JOHN FETTERMAN IS A PSYOP

Politico's Jonathan Martin thinks Senator John Fetterman might switch parties.

It’s a few days after the election this November, and the results have become clear: Democrats have netted the four seats they need to claim a Senate majority.

But then there’s a disturbance in the force: Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump persuade Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to switch parties or at least become an independent to ensure Republicans retain power in the chamber.

It’s a scenario that’s becoming less fantastical by the day.

Fetterman says he won't:

“I’m not changing,” Fetterman told me in an interview Friday when I asked if he was ruling out both becoming a Republican or turning independent. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one. “

Yet, at least in private, he’s not totally rejecting dropping his “D.”

When one senior Republican recently brought up the idea of becoming an independent to Fetterman, he absorbed the suggestion and didn’t embrace or reject the overture, according to a GOP official familiar with the conversation.

In our interview, Fetterman said bluntly: “I’d be a shitty Republican.” ...

“Committed conservatives like Cassidy and Tillis are getting pushed out of their seats,” he noted. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021, and the president is now targeting him in his primary. And Tillis announced his retirement after clashing with Trump over the [One Big Beautiful Bill]....

If Republicans can’t tolerate even Tillis, Fetterman suggested, how would they accept somebody who supports abortion rights, gay rights, legalizing marijuana and is pro-labor? (He flies the pride flag outside his Senate office.)

Fetterman could decide to stop calling himself a Democrat, but my guess is that he won't. The reason has nothing to do with ideology. It's all because Fetterman is perceived as more useful to the right-wing media (and thus to the GOP) if he remains a nominal Democrat.

Fetterman is just the latest in a series of "Fox News Democrats" or "Fox News liberals" -- figures who are registered Democrats but regularly agree with right-wing talking points. Fox has been promoting such figures for a long time -- here's a piece about Fox News Democrats from 2012:

Fox News co-host and contributor Bob Beckel has called for the assassination of WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange (“A dead man can’t leak stuff”—Follow the Money, 12/6/10), for furnishing guns to school children (“If you give your kid a gun, no bullying”—Five, 1/5/12) and for militant opposition to the “War on Christmas,” which is “completely out of hand” (Five, 12/9/11)....

But Beckel is presented as a left-leaning voice on Fox, a counterweight to the network’s army of right-leaning talkers. And he’s far from an atypical specimen there....

For years, Susan Estrich, former campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, was one of Fox’s leading tepid liberals. (Sean Hannity—Hannity & Colmes, 5/23/04—has called her “my favorite liberal.”) ... During the 2003 California gubernatorial campaign, Estrich defended candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger against charges he had physically assaulted numerous women ...; after he won, Estrich accepted a job working on his transition team....

Fox News contributor and former Clinton White House special counsel Lanny Davis (FoxNews.com, 10/6/11) wrote a paean to an arch-conservative political organizer, headlined “I’m a Democrat and I Respect Grover Norquist.” Davis recounted how the anti-tax crusader had set him straight on the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover’s liberal economic lunacy, and ended by praising Norquist’s love for his family: “But it’s not possible for anyone to be anything but a good person who has such love and devotion to his wife and his children.”

The piece lists other self-styled Democrats who regularly seconded right-wing arguments at the time: Zell Miller, Juan Williams, Doug Schoen, Alan Colmes.

Fake Democrats are such a regular feature on Fox that "Fox News liberal" shows up in online encyclopedias of TV tropes, such as Tropedia:

Also known as a conservative Democrat or a DINO (Democrat In Name Only), a Fox News Liberal is a character who allegedly provides political balance in the narrative.... They can be presented as the Only Sane Man in their party, and their criticisms of said party can also evoke from those in the prevailing party that "See? Even this die-hard ... liberal thinks that their party has gone way too far and become way too extreme. *sigh* If only the rest of their party could be as reasonable as they are, they wouldn't be in such bad shape". In particularly extreme versions of this trope, the character forsakes their own beliefs as a means of Character Development, claiming their party line has "gone too far".

TV Tropes adds:

It's also very common for them to admit the solutions proposed by people with (what their superiors consider to be) the 'correct' political views are basically good and desirable, but quibble about the details or minutiae of their 'correct' policies.

Fox News Democrats are meant to be a gateway drug for Democratic audience members. (According to Pew, 18% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say they regularly get news from Fox.) These audience members are expected to watch Fox News Dems and think, Wow, even members of my own party think Democratic officeholders and candidates are radical and weird. The goal is to get these viewers to switch parties, or at least vote GOP some of the time.

Fox and the GOP clearly think that the psyop is more effective if the on-screen critic of Democrats remains a registered Democrat, which is why these people claim to be Democrats long after it becomes obvious to more sophisticated viewers that they've switched teams. Alan Dershowitz, for instance, was a Fox News Democrat for more than a decade. Here's a clip from 2015 titled "Megyn Kelly, Alan Dershowitz Rip Liberal Fascism on Campuses: 'These Students Are Book Burners'":



Dershowitz kept up this "I'm a Democrat, but..." charade until last month, when he made his affiliation with the GOP official. (Dershowitz will turn 88 later this year. I guess he's aging out of this role.)

So Fetterman is perceived as a more useful Republican propagandist if he continues to call himself a Democrat. But what about the Senate? Won't the party want him to switch if it prevents Democrats from taking over?

I wonder if Republicans are weighing the publicity risk of a perceived betrayal of voters vs. Fetterman's usefulness as a saboteur. They might think Democrats voters will take to the streets in large numbers if it's clear they've voted for a Democratic Senate and Fetterman's party switch prevents that. There might be intense pressure on him to resign so he can be replaced by an actual Democrat.

By contrast, if he stays in the party, Democrats run the Senate -- and Fetterman, like Joe Manchin and Kysten Sinema before him, can make the party seem divided and radical. He can still vote for Trump's appointees and judicial nominees, and he will. Between that, the filibuster, and Trump's veto pen, Republicans can limit how much Democrats accomplish, while persuading low-information voters that the country's failing are owned, or at least co-owned, by "the Democrat-controlled Congress."

In any case, Democrats need 52 senators for anything resembling real control. That could happen, but it's a longshot.