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Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman

As the Pennsylvania Democrat increasingly is isolated within his own party, Republicans are quietly trying to win him over.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) speaks with reporters after a briefing from Trump administration officials on the U.S. strikes on Iran at the U.S. Capitol on March 3, 2026. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

By Jonathan Martin05/04/2026 05:55 AM EDT

Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.

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.

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

The political environment is curdling for Republicans, and the quiet campaign to lure Fetterman across the aisle is underway.

Trump has made the sell, offering his patented total and complete endorsement plus a financial windfall to the Pennsylvanian. A handful of Senate Republicans are also gently feeling out Fetterman and responding to his concerns over the prospect of defecting from the Democratic Party, multiple high-level GOP officials tell me.

If Fetterman does flip, according to officials who were given anonymity to talk about sensitive matters, it will be thanks in large part to his deepening friendship with a pair of senators and their high-profile spouses: Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and his wife Dina, and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), and her husband, Wesley.

But the first-term Democrat — who’s infuriated his party with his harder line on immigration and staunch support for Israel, Trump nominees, government funding bills and most recently the president’s ballroom — isn’t yet persuaded.

“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.”

There are his votes against big-ticket measures, such as last year’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, but also his liberal views on a raft of cultural issues.

There’s something else, too: Fetterman has watched how his Republican colleagues who break from Trump, at different levels, have been treated.

“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 aforementioned OBBB.

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Fetterman has raised these same doubts about how welcome he’d be as a Republican to his GOP colleagues, too, I’m told by sources briefed on the conversations.

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.) Senate Republicans have reminded the Pennsylvanian that there are members of their conference who are more moderate on each of those issues.

Trump, who knows a thing or two about party switching, has also gotten in on the action. He’s told one GOP senator he prefers Fetterman making the full conversion to Republican, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

And Trump has said, if Fetterman does, he’d reciprocate. In his typical unsubtle fashion, the president conveyed as much to Sean Hannity in March and asked Hannity to play intermediary.

When Fetterman sat for an interview with the Fox host the next day, Hannity delivered the pitch, recounting Trump’s marching orders nearly verbatim.

“‘Your job is to tell him: He’s gonna run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big,’” Hannity told Fetterman, recalling Trump’s instructions.

Fetterman didn’t respond to Trump’s authorized offer, but, when asked how Democrats treat him, notably said: “They don’t mistreat me, but I think increasingly they’re suspicious or kinda standoffish.”

In our conversation, Fetterman was much more eager to discuss how his support for Israel is the root of Democratic anger at him than he was his political future.

Whenever he’s asked — in public or private — about a switch, he invariably cites two statistics to explain how baffled he is about why people would even ask the question.

There’s his record of voting with Democrats 93 percent of the time and the running joke he has with McCormick about how he, Fetterman, somehow polls better with Republicans than the state’s actual GOP senator.

Fetterman, however, is shrewd enough of a political operator to know exactly why he’s alienated his party and become a Republican favorite. It may have started by standing with Israel when most of his colleagues became horrified with the Likud government’s actions in Gaza following Hamas’ 2023 attack.

But Fetterman has since exacerbated the situation by conducting himself in these tribal times in ways that please the right and anger the left: He largely ignores Trump’s transgressions, finds ways to support the White House in high-profile moments and is increasingly ubiquitous when criticizing his own party on right-coded media in ways that affirm conservative views about liberal excess.

In the modern information environment, this posture, of course, plays a far bigger role in shaping his political image than the totality of his voting record.

Where Fetterman does not play the fool is on his potential leverage in the chamber. He brought up the Democrats-net-four-seats scenario without my prompting, all but taunting his current party about how much they may soon need his vote.

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“If we flip four seats in the Senate, who is the number 51 for the new majority?” he asked, alluding to himself.

Top Democrats are publicly mum about the flight risk in their caucus because they’re alarmed about spooking him.

“I’m not commenting on that,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told me when I outlined the risk of Fetterman deserting should Democrats win 51 seats in the midterms.

Schumer has, I’m told by other Senate Democrats, tried to sustain a relationship with Fetterman, recognizing that a cold shoulder in person could only prompt him to take the left’s online derision to heart.

Other Democratic senators allow there’s a chance Fetterman may bolt, but put the likelihood relatively low — similar to the possibility that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) may become a Democrat or independent.

There are, however, at least two reasons to think Fetterman may be more likely than his GOP colleague to drop his party label (in addition to Murkowski’s seniority and her good-for-Alaska role as a swing Republican floor vote).

First, the Senate is akin to a high school cafeteria. And Fetterman these days is much more comfortable sitting, quite literally, with the Republicans. He never shows up for Democrat-only gatherings, such as the caucus’s regular luncheons.

Fetterman gets along well with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the two text one another regularly. Yet the GOP leader has largely let Britt and McCormick handle the Keystone account.

Watch: The Conversation

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After resisting it because he didn’t want to prompt chatter, Fetterman has now started to hang out in the Senate GOP cloakroom during long votes. For a time, he would remain alone and spend time between votes reading through his phone until Britt came out to join him for meals. This was a way he didn’t have to enter either party’s mini-Capitol clubhouse. Now, though, Fetterman is spending hours with Senate Republicans in their cloakroom and in some leadership offices.

Recently, he was present in the GOP cloakroom when a conversation — which included Baptist-pastor-turned-Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) — turned toward the theological, and the socially liberal Fetterman got a look on his face that said, ‘Is that what you guys talk about here?’ one GOP lawmaker recounted.

This may sound like so much congressional gossip. But the higher one climbs in politics, the more personal it often becomes. That’s never been truer than in the Trump era. It may seem paradoxical given the stakes of the present — massive challenges at home and abroad and a president bent on consolidating power and punishing enemies — but I’ve witnessed the same pattern for the last decade.

It goes like this: The more one drifts from their political tribe, the more they’re scorned and mocked by that tribe, often in personal terms. This only prompts the person drifting away to accelerate their turn and adopt the language, customs and some positions of the other tribe with an I’ll-show-them determination. Soon, they’re identifying somewhat or entirely with the new tribe. The path only goes in one direction.

Fetterman could be the poster child for this pattern. He’s a contrarian by nature — he grew up in a Republican household. Plus, Fetterman has seen how much publicity he can draw for himself and how much it enrages his own party when he, say, accuses Democrats of having Trump Derangement Syndrome and endorses Trump’s elephantine East Wing addition.

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As he’s drifted from the party line, Fetterman has become increasingly isolated. He’s suffered a massive staff exodus — his former scheduler is now his chief of staff — and those who previously worked for him say he spends much of his time on social media. Fetterman wants to know how he’s playing.

“It’s a one-two punch,” said Adam Jentleson, Fetterman’s first Senate chief of staff who has publicly spoken out against his old boss, describing how the senator craves the scroll. “He gets the praise dopamine hit and the anger-at-criticism one.”

The former aides and Pennsylvania Democrats say he rarely participates in the unglamorous work of a senator: showing up for ribbon-cuttings around his home state or racing between committee hearings in Washington. Fetterman turned heads last year when he didn’t attend an announcement in Berwick that Amazon had made the largest private investment in Pennsylvania history. It wasn’t at all surprising at home, though: He has a cool relationship with Gov. Josh Shapiro and barely interacts with the state’s Democratic congressional delegation.

He does, though, spend considerable time with Republicans, particularly the affable Britts and McCormicks, who’ve all but adopted Fetterman and his wife, Gisele.

Classmates together in 2022, Britt bonded with Fetterman early, when he was seen as far more of a liberal. The two cemented their friendship when Britt visited her colleague after he entered Walter Reed hospital to address mental health challenges. They already had a natural kinship because the 6’8” Fetterman had bonded with the 6’8” Wesley Britt, a former NFL offensive lineman. Fetterman calls Wesley “The Big Unit™” in their group text chats, Britt shared last week at a joint appearance with the two senators moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker.

“They’re America’s family,” Fetterman said of the Britts at the discussion.

It was an event dedicated to finding “Common Ground,” and it was the latest in the burgeoning bipartisan buddy show Britt and Fetterman have started.

He spends just as much time with the McCormicks. Fetterman has attended Washington social functions as a guest of his fellow Pennsylvania senator and, a day after his appearance with Britt last week, he sat on stage with Dina Powell McCormick, a Meta executive, at a luncheon conversation dedicated to artificial intelligence.

Oh, and the night that Fetterman was with Britt in Washington, the McCormicks were posing for selfies with Gisele Fetterman on one of the biggest nights of the year in Pittsburgh, ancestral and adopted yinzers happily playing host to the NFL draft.

The friendship is in plain view, and the subtle courtship is just below the surface.

Delivering Fetterman would be a coup for both GOP senators, particularly if the Pennsylvanian is the deciding vote for Republicans to hold power. McCormick and Britt are both ambitious, talented and young enough to have a future either in their conference leadership or on their party’s presidential ticket.

Some Republicans believe Fetterman is unlikely to make the complete party switch. The more likely prospect, they say, is that Fetterman becomes an independent who caucuses with the GOP, or simply casts his vote to ensure Thune remains majority leader. Ensuring Republican control of the Senate floor could be especially critical should there be a Supreme Court vacancy in Trump’s final two years.

That, also, may mark the end of Fetterman’s tenure. He won’t say if he’ll even seek re-election in 2028. He dodges the question whenever he’s asked.

Many Democrats, in Pennsylvania and Washington, argue persuasively that he doesn’t like the job, and the story ends with Fetterman remaining in the party and simply not running again. That way, he could continue to be the Democrat-who-attacks-Democrats, maximizing his invitations from Fox News, for whom his internecine criticism is both brave and good box office.

If he does decide to run again as a Democrat, he’d face a forbidding primary stocked with well-funded opponents, potentially including former Rep. Conor Lamb, his 2022 primary foe, and a canny congressman with a Philadelphia base, Rep. Brendan Boyle.

If Fetterman bolts, the looming question is: What deal could he cut with Republicans? Thune and Trump may be more apt to promise their full-fledged support, including a vow to clear the 2028 GOP primary field, if Fetterman joins the GOP. McCormick has already told people he won’t oppose Fetterman in a Republican primary.

Last month, the chair of the Pennsylvania GOP, Greg Rothman, sounded welcoming notes.

On “the things that matter most right now, John Fetterman is with us,” Rothman said, adding that Fetterman “supported most of President Trump’s nominees, which is a big deal.”

None of this, though, may be enough to clear Fetterman’s path. A Democrat who trolls his own party may be less appealing to Republican voters when he’s just another Republican, and with a host of unorthodox positions.

Fetterman doesn’t have to look far to find an eerily similar situation.

In 2009, another contrarian and often irascible Pennsylvania senator, Arlen Specter, concluded he couldn’t win a Republican primary the following year and became a Democrat. That put his new party closer to a filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority. The switch, as he memorably declared on camera, would “enable me to be re-elected.”

Not so much. Specter had the support of the Obama White House and much of Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment, but still lost his primary by more than seven points.

The other recent precedent was in 2001, when then-Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords flipped from being a Republican to an independent who caucused with Democrats. That broke the chamber’s 50-50 deadlock, and the de facto majority the GOP had because they held the vice-presidency, and handed Democrats a one-seat majority for the remainder of the Congress.

While Jeffords cited policy differences, he, too, felt socially ostracized by his old party, including a guest list snub when a Vermont teacher was honored at the White House. Jeffords never ran again.

Fetterman could try following the Jeffords model (albeit the mirror opposite): becoming an independent and foregoing a primary altogether in 2028. Lacking a political home would make fundraising an immense challenge, but he may be able to tap into pro-Israel donors who find themselves politically homeless today.

Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine have won multiple reelections as independents who caucus with Democrats. However, that’s in part because they’ve established de facto non-aggression pacts with their home-state Democrats while maintaining support from their Democratic colleagues in the capital.

Could a recently-declared independent Fetterman pull off something similar in Pennsylvania in this polarized era? It would depend on what signals Trump sends (and how much he still controls his party’s primaries in 2028).

But what’s clear is that Fetterman’s unpopularity among Democrats means he would have a better chance to return to the Senate as an independent or a Republican than in his current party.

As one GOP senator cracked to me: “I’d have a better shot at winning a Democratic primary there” than Fetterman does.Filed Under:

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