What We’ve Learned About The Communications Tactics That Helped John Fetterman Win

John Fetterman flipped Pennsylvania’s highly contested Senate seat last week, though it’s unclear if the majority of the Democratic candidate's voters genuinely supported him or simply disliked his opponent Mehmet Oz (yes, that Dr. Oz) more. In either case, there is a lot to learn about how proper communications tactics around medical issues – or other challenges such as personal scandals or even age – can significantly impact perception. In Fetterman’s case, his team’s strategies worked, convincing enough Pennsylvanians to view him as Fetterman, the candidate and not Fetterman, the stroke victim.

How did Fetterman and his strategists flip the narrative? And what can we learn from their playbook to help us be more effective communicators and engage more authentically with our audiences - not only in politics, but at work and in life?

Transparency

With many aspects of our lives recorded and available on social media, it’s very difficult to hide anything, warns Dr. Lee Miringoff. The respected pollster and Director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion says transparency is critical in public campaigns and it’s important to get information out to the public on your own terms, and doing so in a timely way engenders trust.

Think back to Hillary Clinton’s near collapse at the 2016 9/11 memorial ceremony. Her team first attributed her unsteadiness to the heat, but later admitted that the then presidential candidate had pneumonia. And the fallout was brutal. Potential voters were annoyed with her lack of transparency, questioned why she waited so long to share her diagnosis and began to wonder if she could be trusted at all.

Fetterman started down a similar path, not announcing his stroke until two days after it had occurred, refusing to release his health records and sharing very little information about his condition, his prognosis or his return. It left potential voters uneasy.

Fetterman’s team quickly reversed course. A few weeks after his stroke, Fetterman released a statement from his physician explaining his condition and his outlook. In August he gave a 10-minute speech at an in-person event so people could see his progress. And in October he unapologetically took the debate stage against Dr. Oz.

“When we had the discussion about the debate, it was about showing people what he is going through,” Rebecca Katz recently told Yahoo! News. The Democratic strategist and senior advisor to Fetterman said that when he was at rallies, he would open up to the audience by asking if anyone else in the audience had had a stroke like he did.

Being transparent, about your health or other personal experiences, leaves little to the imagination. It tells your audience that because you’ve been honest with them, they can trust what you say. As Esquire so aptly put it, “Fetterman's Debate Performance Showed the Door to the Elephant in the Room.”

Authenticity

Consistently letting your audience know who you really are and that you are one of them, makes you relatable. When we have things in common with others, it creates connection.

Fetterman’s supporters appreciated the “what you see is what you get,” jeans-wearing, tattooed vibe from the senator-elect. “What got us here? It was John Fetterman - it was him being himself, being authentic,” said Katz.

“I just remember thinking this was a very good person,” Fetterman’s wife Gisele told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when asked about their first meeting. “I just think there’s an unapologetic authenticity about him.”

Fetterman grew up in a predominantly republican, middle-class suburb of York, PA. After a short stint in the corporate world, he left his job to pursue his true calling - social work in the Pittsburgh suburb of Braddock, a predominantly black community with a high poverty rate, where he’d go on to spend 13 years as the borough’s mayor.

Oz spent much of his life in New Jersey.

“[Pennsylvanians] saw that John was one of them and Oz was from NJ,” said Katz. “And when they voted, that was the number one issue.”

Empathy

Being open about the way you feel invites others to share your feelings and enables them to have compassion - and that helps forge a bond.

“I might miss some words during this debate - mush two words together. It knocked me down but I'm going to keep coming back up.” This was Fetterman’s opening statement at his debate.

The following night, he gave a similar performance in Pittsburgh saying, “I may not get every word the right way. But I will always do the right thing in Washington, D.C. … I will always fight just for you.”

While the signs of his impairment were evident at the debate, they did not appear to turn voters. In fact, seeing his struggle and his fight may have had the opposite effect. The Fetterman campaign announced it had raised $2 million in the aftermath of the debate, and a Monmouth University survey released on Nov. 2 found that just 3% of respondents said they were “reconsidering their candidate choice because of what they saw in last week’s debate.”

On the contrary, experts have been critical of Dr. Oz’s lack of empathy, especially since the candidate was a cardiothoracic surgeon. During his debate, Fetterman said of Oz, “I’ve had a stroke. He’s never let me forget that.” Dr. Matthew Fink suggests that Oz’s lack of empathy may have turned off some voters. “By the time Fetterman starts in office in January, I think he’ll be fine,” he said. “He’s probably fine right now and if properly treated, the chances of him having a second stroke are close to zero. And Dr. Oz knows that.” The Chairman of Neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College (and not one of Fetterman’s physicians) also points out that both Dwight D. Eisenhower and FDR had strokes while in office and served effectively, casting doubt on the Oz team’s strategy of questioning Fetterman’s capacity to serve.

“There are millions of people in the U.S. who have atrial fibrillation and have the same problem,” said Dr. Fink. “So, there were plenty of people listening to his story who I’m sure were sympathetic.”

Voters have shown many times that if a challenge is handled well, people will react compassionately and will be willing to accept it. Yahoo! News’ Alex Wagner summed it up well saying, “I think [Fetterman’s] election was heartening for people across the country because it was an exercise in empathy. You would kind of forgive someone for not being operative at 100% if you knew they could get better, and you believed in them.”