Working Families Party pledges to support a John Fetterman primary challenger

The John Fetterman primary talk is already heating up. 

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Working Families Party announced it will support a primary challenger to the commonwealth’s senior U.S. senator, John Fetterman. 

“At a time when Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to make life harder for working people, we need real leaders in the Senate who are willing to fight for the working class,” Shoshanna Israel, Mid-Atlantic Political Director for the Working Families Party, said in a statement. 

“The people of Pennsylvania deserve a Senator who won’t enable Trump or vote with Republicans to rip healthcare away from over 400,000 of our neighbors. We deserve real working class leadership in the U.S. Senate. Senator Fetterman has sold us out, and that’s why the Pennsylvania Working Families Party is committed to recruiting and supporting a primary challenge to him in 2028.”  

Fetterman, who ran with populist Democratic messaging, has since dismayed many Democratic voters with his policies and practices, from his takes on Israel to his willingness to work with GOP senators to end the government shutdown. 

Fetterman is also in the spotlight following a fall last week that resulted in a hospitalization. His team announced that Fetterman had suffered a “ventricular fibrillation flare-up” and hit his face, sustaining “minor injuries.”

The response to last week’s health scare, just three years after he suffered a near-fatal stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign, has led many to wonder if Fetterman will finish his current term, set to end in 2028. 

And although Fetterman has yet to announce he’s running for reelection, the WFP is hoping unhappy Pennsylvanians will support a candidate that inspires less frustration around issues affecting working people, the group said. 

The Working Families Party is a progressive, independent grassroots organization that has supported Democrats in the past. More recently, the group’s work in Philadelphia led to two WFP candidates winning City Council at-large bids, ousting Republicans from the non-majority seats in the city’s legislative body. 

Looking ahead, WFP launched an online portal to recruit candidates and volunteers into a pipeline for upcoming races, including the 2028 U.S. Senate primary. The group plans to hold a number of recruitment events across Pennsylvania in the coming months to train candidates and campaign staff and to enlist volunteers to further its statewide organizing efforts.