Here's a number that should stop you cold: according to a Quinnipiac University poll of 895 Pennsylvania voters taken July 9 to 13, Sen. John Fetterman posts a 77 percent approval rating with the state's Republicans and a 19 percent approval rating with the Democrats who put him in office. 57 percent of his own party's voters think he should quit the Democrats altogether. If a hedge fund manager posted numbers like that, cheered by the people who bet against him and booed by his own investors, you'd call it a contrarian trade gone spectacularly right or wrong depending who's asking. In the Senate, they're calling it treason.

Is Fetterman the last commonsense Democrat, the final holdout against a party that traded working class instincts for ideological purity tests? Probably not the last. But he may be the last one with a big enough platform and a thick enough skin to say so out loud in public, on camera, at his own party's expense. That distinction matters more than his critics want to admit.

Wednesday night in Dallas, Fetterman's face lit up the jumbotron at the Republican Party's midterm convention, an event some reporters nicknamed “Trumpapalooza.” Standing outside a Pennsylvania steel plant, he told the crowd, “Yes, I'm a Democrat,” then called himself a commonsense Democrat and vowed to “reject the extremes and socialism” creeping into his party. He praised Republican Sen. Dave McCormick as a friend and pledged to help President Trump protect Pennsylvania steel jobs. Republicans in the arena applauded politely. The two senators didn't stop at a friendly video, either. They launched a joint........

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