Speaking back in early September to CNN’s Manu Raju on “Inside Politics Sunday”, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman delivered a warning to his party, particularly the leftist members who refuse to back off of contentious culture war topics, noting that they’d lose badly, much as they have already lost the American people, if they continue sticking to such topics.
Particularly, Sen. Fetterman told Raju that Democrats have forgotten why the American people rejected them at the ballot box on election day in November of 2024, saying, when speaking of many members of his party, “They have forgotten one of the reasons why we lost in 2024.”
On the same note, Fetterman noted that many in his party bizarrely think that the left needs to double down on the woke progressivism that has made them so toxic, saying, “Some people think now we have to double down on those things or we must become more progressive or more extreme.”
Rejecting such an idea totally, the senator then said that no progressivism will win the swing states, saying, “That’s absolutely not true. The seven or eight states that are going to determine who’s going to be our next president, you know, we have to win in those states, and I understand what that takes.”
Adding to that same point, Fetterman noted, “Clearly, we’ve lost the argument,” referring to the fact that Americans seem to have rejected the Democrats’ progressive talking points, saying, “We’ve really lost our connection with American voters in ways.”
Still not done, he noted that dialing up the culture war fight with more and more woke progressivism has been a disaster for America, particularly in how his party has done things like compare Trump to Hitler, and the American people have rejected it, saying, “We have to turn the temperature down. It’s like we can’t compare people to these kinds of figures in history.”
Further, the senator argued that Trump is not, as the Democrats have so far insisted, an “autocrat”, but rather the winner of a democratic election in which Schumer’s Democrats were rejected by the American people. He said, “And this is not an autocrat. This is a product of a democratic election. It’s like, I participated in that. It was safe and it was secure. We lost, and the American people put us in the minority. That’s democracy.”
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Doubling down on that support for “democracy” as a means of criticizing his party, particularly the leftist progressivism that has taken it over to such a strong degree, saying, “I revere democracy. I may not like the outcome, but I have to respect that.” Further, Fetterman said, “He’s definitely different, but that’s what America voted for.”
Fetterman also said that he will not be switching parties, as many Republicans want him to, but will rather be sticking around in the Democratic Party. He said, “I’m a Democrat. I just made a significant investment in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. I’m not changing my party.”
But, he said, he would continue criticizing Democrats in whatever ways he sees fit, saying, “I will disagree with my party at some time. I’m going to have an independent view on what I think was right or wrong.” He added, “What’s good for Pennsylvania, I’m going to vote for that.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: By I, DavidShankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2301835