John Fetterman and Republican senator Dave McCormick have officially opened a joint fundraising committee together, because apparently crossing the aisle to vote for Trump's cabinet picks wasn't clear enough. Federal Election Commission records filed Monday show the creation of something called Common Ground PA, a shared fundraising vehicle that benefits both of their campaigns. If you were still holding out hope that Fetterman was playing some kind of long game for the Democratic Party, you can probably let that go now.
What Actually Happened Here
Politico first reported the formation of Common Ground PA this week. The FEC filing identifies the leadership PACs and principal campaign committees for both Fetterman and McCormick as participants in the joint committee. This is not a policy initiative. This is not a bipartisan caucus. This is two senators sharing a fundraising operation, which is the kind of thing you do with political allies.
For context: Fetterman currently has approximately $1.99 million in cash on hand, according to the latest FEC filings. McCormick doesn't face voters again until 2030. Fetterman is up in 2028. The math of who benefits more from this arrangement in the short term is not complicated.
The Friends-to-Running-Mates Pipeline
Fetterman and McCormick have been loudly, publicly chummy for a while now. Last month, the Guardian reports, the two appeared together in Philadelphia to encourage Pennsylvania parents to sign their kids up for Trump accounts. You know, just two pals hanging out, promoting the financial agenda of the administration one of them is actively supporting and the other is nominally opposing.
Fetterman has described McCormick as a close friend. McCormick has returned the sentiment. This is the kind of cross-party bromance that cable news producers love and that Democratic base voters in Pennsylvania are going to have a harder and harder time swallowing as 2028 approaches.
The Long List of Things That Got Us Here
Let's be specific, because vague gestures at Fetterman's "rightward shift" undersell how far he has actually traveled. According to the Guardian, since Trump began his second term, Fetterman has been the only Democrat to support several of Trump's cabinet confirmations. He has backed parts of the administration's immigration enforcement agenda. He has supported the U.S. war with Iran. Each of those, individually, would be a significant break. All of them together is a pattern.
This is the same guy who in 2016 was a vocal progressive, an early Bernie Sanders backer, who wore hoodies to Senate hearings and was held up as proof that Democrats could win working-class voters by being authentically weird and actually left-wing. That person and the person who just co-signed a fundraising committee with a Trump-aligned Pennsylvania Republican are technically the same human being. One of them seems to be winning.
Democrats Are Saying the Quiet Part Loud
The reaction from people who actually work in Democratic politics has been notably direct. Democratic strategist Mike Nellis told the Guardian that Democrats should simply assume Fetterman "is a Republican going forward, and we can't rely on his vote, especially when it comes to judges." That is not a hedged statement. That is a professional Democrat writing off a sitting Democratic senator.
Rick Wilson, the anti-Trump Republican consultant and Lincoln Project co-founder, predicted on social media that Fetterman is going to flip parties outright. Pennsylvania political writer Nick Field wrote that Fetterman caucusing with Republicans in 2027 and even running in 2028 with their support "looks likelier and likelier by the day." When the people whose job it is to spin things favorably have stopped spinning, that's information.
What Fetterman Says About All of This
Fetterman, for his part, is maintaining that he has no plans to leave the Democratic Party. In a Washington Post opinion piece in May, he wrote: "Being an independent voice that works with the other side to deliver for Pennsylvanians might put me at odds with the party that I have stayed committed to and have no plans to leave. Plus, I'd be a terrible Republican who still votes overwhelmingly with Democrats."
That last line is doing a lot of work. "I vote overwhelmingly with Democrats" is the kind of defense you deploy when you need the bar to be "not quite a Republican yet." It is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Democratic values. A Quinnipiac poll from February found that 46% of Pennsylvania voters approve of Fetterman's job performance, which is majority-adjacent but not exactly a mandate. McCormick, for comparison, sits at 37% approval. Neither of them is setting the commonwealth on fire with enthusiasm.
The Dingo Take
Here is what is genuinely maddening about the Fetterman situation. He is not wrong that Democrats need to find ways to talk to voters who aren't already on their side. He is not wrong that rigid partisan loyalty for its own sake can be a trap. Those are real things. The problem is that "being an independent voice" has cashed out, in practice, as supporting Trump's cabinet, backing immigration enforcement crackdowns, endorsing a war, and now literally pooling campaign money with a Republican senator. At some point the gap between the branding and the behavior becomes impossible to bridge with a Washington Post op-ed.
The Democratic Party has spent years tying itself in knots trying to figure out what to do with Fetterman because he won a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, which is genuinely hard to do, and because his celebrity-progressive 2022 campaign felt like proof of something. But winning once does not make someone a strategic asset forever, particularly when they spend the intervening years giving Republicans everything they want and asking Democrats to be grateful he hasn't formally switched his registration yet.
Common Ground PA is not a policy statement. It is a fundraising committee. And fundraising committees exist to get people re-elected. The question Democrats in Pennsylvania need to answer, probably soon, is whether they want to spend the next two years pretending a joint Fetterman-McCormick fundraising operation is something other than what it obviously is. The money is already flowing. The paperwork is already filed. At this point, the only thing left to update is the voter registration.
