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.”