"Faced with a potentially campaign-ending crisis this weekend, Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania released a Sunday statement thanking the 'kick ass staff and doctors' who treated his stroke."

"The vernacular was not the stuff of parliamentary propriety — 'I need to take a minute,' he wrote about stepping back from the trail — but that was the point, as is often the case with Fetterman. At 6-foot-8, with a shiny pate, a salt-and-pepper goatee, tattooed arms and a sports-bar fashion sense, Fetterman was announcing from a hospital bed that even in illness he remained a different kind of Democrat. It’s a pitch that paid off Tuesday in a state primary that could set up the one-term lieutenant governor to lead his party into the marquee open-seat contest of the 2022 election — a chance for Democrats to find out whether they can arrest the building red wave and their declining White, working-class support with a candidate who does not fit easily into any partisan box. Fetterman, 52, easily beat his principal Democratic rival, Rep. Conor Lamb, a clean-cut Marine Corps veteran and prosecutor whom President Biden had compared to his late son Beau and whom other party leaders as recently as 2018 had held up as an exemplar of the party’s future."

From "Democrats pick John Fetterman for Senate in Pennsylvania/He could represent a chance for a party facing declining White working-class support to put forth a candidate who doesn’t fit easily into any partisan box" (WaPo).

So... one guy may "represent a chance" for the Democratic Party as it faces decline and the other guy was "held up as an exemplar of the party’s future." Looks like the party went into the primary assured that the winner would represent the future. Whatever happens will of course be what was once that crazy thing called The Future. The version of the future that actually arrived is the one without the clean-cut Marine preferred by Biden and other party leaders. The Fetterman future is here:

John Brabender, a Republican consultant who has run races in Pennsylvania for decades, said Fetterman’s candidacy will test whether Democrats can tap into the same sort of populist, anti-establishment energy that worked so well for Trump, but with an entirely different set of policy solutions.

“I have seen people describe Fetterman as the left’s version of Donald Trump,” Brabender said. “What we are going to learn is whether policies or persona are what attracted people to Trump.”