and I have posted this elsewhere - what the party has needed is a "populist" candidate because we hand-wring about the media continually promoting the "populists" of the GOP as if only they can run under that mantle (where supposedly the #1 "GOP populist" was considered 45), and yet the apparatus seems to recoil from that potential for liberals.
The past couple weeks, I have been reading some analysis pieces that have finally started to refer to Fetterman as a "progressive-populist". There seems to be a knee-jerk pretzel twisting by some to try to shoe-horn him into more "controversial" buzzword labels like "The Squad" or "Our Revolution", but he isn't that. I.e., he is taking some of their ideas, which are also generally Democratic Party platform planks, and actually presenting them in a completely different way to a different demographic - the very ones we bemoan.
Here in Philly, I have watched with fascination, something that many on DU keep demanding - slowly bringing the party back to the left. And over the past couple years, that morphed into the city actually electing someone from the Working Families Party to an at-large City Council seat (where she in essence, caucuses with Democrats and was the first non-major party council member elected here in modern city history). In fact since the city charter designates that 2 at-large seats be set aside for "minority parties" (which for Philly since the '50s, were Republicans), she actually booted a Republican for an at-large slot with her win. And she joined with another at-large progressive to make sure concerns of average people were heard. They were the types of "community organizers" that President Obama had been and touted.
These elected individuals were not "show-boating" an agenda and policy points or doing photo-ops, but were actually out there day after day, in some cases with a literal megaphone, demanding action for some of the most negatively-impacted people in this city - whether due to a lack of affordable housing, gun violence, or poorly maintained neighborhoods where you have unscrupulous contractors dumping their debris in vacant lots. Add to this the re-election of a D.A. who also comes from that side of the party (having come from a background of being a public defender vs a prosecutor, and who is invested in criminal justice reform), and the shift is actually happening under the surface as it were.
This is the type of thing that Fetterman has promoted.
Several years ago, he embarked on what he dubbed a "listening tour" where he literally visited all 67 counties to get a sense of where people around the state stood on legalizing marijuana. And the past year, as part of his campaigning for the primary, he did the same - again visiting all 67 counties. So he's not just "phoning it in", although doing that was hard work and it obviously took a toll on him.
From what I have heard, there were a good number of Democrats living in some of the reddest of counties in the state who felt forgotten because Democratic politicians have pretty much given up on those locations and would never visit there. Yet when he showed up, these poor souls were excited and energized to finally be appreciated and listened to.
So it behooves that when it comes to top-of-the-ticket state-wide or federal races, that we do realize that every vote counts. Thus we are going to have to do some maximum extraction of votes in the red counties and not keep pointing fingers at and disparaging people in the cities expecting them to "save the day" for the party. It's ALL HANDS ON DECK.
And as a sidenote - I always considered Wolf as being from the tail end of a generation of "liberal lions", as an old-school jeep-owning Peace Corps liberal whose family had deep roots in the state, but who also touted his business acumen in order to achieve a broad appeal to Pennsylvanians across the political spectrum as a "non-politician". His own initial election in 2014 actually broke a 5 decade precedent of incumbent governors who opted to run for a 2nd term and who always got re-elected, when he beat his GOP predecessor Tom Corbett, making him a 1-term governor.
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