The Free Press
The Democratic Party is in the political wilderness—and the question is: Who will lead it back to power? What vision can unite the party once again? And what message can rally voters, especially the disaffected Democrats who voted red for the first time this year?
Over the coming weeks, The Free Press is profiling Democrats from very different places and with very different constituencies to ask those questions. So far, we’ve interviewed Michigan’s Senator Elissa Slotkin and California’s Rep. Ro Khanna. Today: Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.
It takes 10, maybe 15 minutes watching Josh Shapiro work a crowd to realize he has the juice. It’s mid-January, and the Pennsylvania governor is strolling across the expo floor of the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg—the world’s largest indoor agricultural event with omnipresent barnyard smells, rival BBQ food stalls, and blue ribbons for rodeo and square dancing. There he is trading a joke with a schoolteacher, an easy hand-squeeze on her elbow. Now he’s listening raptly to a farmer discuss soil composition. Then he’s kneeling on the cold concrete to talk eye-level with a toddler about milkshake flavors. Moms excitedly thumb-lick the jelly off their daughters’ cheeks preparing for the big group photo.
In 2022, Shapiro, then the state’s attorney general, trounced his Republican opponent in the gubernatorial election by 15 points. Three years later, with the Democrats struggling to find an answer to Donald Trump, Shapiro has become one of the most popular Democratic governors in the country. Since Trump’s victory, Shapiro’s favorability has only grown, with the governor an early front-runner for the Democrats in 2028.
Shapiro’s age (51) and position—and national visibility as a finalist to be Kamala Harris’s running mate—have pundits mentioning him in the same breath as the other Democratic governors (Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Gavin Newsom before the fires) as the future of the party.
What that misses is his actual ideas, how he thinks about the act of governing. All those other names are extensions of a Democratic establishment that embraced the prescriptions of the progressive left: defund the police; decolonize grade schools; let the immigrants in; and so on. Ideas that turned the majority of the country toward Trump and the Republicans. It was just last spring, for example, that the governor of the bright-red state of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, was marching in support of more diversity, equity, and inclusion in public universities, saying straight up that the acronym DEI represents “very important values that are found in our Bible.”
Josh Shapiro does not talk like that—and never has. When I asked him, for instance, what will reduce the spike in violence on Philadelphia’s public transportation, his response wasn’t to rely on harm reduction or restorative justice but rather to simply increase law enforcement. “When crime impacts a block or a family, they don’t care about statistics. . . . They care about the impact on their family, and they are right to care about that,” Shapiro replied. “To attack crime in a community, you need more policing,” Shapiro told me.
Leading Pennsylvania since January 2023, his political brand revolves around what he and his aides call “getting shit done.” Six months after he was sworn in, a truck crashed into a heavily used highway overpass in Philadelphia, causing it to collapse. The crucial interstate corridor was repaired in less than two weeks, and much of the credit went to the new administration. As governor, Shapiro has stressed getting tangible results on things his constituents care about: from expanding job training for the trades, to fixing 300 broken bridges in a year, to hiring 1,500 police.
He’s essentially a fossil preserved from a previous epoch, a Clinton-era moderate or even a New Deal Democrat. At the farm expo, Shapiro ticked off one after another of the pro-growth farm policies he has championed, noting that the Pennsylvania agriculture industry generates some $132 billion a year. “To ignore all that is not just disrespectful to our farmers, it’s flat-out stupid.”
He added, “Our future economic success no longer runs only through our high-rises and urban office parks. It also runs through the heartland, our farmlands here in Pennsylvania.”
Yet there’s a rub. The Democratic Party desperately needs a reckoning. It needs someone of stature who will say out loud how profoundly the party has gone astray—someone who will be listened to. Shapiro could be that person—many in the party want him to be—the way Bill Clinton was as governor of Arkansas when the Democrats were trying to find their footing after the Republicans dominated the 1980s.
The problem is that Shapiro is unwilling to assume that role. I asked him, for instance, if his “job is more difficult when the Democratic National Committee is unable to absorb the lesson of the election, doubling down on identity politics with the selection of Ken Martin and David Hogg for roles in leadership?”
“I don’t pay attention to that stuff,” he replied.
I pushed the issue. “But you have been a major figure in the party, on the presidential campaign trail last year, and you remain in the mix to set the priorities for the Democrats going forward at the national level. Isn’t there tension with the direction of the DNC and what you’re doing in Pennsylvania?”
“Pennsylvania is the ultimate swing state,” the governor acknowledged, before quickly pivoting to his record “stitching together a coalition that runs through our farmland and our cities.”
How about the antisemitism that has reared its ugly head in his party’s progressive wing? I mentioned Rep. Summer Lee, the Pittsburgh congresswoman who was widely condemned for remarks that all but blamed Israel for the Hamas pogrom on October 7, 2023. Shapiro is a proud, observant Jew, but again, he wouldn’t go there. “If it’s a left- or right-wing politician, I’ve spoken out forcefully against antisemitism in all forms, no matter the person spewing it,” he responded blandly.
When asked if Senator John Fetterman “continually finding so much overlap with President Trump’s agenda is a worthwhile pursuit for Democrats,” the governor would respond only that he “respects John’s work.”
The most obvious question of all, the one that looms largest in the wake of Harris’s loss in November, is one he won’t touch. Why did Harris choose the progressive Minnesota governor Tim Walz over the moderate Shapiro, with his obvious political talent? Did he lose out because he’s an observant Jew who supports Israel? Or because he made it clear that he wanted a significant role as VP if she won? Or because his past suggests he can’t necessarily be trusted?
“She had a deeply personal decision to make, and I had a deeply personal decision to make as well,” is all he will say. Even when pressed on whether the surge of antisemitism in his party might have influenced Harris’s selection, he bristled. “You’ve got to ask the former vice president about that.”
The problem for Shapiro is that he’s not going to be able to remain this bashful forever, not if he wants to be president. Satisfying as it might be for him to sit and wait while other Democrats struggle to remove the bell they tied around the tiger’s neck, the governor will be unable to rely on his track record alone to distinguish himself as the alternative in the run-up to 2028.
And the problem for the Democrats is if Shapiro won’t lead them out of the wilderness, who will?
Raised in an affluent Philadelphia suburb, Shapiro and his two siblings attended Jewish day school; his mother, giving up her job as a public schoolteacher, stayed home while his father, a pediatrician, built up a bustling private practice. Cut from the University of Rochester basketball team the same week a failed calculus test knocked him off the premed track, Shapiro gave politics a try, getting elected school president as a freshman. After graduation and a brief spell as a legislative aide in D.C., Shapiro walked into the office of recently elected Pennsylvania congressman Joe Hoeffel and said he should be his legislative director. Hoeffel hired the brash 25-year-old. Three months later, Shapiro, who was earning a law degree at night at Georgetown, was Hoeffel’s chief of staff.
After five years in D.C., Shapiro returned home to make a run for public office. One of the contacts he made in Washington was Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, who only a few years earlier had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. Lieberman was the first Jewish candidate on a presidential ticket, known to walk miles around D.C. to get to meetings that fell on the Sabbath. Shapiro told Lieberman then, “the way he lived his life, openly and proudly as a practicing Jew, really inspired me.”
Running for a Pennsylvania House seat in 2004 against a three-term incumbent, Shapiro started his campaign 40 points behind in the polls. With an endorsement from Lieberman in his pocket, Shapiro knocked on some 18,000 doors promising to lower taxes, and sailed to a comfortable nine-point victory.
If Shapiro’s hustle won him the campaign, it was a shrewd backdoor maneuver that catapulted him up the political ladder. With a razor-thin one-vote margin, Democratic leader Bill DeWeese feared that a single defection among the Democrats was going to cost him the speakership. The defector proved to be an opportunity for Shapiro, who led the successful coup that put a moderate Republican aligned with DeWeese in the speaker’s chair.
Soon after, DeWeese’s chief of staff was indicted for campaign finance violations. Although Shapiro was part of DeWeese’s brain trust, he decided he needed to make a clean break, and organized a one-man press conference calling for DeWeese to resign his leadership position. “[DeWeese] will always be a symbol of a broken system,” Shapiro said.
“I would never want him in a foxhole with me,” DeWeese told The Philadelphia Inquirer years later.
In 2011, Shapiro took out his original mentor, Hoeffel, who had left Congress and was serving as one of three Montgomery County commissioners. The Democratic organizers in Montgomery County decided they wanted a fresh face, and didn’t back Hoeffel. Shapiro, at 37 and on the rise, took over the ticket from his old boss. Shapiro won, and Hoeffel was out.
“You don’t want to turn your back on him,” Hoeffel said afterward. “Loyalty is not his strong suit.”
Shapiro became attorney general in 2016, winning 51 percent of the vote. That’s when he began to display his antipathy for the prevailing progressive winds. He cracked down on the billion-dollar open-air drug market of Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, sidestepping the lackadaisical district attorney Larry Krasner, whose progressive approach reduced police enforcement despite record overdoses and fatal shootings. Although Shapiro joined a number of lawsuits against the first Trump administration, he was selective about it. “When [Trump] authored his travel ban, I didn’t sue him,” Shapiro said at the time, even as several Democratic attorneys general launched high-profile lawsuits against Trump’s ban on arrivals from Muslim-majority nations. “What he did was lawful.”
In October 2018, when a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Shapiro was quick to join the local community, and his high-profile presence during press conferences and prayer vigils marked him as a prominent Jewish official on the national stage speaking out aggressively against rising antisemitism.
In the 2022 governor’s race against the hard-right Pennsylvania senator Doug Mastriano, which he won easily, Shapiro received support from several prominent Republicans who rejected Mastriano’s extremism, including his close campaign ties to a virulent antisemite.
“I’ve run 12 races in my life, and against some Republicans that I really had profound disagreements with, but I thought they were honorable public servants,” Shapiro said when we spoke. “Mastriano peddled in hatred and bigotry and antisemitism, and I thought his views were really dangerous.”
Unlike Summer Lee, Mastriano is a Republican, which is perhaps why Shapiro doesn’t hesitate to denounce his antisemitism.
Since winning the 2022 gubernatorial race, Shapiro’s focus has been on what he calls “economic freedom,” by which he means creating opportunities for upward mobility. For decades, the Democratic establishment has championed college as the primary credential to compete in a globalized economy. But in his first act as governor, Shapiro took the opposite approach, eliminating the requirement of a college diploma for almost all state job postings.
“For decades now, politicians, including a whole lot in my party, have defined success around the idea of getting a college degree,” he told me. “This is wrong and disrespectful, and doesn’t make sense for the commonwealth’s economic growth.” Pointing out that 60 percent of Pennsylvania’s workforce lacks a college degree, he added, “We were no longer going to be captive to that paradigm.” This was the closest Shapiro came to criticizing the Democratic Party.
Reluctant to speak critically of his party’s missteps, he maintains a distance from the Democratic establishment in his approach to policy, particularly his embrace of a DOGE-like deregulation of Pennsylvania’s antiquated bureaucracy. New barbershops in Pennsylvania get their certificates for operation in a day instead of two weeks; corporate filings take 48 hours rather than two months. Using the might of a governor’s office for such seemingly minor achievements doesn’t do much for donors or lobbyists but makes a tangible difference in the lives of his constituents.
Another example of Shapiro’s willingness to buck Democratic orthodoxies was his attempt to include a school choice program in his first budget proposal. This time, he lost, thanks to the fierce opposition from his state’s teachers unions. In a letter to Harris arguing against selecting Shapiro for her presidential ticket, the teachers unions and other progressive groups described his school choice plan, along with his support for Israel, among his “shortcomings as a national candidate.”
Indeed, Shapiro has never been shy about his unyielding defense of Israel. When University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, testifying before Congress two months after the October 7, 2023 attack, declined to denounce calls for a genocide against Jews as a violation of the university’s code of conduct, Shapiro applied pressure on Magill until she resigned. “I thought her testimony under oath before Congress was shameful and unacceptable,” Shapiro said before she stepped down.
It is obvious in hindsight that failing to choose Shapiro was an unforced political error. Even putting aside Walz’s progressive policies, the stark political reality is that Pennsylvania is the most significant swing state, and Shapiro held a 60 percent favorability rating, clocking in well above Harris (51 percent) and Trump (45 percent). And Shapiro is a vastly more talented politician than Walz.
Mark Riddle, a top Democratic strategist, was one of the party figures behind the scenes who was baffled by what he described to me as the “fundamental political mismanagement in the White House,” with an insulated party elite that ignored the polling data and “a lot of the other talent they could have tapped into.”
It’s possible that the festering antipathy toward pro-Israel Jews on the left will be the glass ceiling Shapiro must shatter to rise up to the White House. “At this point, a Jewish candidate probably would have better success in the Republican Party,” said Val DiGiorgio, the former chair of the Pennsylvania GOP and a longtime friend of Shapiro. “I wouldn’t have said that 10 years ago, but Democrats have a real problem with the base. Not just on Israel. The antisemitism is off the charts.”
As a skilled orator and political strategist, Shapiro has ample room to make an aggressive break with the party’s failed past, not just as a Jew who denounces the party’s illiberalism but as a new leader pushing a working-class populism that could swing back those voters captured by Trump. But to do that, he has to be willing to articulate where the party has gone astray.
“Democrats have to be able to talk about the kitchen-table issues,” said Riddle, whose polling overwhelmingly shows that Democrats need to rekindle the romance with the working class. On that front, Riddle notes that “Shapiro sets himself apart,” with the research indicating he occupies “a very strong lane.”
During our interviews, I asked Shapiro why his bread-and-butter messaging on working-class issues and “getting shit done” was seemingly foreign to the leaders of his own party.
“I dunno,” he said, breaking into a slight grin. “It’s just common sense.”
As the Bibas children were laid to rest in Israel on Wednesday, Barnard students, draped in keffiyehs, occupied a campus building—chanting in support of Hamas. How did this movement become so powerful? Palantir Tech CEO Alex Karp talks to Bari Weiss about the religious nature of woke culture, how Silicon Valley lost its way and, of course, DOGE. Click here to watch their conversation.
