Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman watched Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary results Tuesday and did what he always does: said the uncomfortable thing out loud while his colleagues looked at their shoes.
He essentially threw in with just about every other Republican who sees his party lurching to the commie left, and in a hurry, after DSA-backed Democratic Socialist Donavan McKinney narrowly defeated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District primary, DSA-preferred Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan U.S. Senate nomination over Rep. Haley Stevens, and DSA-preferred William Lawrence won the seventh District.
“I would never try to elevate a communist just because he has followers on Twitch, whatever that is,” Fetterman told Fox News Digital on the sidelines of the Israel on Campus Coalition conference. He named Hasan Piker directly — the DSA-aligned streamer who praises Mao Zedong, carries water for Cuba’s communist regime, backed Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City, and spent the Michigan primary campaign appearing alongside Abdul El-Sayed.
“If you identify with a communist who praises Mao and Cuba and for these places, that should be foreign to any Democrat,” Fetterman said. “Without a doubt, that’s having an impact.”
He’s right. And it’s the understatement of the cycle.
El-Sayed won Michigan’s Senate primary by one point over establishment candidate Haley Stevens. DSA-backed Donavan McKinney defeated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in the 13th Congressional District. Progressive William Lawrence won the 7th. Tuesday was a good day for the DSA. It was a very bad day for the kind of Democratic Party Fetterman is still trying to be a member of.
Fetterman also called out Gavin Newsom — the man positioning himself as the party’s 2028 presidential frontrunner — for describing Israel as an apartheid state. “He knows better. That’s not true.” It’s the kind of thing you can only say if you’re John Fetterman, because saying it requires accepting that you will never run for higher office in the current Democratic Party and don’t particularly care.
The El-Sayed warning he delivered was even sharper: “A lot of the things he has done and said during the primary are going to come back and haunt him, like campaigning with a guy that loves Hamas and is very proud to stand with communist regimes.” He added that El-Sayed “had a very arrogant campaign.”
All of this is accurate. None of it will change what the Michigan Democratic Party just did.
Here’s the political reality that Fetterman is navigating in real time: he is the last prominent Democrat willing to say these things publicly, and the party is moving away from him faster than he can keep up with. He has warned against DSA influence for months. He has called out the communist sympathizers. He has drawn lines on Israel that no other Democrat in the Senate will draw. And he keeps watching his party’s primary voters choose the candidates he’s warning against.
The question isn’t whether Fetterman is right. He obviously is. The question is whether he’s the last of his kind — or whether there are enough Democrats like him left to pull the party back from the edge it’s running toward.
