What’s So Great About Josh Shapiro

Kamala Harris has the luxury of several promising options for her vice-presidential nominee, but the discussion has focused inordinately on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. The reason for this, I think, is that Shapiro has some weaknesses that make him distasteful to some potential Harris voters but also strengths at a totally different level from any other candidate.

Harris’s decision tree begins with “Shapiro or not Shapiro.” Before even considering anybody else, she has to calculate whether the unique advantages of bringing him on outweigh his downside. I think they probably do, but the concerns are valid and deserve to be taken seriously.

Democrats have two main sources of concern with Shapiro, one small and one large. The small concern is that he endorsed a school-voucher plan. School vouchers, which give students public funds that they can use to attend private school, have become the Republican Party’s central policy initiative in education. Not all voucher plans are created equal, but in general, the evidence suggests vouchers do not improve educational outputs. The main reason is that private schools can decide which students to admit, so vouchers allow them to select only for the best applicants. This is importantly different from charter schools, which have to take all comers (and use random selection if they have more applicants than seats).

Shapiro wound up not implementing a voucher plan when he was unable to come to terms with Republicans. He has also been endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers, which probably alleviates some of the concern. But his support for the policy is certainly a demerit.

The more serious criticism centers on his comments on anti-Israel protests since October 7, which he has denounced. In the broadest terms, Shapiro’s position is similar to that of most Democratic officials: He defends the right to free speech while condemning antisemitism. (On the Middle East itself, his position is also conventionally Democratic: He supports the two-state solution, endorses Israel’s right to self-defense against Hamas terrorism, and condemns Benjamin Netanyahu as a dangerous and destructive leader.)

Because Shapiro’s underlying position is so conventional, some Jewish analysts have argued that the disproportionate backlash he has faced, in comparison with other veep candidates who hold similar positions, is antisemitic. That accusation of a double standard seems a bit unfair because it overlooks the unusually strong tenor of Shapiro’s statements about the campus protests.

The most inflammatory comment he made occurred during a CNN interview in April, when he drew a comparison between anti-Israel protesters on campus and the Ku Klux Klan. Shapiro was not drawing a moral comparison. He was arguing that universities have a duty to enforce their rules about use of campus grounds — a group can’t simply seize common spaces for itself in violation of the rules. Shapiro’s analogy to the Klan was designed to highlight the absurdity of schools allowing their rules to be broken — university administrators wouldn’t permit openly racist groups to violate its laws and take control of portions of the campus, so they should not permit other groups to violate rules, either.

A somewhat greater concern for me is that Shapiro called for the resignation of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill over her performance at congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. As I argued at the time, the pile-on against Magill and her fellow presidents was ludicrous. They were asked about policing calls for genocide — asked by Republicans who had defined the term in absurdly broad fashion. They evaded the question and insisted it would depend on specifics, making them sound coldhearted, but their position was correct. Republicans were trying to force them to commit to censoring anti-Israel speech, and they correctly withstood it. Shapiro jumped on the bandwagon to demand Magill’s resignation, undermining his credibility as a supporter of free speech and giving his critics legitimate grounds to question his good faith.

How serious is this concern? It is probably true that some number of left-wing people who care a great deal about the Middle East and currently plan to vote for Harris might abstain if she nominated Shapiro. I think that number is extremely tiny. Even at the height of Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza, young voters in general ranked Israel-Palestine at the bottom of the issues they care about.

A more important risk is that the left wing has a disproportionate voice in media, including on social media. Since Joe Biden stepped down, TikTok, to take the most obvious example, has shifted from pro-Trump to pro-Harris. The risk of a Shapiro nomination is that left-wing propaganda turns sour on Harris.

Would that actually happen, given the surge of excitement over her nomination? Would it even matter? That is hard to say, but I do think the risk of disrupting the sense of unity on the left is a real one.

But these costs have to be measured against the benefits of a Shapiro nomination. And I think those are much larger than most people appreciate.

Shapiro ran 14 points ahead of Joe Biden in his state. Was he running against an election-denying crackpot? Yes, but so was Mark Kelly in Arizona, and Kelly only ran five points ahead of the Biden level. Shapiro’s victory margin indicates very broad appeal.

In office, he has actually expanded his support level. A recent poll pegged his approval rating at +29. That is an incredible level of support to compile in a purple state.

But it makes sense when you pay attention to how Shapiro operates and how he communicates. Lacking a solid Democratic majority, he has not had the ability to sign sweeping legislation like fellow Democratic governors Gretchen Whitmer and Tim Walz. He has, however, made progress on issues that are both substantively important and broaden his appeal. He made public-school breakfasts universally available and opened up state jobs that previously required a college degree to applicants without one. He delivered a masterful performance repairing a melted bridge on I-95 in Philadelphia, delivering practical results that voters can notice.

Watch Shapiro eulogize Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who was killed by the attempt on Donald Trump’s life. You can see how he has an ability to speak to the common humanity of Republicans in a way few politicians seem able to do anymore:

Even though Comperatore’s widow spoke with Shapiro, she refused to take a call from President Biden, citing her husband’s political views. That doesn’t say anything bad about Biden, who was very decent in trying to console her. It is notable that a grieving widow unwilling to take a phone call from a Democratic president would take one from Shapiro.

Walz’s shtick about Republicans being weird is fun. But there’s more value in the ability to empathize with and appeal to Republican voters than mocking their leaders. That benefit comes with a side of upsetting leftists and even liberals, including me. But that is just the cost of winning moderate and conservative support.

The discussion of Shapiro’s merits has centered on his value in his home state, and the research on vice-presidential home state influence is at best inconclusive. But I think the broader value Shapiro would bring would extend beyond one (extremely important) state. He is a very popular and effective messenger who can bolster Harris on her single most important challenge: refuting the claim that she is a left-wing radical.

The election is going to come down to a small percentage of voters who don’t like Trump but worry Harris is too far left. Every major decision she makes should be run through the filter of whether it helps her win those crucial voters. Shapiro rates the strongest on those grounds.

Of course, a vice-president matters more as a governing choice than as a campaigning choice. One lesson of American elections is that presidents constantly select their running mates on short-term political grounds only for those selections to have profound implications on the presidency. Having Shapiro in the administration could prove especially valuable to Harris if she veers from Biden’s policy on Israel (as I hope she would) and applies real pressure to accept a two-state solution.

Shapiro strikes me as a highly promising choice in this regard. An under-discussed fact about his biography is that he came into politics as a legislative aide. I place a high value on this experience. Politics is very hard, in part because it combines some very different skills: grasping public policy, communicating with average people, understanding public opinion and how to build coalitions among both the public and legislators. A high-level communicator who has the expertise to serve as an open adviser is quite rare.

I’ve never met Shapiro. But he strikes me as somebody who studied the system from the inside, then realized he is one of those rare insiders who has front-of-the-camera talent as well.

Progressives have understandable reason to worry about elevating him to a position that would give him the inside track to the next open presidential nomination. But the benefits of such a move seem worth the risk. For all her momentum, Harris is still an underdog in this race. And the voters she needs to pull in are, on the whole, probably more conservative than the ones she’s managed to win over thus far. Any chance she can to expand the contours of her coalition is one she should take. Shapiro is the best chance she’ll get.