In the fall of 2022, as then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro was campaigning for governor, his wife regaled him with what he recalls now as a rant that came to define his candidacy against extreme Christian Nationalist / insurrectionist / election denier Doug Mastriano.
“The other side,” Lori Shapiro said, referring to her husband’s political opponents, “keeps talking about freedom. It’s not freedom to tell me what to do with my body. It’s not freedom to tell parents what books their kids can read. Someone’s got to tell them that! You’ve got to tell them that!”
Shapiro took Lori’s advice to the campaign trail — and, as we know, prevailed in the election. As Larry Platt noted this past March, other Democrats across the country have started paying attention to his success:
A piece in Governing Magazine reports that Shapiro’s rhetoric is catching on. Candidates throughout the nation are borrowing the formulation. The New Democrat Coalition in Congress and NewDEAL, a national network of state and local elected officials, released a joint “freedom agenda” last fall.
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When I ask Shapiro if his freedom theme ought to be applied at the national level, he demurs. “I’m not a pundit,” he says. “You’ll opine on that. But I did just say on one of the Sunday morning shows that this election is not just about Trump and Biden. It’s really about what kind of country we want to be and whether we’ll protect our freedoms and, in the process, still be a beacon of hope across the globe.”
Shapiro, 51, may get the chance to bring his freedom fighting stump speech to a national audience this fall, if he is selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a Kamala Harris presidential ticket, now that Pres. Biden has dropped out of the race. Democratic politicians in Pennsylvania, many of whom endorsed Harris Monday, have been pushing her to select Shapiro as her running mate. He is apparently one of several VP candidates under consideration, both because of his relative bipartisan popularity and because of Pennsylvania’s importance to the election. (Other governors being considered: North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear and Illinois’ JB Pritzker.)
“I am telling them, without question, [Shapiro] would make them proud,” former PA Congressman Bob Brady, head of the Philadelphia Democratic Party, told the Inquirer over the weekend. “He would do a great job, he would lock in Pennsylvania. He’s a great speaker, and he would be a great addition to the ticket.”
Here’s some of what we know about Shapiro:
He is surprisingly popular among the MAGA crowd.
A May poll from The Inquirer, New York Times and Siena College found that Shapiro is hugely popular in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, with 57 percent of residents approving of his leadership. More specifically, 77 percent of Democrats, 42 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of Independents think Shapiro is doing a good job. Strikingly, 35 percent of Pennsylvania Trump supporters also said they approved of the governor’s performance so far.
How does he do it? Platt laid out some of the reasons in late May, including the fact that governors tend to be more popular than other politicians — Beshear in Kentucky, for example, also has support among Trump voters. Shapiro is also widely viewed as a nice guy, with deep moral and religious beliefs, who shows up and “gets shit done” — as well as a tough guy who does not shy away from a fight. As Platt said:
He might not seem like a bare-knuckled brawler when at the podium, but how else does a candidate navigate his way to no primary opposition in an open gubernatorial election, other than by the exquisite exercise of political power behind the scenes? It was, after all, unheard of: In 2022, in an open seat, no one was willing to challenge him.
The bad news for Shapiro: He is not as well-known nationally as some other candidates. On Sunday, an ABC / Ipsos poll found that nationally, 77 percent of respondents had no opinion on Shapiro — as opposed to, say, Pete Buttigieg, of whom 48 percent had no opinion.
That get shit done mantra? The world saw it in action.
The 2023 collapse of I-95 in North Philadelphia was a disaster. It was also the perfect opportunity for Shapiro to shine. And shine, he did. With the eyes of the country on Philadelphia, Shapiro stepped into the leadership breach and did the unthinkable: He rallied together city departments, labor unions and local businesses to devise a fix that had the road open again in just 12 days rather than the months we were initially told to expect. And he did it with style and grace: When his live streaming of the road repair went viral, for example, he credited his Chief of Staff Dana Fritz for coming up with the idea.
In a column for The Washington Post, Shapiro elaborated on what it took to get the work done: empowering strong leadership; speeding up bureaucracy; encouraging creativity; and working together. “The playbook we developed shows that Americans can do big things again,” he wrote. “And thanks to the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act states and cities now have billions of dollars to spend on everything from highway and bridge repair to broadband expansion and clean energy.”
Shapiro, now 50, may get the chance to bring his freedom fighting stump speech to a national audience this fall, if he is selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a Kamala Harris presidential ticket, now that Pres. Biden has dropped out of the race.
He has shown political courage — but has also punted on some big fights.
In his gubernatorial campaign, Shapiro touted his support for Lifeline Scholarships that would provide students in the lowest-performing school districts with vouchers for private schools. Long a darling of Republicans, Democratic politicians vehemently oppose vouchers — despite strong support for the program from Black families, whose children (at least in Philadelphia) are most often trapped in failing schools.
Under pressure from party leaders, Shapiro backed down last year from his support of vouchers, angering Republicans with whom he’d negotiated a deal; he again failed to include it in his budget this year. He fell short in several other areas as well: allotting as much public school funding as he and school advocates say is needed to fix K-12 education across the Commonwealth, securing much-needed funding for SEPTA, legalizing recreational marijuana and raising Pennsylvania’s appalling $7.25 minimum wage.
He has already been in the fight against Trump.
Before he became governor, Shapiro spent five years as PA Attorney General, taking on massive institutions, including the Catholic Church and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He also (mostly successfully) sued the Trump administration some two dozen times, over issues varying from birth control to labor rules to election fraud. He successfully won some 40 cases brought by Trump supporters fighting the valid results of the 2020 election and his brief defending Pennsylvania in a 2020 election lawsuit filed by the state of Texas was a master class in the kind of moral legal arguments that have shaped this country for the better. (The Supreme Court seemed to agree as it unanimously ruled against Texas.) He did all this by using one of the Republicans’ favorite rallying cries: State’s rights.
As he said after the Supreme Court case: “I spoke to several [Republican] AGs. I’m not going to say who I spoke to specifically, but all told me they were feeling significant pressure. I just told them that giving in to that pressure just shows the weakness of your character. And I told them to never lecture me again on things like rule of law or states’ rights, because it turns out they’re full of bullshit when they do.”
He is a supporter of Israel.
Shapiro, who would be the first Jewish Vice President, is staunchly pro-Israel (though he has also been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership) and has called out anti-Israel protesters on campus and elsewhere since Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack. He has said he would sign into law a bill punishing state universities for divesting from Israel, if the PA legislature sends it to him, and he raised First Amendment concerns in the spring when he issued an order banning state employees from “scandalous or disgraceful” behavior on or off duty, amidst widespread divide about the Middle East conflict. This could turn off progressive voters who have expressed deep disagreement with President Biden’s approach to the war — and could galvanize others, who see his vocal stance as evidence of his moral righteousness.
“I do feel a somewhat unique responsibility to speak out when I see this level of antisemitism on our campuses and in our communities,” Shapiro told Politico in the spring. “We’ve seen a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia. I think it is incumbent upon anyone — a governor or anyone else — to speak and act with moral clarity when they see these issues.”
He learned about leadership from high school basketball.
At our 2023 Ideas We Should Steal Festival, Shapiro — a point guard on his championship Akiba Hebrew Academy basketball team in high school — compared being a point guard in a high-intensity game to the work he does as governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
“Being a point guard … you’ve got to figure out how to involve everybody in what you’re doing,” Shapiro told Platt and Fran Dunphy, the winningest college basketball coach in Big 5 history. “You have to recognize that everyone has a distinct role, and your job is to lift them up, empower them, give them the opportunity to succeed.
“When I think of my role as governor when we get around the table … It’s figuring out all the different people around the table, and recognizing we each have a role to play, and we have to play our role as excellently as we can or we will not accomplish our mission, and I am just one of those roles.”
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