Why Josh Shapiro might be Kamala Harris’s running mate pick

Kamala Harris is days — if not mere hours — from publicly announcing her selection of a running mate for the remainder of the 2024 cycle. A Yinzer may be at the top of her list.

Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro emerged early on as a strong contender in the running to serve as the vice president’s own future VP, with Harris now at the top of the Democratic ticket and Joe Biden stepping aside. Married to highschool sweetheart Lori Ferrara, the governor and his wife moved back to Pennsylvania to raise their children after Shapiro graduated from Georgetown Law. It was his law school time which saw him get his foot in the door as a political operative — he worked as an intern for Carl Levin’s Senate office.

He almost never got into politics at all. “I started as a pre-med student, but a few months into freshman year, I nearly flunked out of organic chemistry,” he revealed to students at University of Rochester in 2023.

A swing-state governor enjoying a wave of popularity through his first term, Shapiro checks several boxes for the Harris campaign.

His ability to drive out votes for Harris particularly in western Pennsylvania is possibly Shapiro’s most important selling point. The governor’s commanding victory in 2022, a 15-point brutalizing of his opponent Doug Mastriano, was aided in part by the fact that Shapiro was about to turn out voters in every county. Even in deep-red Republican counties with far fewer voters, where Democrats are often wiped out, the governor was about to turn out between 17-30 per cent of the vote in his favor. Compare that to Mastriano, who received just 13.1 per cent of the vote in Philadelphia County, the second-largest district by voter turnout.

If Shapiro were able to deliver Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes, it would be a major pickup for the Harris campaign. Doing so would allow Democrats to shift more resources to states like Georgia, Arizona and even places like Florida where local parties are hoping for more resources from their national counterparts. It’s no coincidence the other reported finalists for the spots all have battleground state appeal as well — Minnesota’s Tim Walz, Michigan’s Gary Peters, Arizona’s Mark Kelly and even Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, whose connections to Appalachia have been seen as a possible counter to Donald Trump’s Ohio-hailing running mate JD Vance.

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But Shapiro, like any candidate, is not perfect. His support for Israel, while a mainstream Democratic position to be sure, has veered at times over the past year into instances where he has been accused repeatedly of insufficiently caring for the loss of civilian lives in Gaza. The governor has also been accused of likening campus protesters with a wide range of views about Israel and Gaza to the KKK. As a result, progressives are thought to oppose Shapiro’s addition to the ticket more strongly than any of the others reported to be in contention for the role. “Pick Shapiro, lose Michigan” has been a common warning issued by lefties on Twitter/X who argue that Michigan’s sizable Muslim-American and Palestinian-American communities will be turned off from voting for a Harris-Shapiro ticket.

He has also picked a fight with one of Harris’s erstwhile allies, teachers’ unions, in his home state with support for charter school vouchers in Pennsylvania’s annual budget.

Still, it could be a gamble Harris’s team is willing to take. She has been careful to not stray too far from the position on Israel’s offensive in Gaza taken by Joe Biden, which has already caused deep rifts between national Democratic officials and Muslim Democratic-leaning voters, some of whom spurned a peacemaking meeting with Democrats in March. And Harris’s numbers are still underwater in Pennsylvania, where a new Morning Consult poll on Tuesday found her trailing Trump by four per centage points. The same poll saw her leading by nine in Michigan.

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Shapiro was first elected to the Pennsylvania statehouse in 2004. He’d later go on to be elected the state’s attorney general in 2016 after serving as Montgomery County commissioner. The soon-to-be-governor staked out a liberal record on social issues during this time period, including on abortion rights and LGBTQ+ marriage rights.

He was reelected in 2020 and only became the state’s governor in 2023, after winning an election the year prior and winning an unopposed Democratic primary. Vance, Trump’s running mate, only took office himself the same year, and now could become vice president less than two years into his first six-year term.

But Shapiro, unlike Vance, has been eyed in recent days for his charisma onstage stumping for Harris and his ability to land a punch — the opposite summation of the senator’s abilities after a week of his pummeling by the Democratic campaign apparatus. At a rally alongside Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Tuesday, Shapiro mocked Trump for hugging the flag and proved he could effectively deliver the “Trump and Vance are weird” attack line.

“I love the flag, but it’s a weird thing he does,” Shapiro told a laughing crowd.

At least some writing appears to be on the wall indicating that Shapiro could be Harris’s pick. The vice president is set to unveil her running mate selection in his home state next Tuesday at a rally in Philadelphia — though that could also be an attempt to throw reporters off the scent. And she’s set for a swing through other battlegrounds as well in the coming days, including Arizona, from which Kelly hails.

The next few days will be some of the most important of Harris’s political career. Her eventual pick will reveal much about where the campaign sees its strengths, its weaknesses, and possibly its intended targets, too.