The bloom is off the rose. The honeymoon is over. The Democratic Party seems determined to divorce John Fetterman. Following a report from the Wall Street Journal that showed, largely using leaked messages from aggrieved Fetterman staffers, that the Senator routinely blew off constituent meetings and the day-to-day business of the Senate, the party is howling for blood.

On X, Democratic representative Brendan Boyle called Fetterman “a disgrace”. Rep. Chris Deluzio described his behaviour as a senator “pathetic”.

What’s so striking about this is how quickly Fetterman’s star has plummeted. He was the mayor who tattooed both his town’s zip code and the dates of all nine of the murders that happened on his watch on his arms. He was “Rust Belt Cool”: gruff and earthy but staunchly progressive. When it wasn’t entirely clear if Fetterman’s shorts-and-sweatshirts look could pass the informal dress code of the then Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, he instructed the sergeant-at-arms to relax the rules.

The reasons for Fetterman’s fall from grace are complicated. There have always been questions about his work ethic — during his Braddock mayoralty, he regularly skipped council meetings. Then, in the aftermath of the stroke, he suffered severe depression, which led to his admitting himself to Walter Reed Hospital for six weeks in 2023. Then, his positions in office proved very different from what his progressive supporters expected. He announced in 2023 that he was “not a progressive”, telling Bill Maher that that shift was “liberating”. He visited Mar-a-Lago to work on an anti-immigration bill and, most crucially, became an unwavering supporter of Israel, rejecting a possible Israel-Hamas ceasefire by saying “let’s get back to killing”.

Whatever is to be made of Fetterman’s personal travails, the more important consideration here is whether the Democratic Party’s chronic inability to commit itself to winning. When it tries to move beyond its scripted image and connect with real voters, the party finds itself supporting authentic candidates — whether that’s Fetterman or Krysten Sinema with her childhood living in an abandoned gas station, or whether that’s the humble Maine oyster farmer Graham Platner. What’s lost in the Democratic Party’s disillusionment with Fetterman is that he actually has 48% approval statewide and, astonishingly, 77% approval among self-identified Republicans.

Whether or not Fetterman blows off constituent meetings and misses procedural votes, numbers like that should give Democrats pause. The party’s image is of being hopelessly scripted and out-of-touch. The willingness to support more authentic candidates is a healthy electoral impulse. But the thing about authentic people is that they won’t always behave the way you want them to. Sinema voted against raising the minimum wage and abolishing the filibuster, and left the party in 2022. Fetterman wasn’t the cuddly progressive Democratic voters expected him to be. But it’s not entirely clear how much the current attempted divorce is really a referendum on the handling of his job or else is just buyer’s remorse for being saddled with someone who doesn’t fit the mould.

“Pennsylvania voters who elected Mr Fetterman in 2022 knew that he was a gruff guy,” wrote The New York Times. A few of his listed faults are exactly what you would expect from a populist insurgent. What he loses in constituent meetings and ceremonial duties, he gains in bringing back into the fold voters who feel that he looks like them and would never otherwise warm to the Democrats’ corporate vibe.

So Fetterman may not be the world’s best senator, but Democrats may want to think twice about dumping him. The sense is that the new feeling in the party is young far-Left progressives who have so much shine on them that they can win elections through passion and charisma — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed — but, ultimately, that’s just not a viable electoral strategy. To take vital states like Pennsylvania, the party will have to win disaffected white voters. That means running candidates who are angry, outspoken, populist, and who resemble their constituency. Those candidates aren’t all going to be controllable, but Democrats, if they’re serious about winning nationally, will have to accept the risks that come with that territory.