Obama, Biden, and Oprah: The Final Days of John Fetterman’s Bid for the Senate

The tone of Gisele Fetterman’s laugh is deeply ironic. She is standing in the lobby of a Best Western in Wilkes-Barre, across from a fountain of four fat cherubs, after the most recent campaign appearance by her husband, John Fetterman. Now a giant black bus idles outside the hotel, waiting to continue the final days push with stops in Allentown and suburban Philadelphia before the long trip back across Pennsylvania to the Fettermans’ hometown, Braddock, just outside Pittsburgh. Fetterman’s final campaigning days were to be capped by two major rallies with Barack Obama in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia—the latter of which President Joe Biden would also headline.

Even with all the pressure of a high-stakes US Senate race, I say to Gisele, I hope she and Fetterman are able to have a little fun down the stretch. “Fun?” she says, throwing back her head with uproarious laughter.

Her edgy giddiness is perfectly understandable. It has been a grueling year. The contest between Fetterman and Mehmet Oz is a toss-up that could decide the next Senate’s majority. Republican groups have dumped $100 million into trying to defeat Fetterman, attacking him relentlessly as “pro-crime”; Newt Gingrich has suggested that one of Fetterman’s tattoos signals that the state’s sitting lieutenant governor is secretly the member of a violent gang. And then there’s the “elephant in the room,” as Fetterman, himself puts it: The Democrat had a stroke in May, which if not for Gisele’s quick thinking in rushing him to a hospital, might have killed him.

The damage was serious enough to keep Fetterman off the in-person trail for three months. His team scrambled and filled the gap with a remarkably creative and effective social media campaign. But eventually Fetterman himself was going to need to show that he had healed enough to credibly handle being sent to Washington. Fetterman’s reentry has been bumpy—his performance in the campaign’s one debate with Oz, in late October, was awkward—but his progress has been palpable. “Every single expert that has treated him says he’s great, he’s going to be better than ever. I have to believe them, and I do,” Gisele says when I ask whether she’s still worried about Fetterman’s physical condition. “I see it every day—he’s stronger than he’s ever been. And the rest is going to catch up fully.”

Even with a remarkable recovery to this point, that day still seems to be a bit down the road. The Wilkes-Barre hotel ballroom event is carefully structured as a conversation between Pennsylvania’s incumbent Democratic senator, Bob Casey, and Fetterman, with the two men seated in brown armchairs on a small stage. The stylistic contrast is striking. The bald, goateed, six-foot-eight Fetterman is wearing black work boots, blue jeans, and his signature Carhartt hoodie; Casey—in black wing tips, gray slacks, crisp white dress shirt, and navy V-neck sweater—is dressed more like another Pennsylvania icon, Mr. Rogers. Casey, whose delivery is as smooth as a late-night FM jazz DJ, delivers perorations on Republican obstructionism, then lobs easy questions at Fetterman. The candidate keeps his answers brief. “The fact that Dr. Oz refused ever to commit to raising our minimum wage to a level that’s appropriate at all—7.25 an hour is outrageous,” Fetterman says. “The fact that—what can anybody get remotely close to supporting themselves, let alone a family with any children? Seven-twenty-five is a sin. And I think it’s just a thing that you have dignity in all work. You must have all kinds of dignity in every paycheck as well. And to me, it’s something we’ve always stood for and something that we would fight for. And that is for waging—excuse me—for a living wage to make sure that everyone has the kind of at the core of basic kinds of economic security.”

Fetterman’s greatest appeal was never as an orator, even before his stroke—it was his Pennsylvania everyman quality. And his illness, in a perverse way, has seemed to enhance that attraction for some voters. The Wilkes-Barre audience, dominated by labor union members, is very much a home crowd for Fetterman anyway. But seeing him up close clearly enhances the bond. “Look, I’ve had people in my family go through strokes. I know it’s hard, but they bounced back,” says Drew Wechsler, a 36-year-old cook wearing a Phillies hat. “He’s doing fine, and he cares about helping people. Oz wants to be a senator to give himself a tax cut.” Wilkes-Barre, a scuffling midsize industrial city, is an important barometer in this election: It’s part of a county, Luzerne, that went for Obama by eight points in 2008 and five points in 2012, then flipped to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, by 19 and 14 points, respectively.

The math for a Fetterman victory is straightforward in theory, if far harder to pull off on the ground: Hold your own in Pennsylvania’s multitude of red counties by persuading blue-collar voters like Wechsler, while running up the score in the deep-blue urban precincts in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, maybe peeling off some disaffected Republicans in the collar counties. The most pitched battles are for the suburbs of those two cities. That’s why Oz and the Republicans are fearmongering about Fetterman’s work with the state’s parole board, where he advocated for some controversial prisoner releases. Billboards, paid for by the Trumpworld-affiliated group Citizens for Sanity, line the freeway leading into Philadelphia reading “Fetterman=Crime and Poverty.” Suburban, independent voters are also where Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Fetterman—and repudiation of Oz, who became a star on Winfrey’s show—which was announced shortly after Fetterman left Wilkes-Barre, could be especially potent. Winfrey has a huge fan base among women, and her backing underlines Fetterman’s argument that Oz is a fraud. “With the Eagles undefeated and the Phillies in the World Series, it’s very hard to reach people with any political news. Oprah’s endorsement breaks through,” says Rebecca Katz, a top Fetterman adviser. “And this is the kind of thing that’s sticky, because it’s an indictment from someone who knows Oz best.”

Winfrey isn’t expected to make any in-person appearances on behalf of Fetterman. But Obama, a high-profile validator with a unique ability to pierce through the media noise and voter apathy, did on Saturday. The locations of both the former president’s rallies were chosen to reach younger voters in particular. “John’s stroke did not change who he is, it didn’t change what he cares about, it didn’t change his values, his heart, his fight,” Obama told the large crowd at Temple University. “It doesn’t change who he will represent when he gets to the US Senate.”