Rep. Chris Deluzio is openly campaigning against his own state's Democratic senator, calling John Fetterman absent from Pennsylvania and predicting his political career ends in three years.
The Pittsburgh-area congressman went on CNN Wednesday and delivered the sharpest public rebuke yet from a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat. Sitting across from anchor Jake Tapper, Deluzio said Fetterman has abandoned the state, abandoned the party, and abandoned the people who put him in office.
Deluzio told Tapper that frustration with Fetterman runs deep across the commonwealth, not just among party insiders, but among ordinary voters who expected their senator to show up.
"My constituents and folks all over Pennsylvania are pretty frustrated with John Fetterman. They're pretty disappointed. I've been all over not just my district of Pennsylvania, trying to help us flip the most competitive congressional races. And John Fetterman is nowhere to be found."
That last line landed hard. Deluzio wasn't hedging. He wasn't offering the careful, diplomatic criticism that lawmakers typically reserve for members of their own party. He was making a case, publicly, on national television, that Fetterman has checked out.
And he went further. Deluzio said Democrats across Pennsylvania don't even want Fetterman campaigning alongside them. The senator, he argued, has spent his time appearing on conservative media outlets to criticize his own party rather than doing the work voters sent him to Washington to do.
"And frankly, folks don't want him on the trail. He's spending his time, frankly, going on right-wing media to bash the Democrats."
Deluzio didn't stop at the CNN interview. In a separate statement obtained by The Washington Sun, he issued what amounted to a political death notice for Fetterman's Senate career.
"John Fetterman has failed the Pennsylvanians who elected him.... He's not going to be a Senator after 2028, mark my words."
When Tapper pressed Deluzio on whether he would personally challenge Fetterman in a 2028 Democratic primary, the congressman stopped short of a formal announcement but left little doubt about his intentions. He said he had "gotten a lot of encouragement to do it" and would "make that decision when the time comes."
Earlier in the week, Deluzio had already floated the idea on NewNation's "The Hill Sunday" with host Chris Stirewalt, saying he "might" challenge Fetterman but hadn't "decided that." The trajectory from "might" to "a lot of encouragement" took less than a week. That growing primary challenge appears to be accelerating, not cooling.
For now, Deluzio said his focus is on the competitive races Democrats need to win in the near term. But the groundwork for a direct confrontation in 2028 is being laid in plain sight.
Deluzio's frustration isn't happening in a vacuum. A joint poll conducted by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Siena University found that Fetterman's political identity has essentially inverted. Seventy-three percent of Pennsylvania Republicans now view him favorably. Among Pennsylvania Democrats, that number has cratered to just 22 percent.
Read those numbers again. A sitting Democratic senator is more than three times as popular with Republican voters as with his own party's base. That isn't a minor ideological drift. It is a full realignment in the eyes of the electorate.
AP News reported that Fetterman's favorable rating among registered Pennsylvania Democrats stood at 74 percent as recently as 2024. The collapse to 22 percent represents one of the steepest drops in intra-party approval for any sitting senator in recent memory. Democratic strategist J.J. Abbott told the outlet that Fetterman "is antagonizing Democrats, seemingly for pleasure."
Lori McFarland, the Democratic Party chair in Lehigh County, was even more blunt. "I absolutely think that Fetterman would bring us more harm than good," she said.
Deluzio's criticism also drew on reporting from the Wall Street Journal, which published an investigation alleging that Fetterman skipped meetings with three disabled veterans in order to appear on Fox News. The same report alleged that Fetterman complained about having to meet with representatives from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Those allegations, if accurate, cut directly against the image Fetterman built during his 2022 campaign, a populist champion of working-class Pennsylvanians who would fight for the people Washington forgot. Skipping disabled veterans for a cable news hit is not what voters in steel country signed up for. The details in that exposé painted a picture of a senator who had lost interest in the basic obligations of the job.
Deluzio relayed what he said constituents have told him directly: that Fetterman "doesn't have the respect for the office that he occupies." For a senator who won his seat by running as the anti-establishment everyman, that is a devastating verdict from the people he claimed to represent.
On the same Wednesday that Deluzio was dismantling Fetterman's record on CNN, Fetterman was making an appearance of his own, at the Republicans' midterm convention, where he introduced Republican Sen. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania.
McCormick and Fetterman have developed what has been described as a close relationship, one that has only deepened Fetterman's estrangement from his own party. Fetterman made a video appearance at the GOP convention in Dallas, praising McCormick and pledging to work with President Trump to "defend the steel way of life." That alliance with McCormick has become a central grievance for Pennsylvania Democrats who see their senator cozying up to the opposition while ignoring his own side.
Fetterman has said that the Democratic Party becoming anti-Israel would be a "red line" that could force him out of the party, and he has not fully ruled out switching parties. Yet he has also vowed he will "never" leave the Democratic Party, even as Republicans court him publicly. The contradiction between those two positions has only fueled suspicion among Democrats that Fetterman is playing both sides without committing to either.
The optics of the split screen on Wednesday were impossible to miss. One Pennsylvania Democrat was on CNN explaining why his party's own senator had gone missing. That same senator was across the country, introducing a Republican colleague at a GOP gathering. If Deluzio wanted to make the case that Fetterman has abandoned his party, Fetterman's own schedule made the argument for him.
Deluzio is the first sitting Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania to go this far on the record. But the sentiment he expressed is not isolated. The poll numbers, the party chairs speaking on the record, the strategists offering blunt assessments, all of it points to a Democratic coalition in Pennsylvania that has moved past disappointment with Fetterman and into active opposition.
Fetterman has not publicly responded to Deluzio's CNN interview or the statement obtained by The Washington Sun. Whether he will remains an open question. His pattern in recent months has been to dismiss criticism from the left as proof that he is thinking independently, a framing that plays well on conservative media but does nothing to rebuild trust with the voters who elected him as a Democrat.
Deluzio, for his part, has made clear he sees Fetterman's break with Democrats as permanent and politically fatal. He isn't trying to bring Fetterman back into the fold. He is building the case that Pennsylvania Democrats deserve a senator who actually represents them.
When a party's own members start writing the political obituary out loud, the subject usually deserves it.
