J ohn Fetterman, you may have heard, is not your father’s Democrat. But forget about that. He’s not even your Democrat from 10 years ago. With his 6-foot-8 frame, shaved head, multiple tattoos, goatee, and penchant for wearing shorts and hoodies no matter the occasion or weather, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor looks nothing like Bob Casey, the man he hopes to join in the state’s Senate delegation, let alone Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Chris Dodd, Max Baucus, John Kerry, or Jay Rockefeller, to name a few Democratic senators from 2012.
Now take Val Demings, Sen. Marco Rubio’s challenger in Florida. Demings, who represents Florida’s 10th Congressional District and before that was Orlando’s police chief, could’ve walked straight out of a stock photo or central casting. She looks the part: polished, professional. She has everything, in other words, that Fetterman doesn’t.
Yet despite their considerable superficial differences, beneath the surface, the Floridian and Pennsylvanian are virtually indistinguishable. As are the other Democrats running for Senate this year. Dissimilar as they may be in terms of outward characteristics such as education, employment, and experience, the one thing they have in common is the most important thing of all: Each of them subscribes to the Democratic agenda without exception.
Whether it’s abolishing the filibuster, abortion on demand until birth, government-run healthcare in the form of "Medicare for All" or a so-called public option, a federal takeover of elections, a $15 minimum wage, banning “assault weapons,” or massive giveaways to unions in the form of the PRO Act, there’s not a deviation from the party line to be found. Instead, they’ve promised to be lockstep votes for it.
As a group, Fetterman, Demings, Tim Ryan, Mandela Barnes, and Cheri Beasley couldn’t look less like they were made from the same mold. But appearances can be deceptive. It’s the substance that matters. And these cookies, though they come in different sizes and shapes, were cut from the same sheet.
Fetterman's backstory, as a Harvard graduate who moved to Braddock, an economically distressed small town in western Pennsylvania, and eventually became its mayor before being elected lieutenant governor, has made him the darling of this crop of Senate candidates. As have the tattoos on his left arm of its ZIP code and on his right arm of the dates of homicides that occurred there during his mayoralty. His ceaseless social media trolling of his opponent, celebrity physician Mehmet Oz, is catnip for overly online journalists and Twitter progressives. His decidedly untelegenic appearance has if anything buttressed his image as a nontraditional candidate.
Fetterman, who suffered a severe stroke just before the primary in May and has largely kept out of the public eye since, is a colorful figure. But he is running as a generic liberal. Does he back a $15 minimum wage? At least that much. He is utterly orthodox on abortion, declaring it “nonnegotiable.” Women must “have control over their own bodies and their own lives,” a position that tolerates no restrictions whatsoever. He favors outlawing “military-grade assault weapons.” Fetterman has proclaimed his opposition to banning fracking. Yet he also wants to kill the filibuster, in whose absence a sufficiently large Democratic majority would be able to implement such a ban without his support.
One write-up lumped Fetterman together with his fellow lieutenant governor, Wisconsin’s Barnes, as “progressives who have voiced support for Medicare for All, allied with Bernie Sanders and vowed to end the filibuster.” Unlike the middle-aged and white Fetterman, Barnes is black and young. He was only 31 when Gov. Tony Evers tabbed him as his deputy in 2018 after two terms in Wisconsin’s legislature, making him just the second black person elected to state office in the Badger State.
Barnes’s profile is an atypical one for a senator. Peruse his website , however, and Barnes reveals himself to be a conventional Democrat. He advocates abolishing the filibuster to make “Roe v. Wade the law of the land” by passing the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would do not only that but would eliminate all state restrictions on abortion as well as strip protections from people and organizations that refuse to perform abortions on religious grounds. Like any Democrat in good standing, he wants to overturn Citizens United v. FEC, pass federal legislation to make Election Day a holiday, and force states to expand early and mail-in voting. As a bonus, Barnes also spouts de rigueur progressive platitudes, such as when he decried America’s founding as “awful” at a Fourth of July event.
You won’t find anything so impolitic on the website of Beasley, the Democratic nominee for the seat being vacated by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC). But if you didn’t know it was hers, you’d be hard-pressed to tell whom it belonged to. There’s the rote approval for “expanding the Affordable Care Act with a public option.” The PRO Act, which would overturn state right-to-work laws and tilt the balance in union elections decidedly in labor’s favor, gets its obligatory shoutout. She, too, backs the Women’s Health Protection Act and supports repealing the Hyde Amendment, which bans the federal government from funding abortions. Beasley pledges to “work to end the influence of dark money in politics” by undoing Citizens United. “Cheri supports the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” which if passed would authorize the federal government to seize control of state elections. She even urges passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. The first black woman to become chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court — she lost her reelection bid by 400 votes in 2020 — Beasley is running to be the latest progressive in the Senate.
Demings may have the most impressive CV of this year’s Democratic Senate candidates. She served in the Orlando Police Department for 27 years, becoming its first female chief in 2007. In 2016, the city’s voters sent her to Congress. Already a rising star, Demings attained national prominence in 2020 when she made Joe Biden’s short list for vice president, though her law enforcement background likely doomed her chances in the summer of George Floyd protests.
The 65-year-old Demings is a black career police officer and congresswoman who was the child of a janitor and maid. Yet despite her intriguing biography, Demings is running as just another liberal. She wants to end the filibuster. She co-sponsored Democrats’ unlimited abortion bill. She has voted for every liberal priority that has reached the House floor, including Democrats’ election takeover legislation, each iteration of "Build Back Better," which finally passed as the grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, and a new assault weapons ban . Unlike her potential colleagues, her website is short on specifics and long on glittering generalities. Her voting record, however, speaks loudly and clearly about just what kind of senator she’d be.
No Democratic Senate candidate presents a greater disparity between reputation and reality than Ryan. In 2016, the representative from Ohio’s 13th Congressional District undertook a quixotic bid to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as the House Democrats’ floor leader and followed that with an even more quixotic bid for president that imploded months before the first primary. Now he hopes to parlay his popular image, one built with much media assistance, as Democrats’ great blue-collar hope, a populist who can help his party recapture the ground it has lost with white, working-class voters, into a successful campaign to succeed retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH).
Yet as with the others, Ryan’s voting history betrays any prospect of heterodoxy. He may not want to stand next to Biden in Ohio, but he stands up for him in the House, siding with him 100% of the time this Congress, just as he has with Pelosi. That means he has voted for the progressive agenda lock, stock, and barrel, from unlimited abortion on demand and a federal takeover of elections to reconciliation, union giveaways, and the assault weapons ban. Ryan styles himself as an old-school, blue-collar Ohio Democrat, but you’d never know it from the way he votes.
Ryan & Co. is the Left’s idea of diversity in action. Candidates can be as different as they want in their home states as long as they’re identical in Washington. This principle applies to those seeking to join the Senate as well as to those aiming to remain part of it. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) has an all-American resume: astronaut, husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, and now occupant of the late Sen. John McCain’s seat in Congress's upper chamber. Yet he’s no maverick. There’ll be no thumbs down from him to one of his party’s priorities, not when he votes with Biden 94% of the time , according to FiveThirtyEight. The same is true of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), the country’s first Latina senator who agrees with the president 93% of the time, and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who agrees with the president 96% of the time and preached in the same pulpit as Martin Luther King Jr. before winning a special election in Georgia last year. Whatever their backgrounds and biographies, it’s all left at home when they head to Washington. Hence their uniform support for the main Democratic agenda items: changing the filibuster, enshrining a right to abortion in federal law, federalizing elections, passing huge tax and spending hikes, you name it.
However different in terms of personality, once in office, they’re functionally interchangeable. No one expects them to be another Joe Manchin (D-WV), but they won’t even be a Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), whose unorthodox background — she was a Green Party member and anti-war activist before she entered electoral politics — has produced an unorthodox senator.
This holds for Democrats pursuing office outside Washington, too. Beto O’Rourke ran a great race in 2018, when he nearly pulled off the upset to beat Sen. Ted Cruz with a Texas-centric campaign focused on local concerns. Then, letting his ego get the better of him, he pursued the Democratic presidential nomination. Absorbed into the liberal hivemind as a consequence, he now blurts out snippets of progressive dogma at random as if he were a malfunctioning children’s toy. “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” he shouted during a debate in 2019. This year, he interrupted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at a press conference after the Uvalde massacre and later berated a heckler at a public event. O’Rourke may be running for governor of Texas, but his audience is coastal donors. It’s worked: His vociferous protestations of fealty to the liberal cause have boosted his fundraising to record levels. He’s not alone. His Senate counterparts have been raking in unprecedented amounts of cash as well.
Biden may be president, but the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has shifted dramatically in the direction of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). A quick peek at Democrats’ agenda, in Congress and out, shows it. Ryan wouldn’t have dared to support repealing the Hyde Amendment when he entered Congress a decade ago. Nor would O’Rourke have embraced an assault weapons ban. Today, both are requirements for anyone hoping to woo donors and Democratic primary voters. You once expected that from someone running in California, not Ohio or Texas. But local differences and variations have little place in today’s Democratic Party. Pete Buttigieg was mayor of South Bend, Indiana, but he’s become a national figure because he appeals to national liberals.
An appeal that has made Buttigieg an implausible yet legitimate contender for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. One poll even shows him leading Biden in New Hampshire. In terms of experience, he is easily surpassed by rivals such as Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Both men have been elected statewide and possess qualifications more typical of a presidential candidate. And both are pleasing to progressives in obvious ways. Newsom practically scratches the Democratic id, enacting one progressive initiative after another while suing the Trump administration twice a week. But none of the three would govern differently as president, which is why Buttigieg, whose highest political office is the minor Cabinet post of secretary of transportation and who as mayor had fewer constituents than a New York City councilman, is considered their peer. Indeed, it is arguably the shallowness of his resume that makes him so attractive. Buttigieg checks the right demographic boxes as a younger, gay, white man from the Midwest, but he sits in the Democratic Party’s sweet spot because his profile is ideal for dressing an empty vessel that will reliably pour forth whatever progressive decoctions it is filled with. A sweet spot he shares with this year’s Democratic Senate candidates.
Democrats are running a kind of bait and switch. Voters are offered a female black police chief, an astronaut, a former state chief justice, a champion of the working class, and an ex-mayor of a hardscrabble town. But what they’d get is one more vote for the most left-wing Democratic Party in history.
Anyone who’s eaten animal crackers knows that even though they come in multiple shapes and sizes, they taste the same. So it is with this year’s batch of Democratic candidates for Senate. They’re an assortment, but not a variety. And because they’re baked from the same dough, this fall it may be Democrats’ Senate chances that crumble.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta .