Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) told podcaster Joe Rogan that former President Donald Trump continues to connect with people in his home state of Pennsylvania in a different way from previous Republican candidates.
Political prognosticators have pointed to Pennsylvania as being critical to Vice President Kamala Harris’ pathway to 270 electoral college votes as the public heads to the polls next week.
However, Democrat Senator John Fetterman has warned that former President Donald Trump’s economically populist message continues to resonate in the heartland of the Rust Belt state, an area which has been ravaged by globalist policies of deindustrialization and offshoring of businesses to countries like Communist China.
Speaking to Joe Rogan, Sen. Fetterman said that he was early in noticing that Trump was connecting in a new way to Pennsylvania voters, which he said should have been more concerning to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, which ultimately lost the battleground state to Trump.
“I’ll never forget, it was June in 2016, and I was a surrogate for Clinton, and Trump announced, ‘I’m showing up in a town called Monessen’, which is a small steel town in the valley down from ours, and I’m like why is he showing up [there], I mean that’s not… so either he’s crazy, or they’ve plugged into something,” Fetterman said.
The Pennsylvania senator said that while more establishment Republican candidates like Mitt Romney would win more rural counties of the state by margins of 50 or 60 percent, Trump was able to increase the vote share to around 80 percent. This, Fetterman said, is how he was able to overcome the strong support for Clinton in urban centres like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Trump’s message “resonated, and you started to see a lot of the signs and a lot of the energy,” the senator said.
Fetterman’s willingness to sit down for over two hours with Rogan contrasts starkly with Vice President Kamala Harris’s refusal to speak with the country’s top podcaster after Donald Trump’s viral appearance on the show.
According to Rogan, the Harris campaign demanded that the interview be held outside of his studio in Austin, Texas and that the discussion be considerably shorter than normal episodes of the programme. Rogan said that he would not abide by the conditions demanded by the campaign.
Earlier this week, Fetterman predicted that Harris would win his state. However, the Pennsylvania senator said per CBS that it would be “very, very close. ” He explained that “all the time I spend going across Pennsylvania, visual, it’s jarring and surprising the level of kinds of devotion” to Trump.
Last month, a survey from the Center for Working-Class Politics and YouGov found that Trump is leading Harris among union workers and people with manual labour jobs in Pennsylvania.
According to the poll, the former president 47 percent to 43 percent advantage among current and former union workers. Meanwhile, Mr Trump is favoured by manual workers by 20 points, 56 to 36 percent, respectively.
