On May 13, four days before the 2022 Pennsylvania primaries, John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor running for the Democratic Party’s senatorial nomination, suffered a stroke. Fetterman won his primary by a huge margin, and took a lead in the polls against the GOP winner, Mehmet Oz. But he did not appear in public to campaign until October, and when he did, his speech was choppy and halting. Even a friendly review of Fetterman’s performance in his lone debate with Oz conceded that “while his overall points were intelligible, it was at times genuinely difficult to understand some of his sentences.”
Fetterman was not the first American with a disability to run for office. A candidate’s ailment can be the thing that sinks him, or
