Vice President Kamala Harris and many of her campaign allies decried Trump as a “fascist” in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, but ultimately, Trump defeated her in the ensuing election, sweeping all seven swing states. Fetterman, who represents one of those swing states in the Senate, told ABC News’s This Week that he thinks the pitch that Trump was a “fascist” was part of what did not work for Harris’s campaign.

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Democratic Sen. John Fetterman says he never believed the 2024 election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris “was about fascism.”

“Fascism, that’s not a word that regular people use.” https://t.co/PnqXqsUODv pic.twitter.com/seeERMEvTj

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 22, 2024

“Well, it’s like, that’s her prerogative, I mean, but, but it’s not a word that I would use. Because you put a lot of Democrats, especially in my state, that I know, and I happen to love people that are going to vote for Trump, and they are not fascist,” Fetterman said.

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“And also fascism, that’s not a word that regular people, you know, use, you know? I think people are going to decide who is the candidate that’s going to protect and project, you know, my version of the American way of life, and that’s what happened,” he added.

The Pennsylvania Democrat believed that one of the other factors to Democratic losses last month was Trump being a “singular political talent.”

“You know, he had the energy and almost the sense of fearlessness to just say all those kinds of things. And people, it’s, it’s undeniable that it has an entertaining aspect for that too, and just if you’re not afraid to say all of those things, or, and after you survived an assassination, you literally were shot in your head and had the presence of mind to respond, you know, ‘fight, fight, fight,’” Fetterman said.

“I mean, that’s a political talent, it’s undeniable,” he added.

Fetterman has not been shy in his assessment over what went wrong last month for Democrats, commenting on how Trump is able to connect with Pennsylvania voters and warning that Democrats should rethink their messaging in swing districts.