one of the Democratic caucus’s loudest critics of the socialist wing.
He has accused parts of that movement of pushing the party toward positions that are politically dangerous and, in some cases, has used far harsher language than Democratic leaders normally use against their own side.
He has criticized individual Democratic candidates.
He has attacked activists he considers anti-American.
He has openly argued that Democrats should “police” their own ranks rather than pretending ideological differences do not exist.
Those are Fetterman’s views. They should not be confused with evidence that every socialist or every Democrat is attacking him over his friendship with McCormick.
There is plenty of intra-party tension without manufacturing more of it.
What can be established is that Fetterman’s political brand is increasingly unusual.
He remains a Democrat.
He votes overwhelmingly with Democrats.
But on Israel, immigration, some Trump nominees and the growth of democratic socialism, he has repeatedly broken with influential parts of his party.
At the same time, he has become unusually comfortable around Republicans.
McCormick is not his only Republican friend.
But McCormick is different for one obvious reason.
They represent the same state.
Pennsylvania is not a safe Democratic state.
It is not a safe Republican state either.
Donald Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2024 by roughly 1.7 percentage points.
McCormick defeated Casey in the Senate race by only a fraction of a point.
Fetterman himself won his seat two years earlier as a Democrat.
That is what a genuine battleground looks like.
Any senator representing Pennsylvania has to operate in a state where millions of voters routinely support the other party.
That does not require abandoning partisan principles.
But it does create an obvious incentive to understand that the voters across the aisle are not going anywhere.
Fetterman appears to have decided that the same principle applies to his Republican Senate partner.
That approach will not please everyone.
Political parties exist to win elections.
Senators routinely travel into other states to campaign against members of the opposite party.
When control of the Senate is decided by one or two seats, refusing to help defeat a vulnerable opponent can have national consequences.
So Democrats would be entirely justified in asking what Fetterman’s promise means if McCormick’s 2030 race becomes decisive for Senate control.
That is a real political question.
But it is different from pretending there is something mysterious about why the two Pennsylvania senators get along.
They have spent more than a year showing exactly why.
They work together.
They appear together.
They raise money together.
They describe each other as friends.
And Fetterman has now drawn a personal line he says he will not cross for his party.
He will not campaign against Dave McCormick.
That promise is especially striking because Fetterman did exactly that in 2024.
He was firmly on Casey’s side.
He attacked McCormick.
He wanted McCormick to lose.
Now he calls him a “great guy” and says he would “never, ever” move against him.
That is not normal Washington choreography.
It is a genuine political evolution.
And it also complicates the easy narratives surrounding Fetterman.
He is not secretly a Republican simply because he likes one.
He is not a reliable conservative simply because conservative media often celebrates him.
He still votes with his party on the overwhelming majority of Senate business.
And McCormick remains a Republican senator who will vote against Democrats on plenty of major issues.
Their alliance is unusual precisely because the partisan differences are real.
The interesting part is that neither man appears to believe those differences require personal hostility.
Washington talks constantly about bipartisanship.
Usually that means a bipartisan bill with a handful of cosponsors, a ceremonial event or a temporary coalition on one narrow issue.
Common Ground PA is something else.
So is a Democratic senator pledging not to campaign against a Republican colleague four years before that colleague even faces voters again.
Whether this partnership survives the pressure of an actual election remains unknown.
There is plenty of time for politics to become more complicated.
Fetterman could decide not to run in 2028.
McCormick could face a difficult reelection battle in 2030.
The Senate majority could hang on Pennsylvania.
A Democratic nominee could demand Fetterman’s support.
And McCormick could eventually be forced to decide whether “Team Pennsylvania” extends to Fetterman’s own campaign.
Those are unanswered questions.
But several facts are already clear.
Fetterman and McCormick really did create a bipartisan joint fundraising committee.
They really did partner to put Pennsylvania into the Great American State Fair after the state’s original participation fell apart.
Fetterman really did say he will not campaign against McCormick.
And he really has denied that any of this means he is leaving the Democratic Party.
That makes the story more interesting than the exaggerated version.
There is no need to claim every Democrat is furious.
There is no need to invent a feud with the DSA.
There is no need to turn the State Fair dispute into a motive that cannot be proven.
The verified story is already remarkable enough.
A Democratic senator who once campaigned to defeat Dave McCormick now calls him a friend.
Their campaigns are financially linked through a joint committee.
Their offices have built a public political partnership around Pennsylvania.
And Fetterman is willing to say something most senators would avoid saying years in advance:
May you like
When McCormick’s name is back on the ballot, John Fetterman says he will not be working to take him down.
Whether McCormick eventually says the same thing about Fetterman may tell us just how real “Common Ground PA” actually is.
