‘Stomach-churning’: How Fetterman survived a stroke — and more — to beat Oz

PHILADELPHIA — In a cramped, bare-bones campaign office in downtown Philadelphia adorned with a poster of the city’s shaggy-haired, Cheeto-colored mascot Gritty, John Fetterman’s top aides gathered to discuss a problem that could sink the campaign: Their candidate was getting badly outspent on TV, and they were desperate for ways to halt it.

It was late summer, and GOP super PACs had been torching the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate hopeful, casting him as a lunatic who wanted to throw open the prison gates to release convicted murderers.

The commercials were everywhere. And polls were tightening, as reporters were asking more and more questions about his aides' least favorite topic: Fetterman’s stroke.

It was a long way from earlier in the year, when Fetterman was crushing Republican Mehmet Oz by double digits in the polls, and when every headline was about crudité or Snooki or something else unflattering for Oz. The Democrat even created an internal chat room solely dedicated to trolling the celebrity doctor.

Fetterman and his Democratic allies were already spending $2 million a week on TV ads. But Republicans were starting to double that, leaving the GOP’s ad blitz swamping them on the airwaves.

Brendan McPhillips, Fetterman’s campaign manager, weighed the options with his team. On a Zoom call with staff and consultants, they determined the campaign had to significantly step up its spending to simply survive the next few weeks, never mind actually match the GOP. Doing so would mean tapping funds earmarked for the final weeks of the race — robbing Peter to pay Paul — and counting on outside groups to swoop in and spend more on commercials in October, at the moment when many voters would be making up their minds.

They decided to take the leap.

“We made the decision to basically empty our bank account and just compete as best we could,” McPhillips said. The Fetterman campaign doubled the amount it was spending on television each week, from $800,000 to $1.5 million — and increased it even more in the weeks thereafter. “Essentially the strategy became: Stay alive until October.”

It was “stomach-churning,” McPhillips recalled. Payments to consultants had to be deferred. But Fetterman had to do something about the attacks. The fresh funding paid for more ads in which the 6-foot-8, bald-headed, tatted-up politician talked about taking on crime as the former mayor of a steel town and sought to emasculate Oz by portraying him as an elitist from New Jersey.

“Doc Oz, in his Gucci loafers, is attacking me on crime. Dr. Oz wouldn't last two hours here in Braddock,” one of the ads said.

The gamble paid off: When Election Day came, Fetterman not only flipped a GOP-held seat blue, but he also upended Republicans’ hopes of a massive sweep of the Senate map and complicated their path to winning a majority.

And Fetterman did it as Democrats across the country stared down what looked like impossible headwinds. Faced with 40-year-high inflation, sky-high murder rates and President Joe Biden’s deep unpopularity, the state’s lieutenant governor eked out an unlikely victory in part by mounting an aggressive, early defense against soft-on-crime attacks and building a brand as an outsider populist.

The contest in the Keystone State — a clash between two giant, disparate personalities — was the most expensive and most-talked about race this year.

Fetterman defied the conventional wisdom that voters punish candidates from the president’s party in midterm elections. He overcame his health ailments by connecting with voters who also had similar struggles. And he capitalized on his opponent’s unique weaknesses, harnessed small-dollar donors and fired up a base that was infuriated by the end of Roe v. Wade — and looking for a way to send a message.

'He's back, baby'

Fetterman had to do something to show voters he cared about the high prices lighting up Pennsylvania’s grocery shelves. And he had to do it when his party had complete control of Washington — both houses of Congress and the presidency. If voters didn’t like what was happening in the economy, Democrats were all but certain to take the blame.

In early June, a few weeks after his stroke, Fetterman got on a video chat with his communication director using closed captions, which enabled him to understand the conversation despite the auditory processing difficulties he had suffered. Joe Calvello had been in the hospital with Fetterman in the immediate days after he had nearly died. But this was one of the longest conversations he had with him since the health setback — and, according to Calvello, it was all about inflation.

“It was the first time post-stroke where I was like, he's back, baby. We were talking about corporate greed, talking about price gouging,” he said. “And talking about the reality of, ‘This is going to be tough to talk about as a Democrat.'”

That was an understatement: Most voters across the country believed the U.S. was in a recession. Through that conversation and the many others that would follow, the campaign settled on a strategy to weather that strong tide by seizing on one of Oz’s ultimate top weaknesses: his paper-thin ties to the state. The thinking went that if Fetterman’s team could show that the Donald Trump-endorsed Republican was a wealthy, out-of-touch carpetbagger who didn’t understand average Pennsylvanians, then it could make the case that he wouldn’t fight for average Pennsylvanians when it came to inflation, either.

“Democrats were in the shitter,” said Calvello. “But if we can say, ‘Look, this guy doesn't even know how to fucking shop’” — a reference to an infamous video that Oz shot where he called a vegetable tray “crudité” and garbled the name of the supermarket — “it helps you push back against the economy.”

Fetterman also ran ads that distanced himself from Democrats in the capitol, acknowledging that the economy was “a mess because of Washington” and blaming supply chain and inflation issues on the rich and powerful, the insiders and lobbyists. In another, Fetterman’s campaign featured a worker lambasting D.C. for attacking small towns — while promising the Democratic candidate would fight for higher wages and “good American jobs."

Fetterman’s aides said the commercials, which were in large part funded by his loyal army of small-dollar contributors, served another purpose: As he was sidelined from the campaign trail for months as he recovered from his stroke, they acted as a critical way for him to communicate with voters.

His team said he was adamant that they go up on television early in the general election for that reason. And they had lucked out: Days before his stroke, at which point the primary hadn’t ended and they didn’t know who his GOP opponent would be, they shot footage of him bashing Oz direct-to-camera that could be used in ads over the summer when Fetterman was out of commission.

Schoolboy antics

At the same time, Fetterman’s campaign hustled to win the narrative in mainstream media. And at first they did: Headline after headline marveled at Fetterman’s schoolboy antics trolling Oz on Twitter.

One moment that took off was when the Fetterman campaign tweeted a video of Snooki, the reality TV personality who starred on Jersey Shore, ridiculing Oz: “I heard that you moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to look for a new job.” The team had gotten it through Cameo, which allows users to pay for famous people to record personalized videos for them.

Fetterman adviser Rebecca Katz said the campaign originally tried to get the Situation, another Jersey Shore star, to do the bit. But “it was terrible,” she said. “He was like, ‘Good luck, Mehmet. We’re rooting for you.’ It was all wrong.” So they went for Snooki instead. Her video landed in their inboxes during a meeting. “We were all screaming,” said Katz.

But trolling Oz as a campaign strategy only worked for so long. Frustrated by the success Fetterman seemed to be having conducting Google Meet calls from inside his home, the Oz camp made direct appeals to media to begin asking questions about Fetterman’s health: Why wasn't he campaigning more, if he was 90 percent recovered? And why wasn't his team being more forthcoming about his medical history?

In time, the Oz campaign’s relentless summer attempt at a narrative shift paid off for them. A steady stream of news outlets continued to grill Fetterman about when he would face Oz in a debate, replacing the early-summer headlines of pop culture icons criticizing the celebrity doctor. Eventually, editorial boards also called on him to release his medical records and to agree to an immediate debate to demonstrate that he had made a good recovery.

But Democratic colleagues stood by Fetterman — and held out hope that voters would sympathize with him despite his lingering troubles. Sen. Gary Peters, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said he spoke with Fetterman frequently throughout the race: “And as I talked to him I could see him getting better.”

JB Poersch, president of the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC, said that when he first learned of Fetterman’s stroke, he thought that instead of seeing Fetterman as unfit, voters could sympathize with his plight: “Pennsylvanians would understand,” he said, “because we’ve got to deal with it in our own families.”

Still, Fetterman caved to the pressure from Oz. After weeks of stonewalling, he committed in September to a televised matchup. When the debate took place in late October, the decision appeared to have been a miscalculation. Despite help from a closed captioning system, Fetterman’s speech was halting and hard to follow. What followed was the most negative press of Fetterman’s campaign: a candidate struggling to speak, and Republicans relishing it.

'Hard to watch'

After pummeling Fetterman for months with ads hitting him as soft on crime and “far-left,” Republicans decided to aim to disqualify him by focusing on his health. Within days of the October debate, GOP super PACs began launching commercials focusing on his shaky performance.

“That was hard to watch,” a television news commentator said in the opening seconds of the first ad.

The next day, another hit: Fetterman stumbling through an answer about fracking, which not only highlighted that he had reversed his past position against the method of extracting natural gas that employs tens of thousands in Pennsylvania, but also showed him struggling to get out a complete sentence.

The post-debate ad blitz by the GOP came at a cost: The Senate Leadership Fund, which is closely tied to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, paid for it by pulling its remaining $6 million of ad reservations in a state many saw as a pick-up opportunity, New Hampshire, to go all-in on stopping Fetterman instead.

Fetterman prepared for the debate for weeks. He participated in mock debates. And according to several people on his team, he performed well in them, despite how he came across during the live event.

“Honestly, some of John's performance was nerves,” said McPhillips, Fetterman’s campaign manager. “And nerves and anxiety trigger more of the speech problems.”

McPhillips thought at the time that the impact of the debate was “minimal.” After all, Oz had had actually gifted Democrats with a gaffe of his own: During the debate, he said “local political leaders” should help decide abortion policy. Fetterman’s campaign stayed up late cutting a TV ad focusing on it, which McPhillips said he signed off on “at 2:10 a.m. or something.”

Many political insiders in both parties believed that Oz, who had spent the better part of two decades on television, had momentum after the debate. The polls were showing it a neck-and-neck race.

Drags and gaffes

But Oz faced yet another problem: Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee running far to the right of Oz, had been a drag on the Republican ticket throughout the campaign. Retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey, who campaigned on Oz’s behalf, said before polls closed on Tuesday that if Mastriano lost by double digits — which he ended up doing — it would amount to “a lot of headwinds to overcome.”

Fetterman had his own drag, too — the President of the United States.

Joe Biden campaigned in Pennsylvania the weekend before the election, even as Fetterman’s team recommended against it, according to three people familiar with the conversations. They knew that the president’s popularity was dismal with many Pennsylvanians, and that Fetterman would do better keeping his brand at a remove from Washington. His staff wanted former President Barack Obama to be the campaign closer who would appear alongside Fetterman in the race’s final days.

“There were times it was very frustrating that they would not let us be,” said a senior Fetterman aide of the White House. Added another top Fetterman staffer: “When we were asking for distance, it wasn't anything personal or that people don't like him. It was important for us to make sure that we're not nationalizing the campaign.”

Fetterman ultimately joined both Biden and Obama at a rally in Philadelphia. Another source familiar with the event said that the Pennsylvania Democrat told Biden “he couldn’t believe how much he’s done for him and how thankful he is.”

By the time the election arrived, the Biden appearance appeared to have done more good than harm — or perhaps voters decided that the man who doesn’t look or talk like a typical politician is not Biden.

“It's a basic connection that he's made to voters. And in the end, that's the difference,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), said of Fetterman. “You can't necessarily describe it perfectly or there's no data point that says ‘a-ha, there's the number that explains it.’ But he connects to voters in a way that a lot of candidates don't.”

The fact that the Supreme Court ended the national right to an abortion also appeared to have boosted Fetterman.

During the campaign, Fetterman pledged to be a vote in the Senate toward ending the filibuster to pass legislation to codify Roe v. Wade. And when exit polls were released on Election Day, more Pennsylvania voters rated abortion as their top issue than crime or inflation, and three out of four of those voters chose Fetterman.

In the end, it seems, Oz's gaffes in the debate may be been more meaningful than Fetterman's.

“It turns out," said Katz, "that most Pennsylvanians didn’t agree with Oz that abortion is a decision best made by women, their doctors and local political leaders.”

Marianne Levine contributed to this report.