Can Braddock Mayor John Fetterman, a towering figure from a small town, shake up a senate race?

The first thing you notice about John Fetterman is the sheer size of the 6-foot-8 mayor from Braddock, a tiny borough just east of Pittsburgh.

That makes you look.

Then you can't help but notice that, among Fetterman's tattoos, are large numbers, 15104 on his left forearm and a series of nine dates on his right.

The left arm tells us Braddock's zip code.

The right lists the dates when people in the borough of 2,100 people were killed since Fetterman won his first election for mayor in 2005 by a single provisional ballot.

Like that election, Braddock is teetering on the edge while the people who live there wonder which way it all will tip. Fetterman, 46, seems right at home in that tension.

And he's bringing all that - the hard work to save a dying town and the national media attention that followed - to the April Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate.

Fetterman is a big ball of authenticity entering a campaign where that has been sorely missing.

"I'm as surprised as anyone to be in this position," Fetterman said last week. "Nobody goes to Braddock to start a GED program and says, 'Well, this is the pathway to power.' "

Fetterman will meet with voters Monday night at Bob & Barbara's, the venerable dive bar on South Street. He calls the bar, an unlikely venue for an unlikely politician, a great fit for him.

Like his size, Fetterman's approach to the campaign he announced last Monday stands out.

The other candidates are smart, capable, accomplished people. But on the stump, where politicians try to connect with voters, they each come up short.

The incumbent, U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, is a Lehigh County Republican and former businessman who served three terms in the U.S. House before winning his seat in 2010.

As a campaigner, Toomey is so white bread that he makes a loaf of Stroehmann's look like marble rye. In his reelection kickoff last week he barely raised his voice at all.

Toomey defeated former U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a Delaware County Democrat and former Navy admiral, in 2010.

Sestak, now back for another shot, is unpopular with the Democratic Party establishment. That is often chalked up to his 2010 decision to ignore pleas to stay out of the race in deference to Republican-turned-Democrat U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter.

But there is another factor at play here: Sestak's conversations sound oddly manufactured, as if he is attempting to inject emotion into his words as they roll down a factory production line.

Katie McGinty is the third Democrat in the primary. A Philadelphia native who now lives in Chester County, she served in President Bill Clinton's White House and Gov. Ed Rendell's administration before running for governor in 2014. She finished last in a four-candidate primary and went on to serve as Gov. Wolf's chief of staff for six months this year.

McGinty also has a stilted approach to the stump, sounding like a character out of central casting for an old black-and-white movie, the peppy office go-getter trying to fire up her lackadaisical colleagues.

Match that up against Fetterman, who attended Albright College in Reading and then Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government before moving to Pittsburgh to work for AmeriCorps. He had never heard of Braddock, which had a reputation as a place to stay away from.

He went anyway, starting a nonprofit with seed money from his father, who runs an insurance agency in York.

Braddock is 0.65 of a square mile, eight miles east of Pittsburgh, along the Monongahela River.

Two out of every five of the borough's residents lived below the national poverty level - an individual annual income of $12,316 in 2014 - according to the U.S. Census.

His nonprofit, Braddock Redux, raised $2 million from 2009 to 2013, according to a tax return filed in November, and had $1.3 million in assets as of the end of 2013.

Fetterman has already had national media attention - the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic - as Braddock's mayor.

He says he never asked for any of that.

"They were looking for something that was truly authentic," he said. "I was doing my thing. I came to Braddock to disappear. The most unlikely thing happened. I became more and more visible."

brennac@phillynews.com

215-854-5973@ByChrisBrennan