Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro would bring a battleground state and political acumen to a national ticket

Gov. Josh Shapiro gives his 2024 budget address at the Capitol in Harrisburg Feb. 6, 2024 (Commonwealth Media Services photo)

He’s only been Pennsylvania’s governor for a year and a half and just got his second state budget wrapped, but Josh Shapiro already had a national profile for some of the cases he prosecuted during his tenure as the state’s attorney general.

Shapiro is now one of the people considered most likely to join the Democrats’ 2024 ticket if President Joe Biden drops out of the race. He leads a critical battleground state with 19 electoral votes up for grabs.

Shapiro has continued to support Biden publicly in the aftermath of the president’s poor performance in the June 27 presidential debate, saying the morning after on cable news morning shows that Democrats should “stop worrying” and “start working.” But that hasn’t stopped speculation — which Shapiro has largely dismissed — that he is destined for bigger things within the Democratic Party, whether it’s now or sometime in the near future.

Rising from a state House seat representing his hometown of Abington to the governor’s mansion, Shapiro built a reputation for being a hard worker and a skilled negotiator. And he has projected those attributes onto his administration’s brand with the slogan “Get S**t Done.”

“He’s had 20 years of being in government and that’s a lot of experience,” Neil Oxman, who served as a consultant for Shapiro’s first campaign.

Shapiro touts simple achievements in state government such as cutting the time to register a new corporation from months to days and flipping the state’s reputation for lethargic government by reopening Interstate 95, a crucial mid-Atlantic artery, in 12 days after a gasoline tanker crash last June destroyed an overpass.

And he offers grand designs for the future of Pennsylvania by reforming the state’s system of higher education, expanding workforce training and development opportunities and reinventing the commonwealth’s energy economy to meet carbon reduction goals while recognizing the role the state’s fossil fuel industries will continue to play for the foreseeable future.

Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, said Shapiro’s approval ratings, his 2022 gubernatorial election win by a 15% margin, and record as attorney general all make him one of the most recognized political figures in the key swing states for Democrats.

“People view him as  … a moderate commonsense Democrat who tries to get things done,” Yost said, adding that his profile among Democratic leaders is also strong.

“People wouldn’t be mentioning his name if he hadn’t already generated some buzz,” Yost said. “His brand is undoubtedly strong, particularly within the party, but it has the potential to be appealing to a broader swath of voters.”

Rising through the ranks

Shapiro was elected to the state House of Representatives in 2004 and served there until 2011. During his first tenure in Harrisburg, Shapiro demonstrated acumen for forging compromise. He helped to negotiate a play to put Rep. Denny O’Brien, a Republican backed by a reform-minded alliance of Democratic and GOP lawmakers, on the speaker’s rostrum in 2007.

In doing so, Shapiro helped knock Rep. John Perzel, a Philadelphia GOP boss later convicted of using state resources for campaigns, from the speaker’s seat. O’Brien named Shapiro a co-chair of the newly formed Speaker’s Committee on Reform.

After three terms in the House, Shapiro returned to Montgomery County, where he was elected to oversee a financially distressed government. According to his campaign biography, Shapiro erased a $10 million deficit and simplified the county’s investments to rescue its half-billion-dollar retirement fund.

It was as the state’s attorney general, however, that Shapiro began to draw national and international headlines. In 2018 he released the results of a grand jury investigation that alleged widespread abuse of 1,000 children by some 300 “predator priests” in six of Pennsylvania’s eight Roman Catholic dioceses. In a scathing report , Shapiro said church leaders engaged in a “systematic cover up” over the course of eight decades to protect the institution, transferring abusers from one parish to another without disclosing their prior acts.

Shapiro opposed proposals by the dioceses to establish victims’ compensation funds, noting that the grand jury recommended lifting or creating exceptions to the criminal and civil statutes of limitations for abuse and saying that the church should not be “the arbiter of its own punishment.” While the legislature eliminated the criminal statute of limitations for abuse, it has been unable to complete legislation to allow older victims to sue their abusers and those who enabled them. Within a year of the report’s release, the dioceses paid $84 million to settle claims by 564 victims.

And he sued former President Donald Trump’s administration some two dozen times, including in 2019, to challenge a “gag rule” imposing restrictions on participants in the Title X family planning program.

Shapiro also brokered a 2019 deal between two western Pennsylvania healthcare giants, UPMC and Highmark, who were at odds over terms to allow Highmark-insured patients to receive in-network care at UPMC facilities. Shapiro accused UPMC, the largest healthcare system in western Pennsylvania, of violating the state’s public charities law and of unfair trade practices. The two sides signed a 10-year agreement allowing patients to keep access to each other’s services just days before the previous agreement expired.

Shapiro’s 2022 run for governor came the same cycle that Democrat John Fetterman ran for the state’s open Senate seat, in an election year when candidates aligned with Trump fared relatively poorly. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade just a few months prior, was galvanizing for many Democrats, and Shapiro’s Republican opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), was and is staunchly anti-abortion.

Mastriano, a retired U.S. Army colonel from south-central Pennsylvania, ran on a far-right platform in which he advocated restricting abortion access and cutting public school funding. He also promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, said Shapiro’s campaign zeroed in on Mastriano’s weaknesses early in the campaign and didn’t let up. He also received endorsements from more than a dozen high-profile Republicans including former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Pennsylvania Congressmen Charlie Dent and Jim Greenwood.

“It was a textbook on campaigns that didn’t deviate from their game plan,” Borick said, adding that Shapiro is disciplined in his messaging and style. “He doesn’t make a lot of unforced errors in his politics.”

His tenure as governor has not been without controversy. The first budget Shapiro negotiated, with a GOP-controlled Senate and Democratic-controlled House, was delayed nearly six months, as a protracted battle over school vouchers simmered through the summer into the fall. Senate Republicans blamed Shapiro for failing to secure the support of House Democrats, who killed the $100 million program.

Last August, Shapiro’s office paid $295,000 in public funds to settle a state employee’s sexual harassment complaint against his longtime aide and former Legislative Affairs Secretary Mike Vereb. The terms of the agreement came to light last October.

What would he bring to the ticket?

With the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin crucial to winning the presidential election, both the Biden and Trump campaigns have spent significant time and resources in the Keystone State, with only a few points separating the two in recent polls. However, following the June 27 debate, a growing number of Democrats called for Biden to step down from the ticket, in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris or another candidate, like Shapiro.

A July 18 survey by Public Policy Polling found a Democratic ticket of Harris/Shapiro ahead of Trump and his running mate U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance by one point, while the Biden-Harris ticket trailed the GOP team by about four points. A Quinnipiac University poll in January found Shapiro with a 59% approval rating, well ahead of the 40% approval rating Biden had in the same poll. And in a 2022 Muhlenberg poll of a hypothetical presidential election between Shapiro and Trump, the governor led by 11% among Pennsylvania voters.

“His resume is stellar for taking that next step,” Yost, of Franklin & Marshall said. “We just don’t know what that would look like.”

If Shapiro were to stand as a choice for the presidential nomination in an open Democratic convention, he would be an attractive choice, he added.

“He would be one of the leading candidates just given his record and the necessity of winning Pennsylvania for Democrats and his ability to appeal to the middle in the way his opponent, if he were to run against Trump, has struggled with,” Yost said.

And although voters in Arizona or Wisconsin might never have heard his name, Shapiro’s brand of politics is well suited for a national audience, Borick said.

“Pennsylvania … is a swing state for a reason,” Borick said. “It has one of the largest rural populations in the nation, it has large urban populations and booming suburbs. It mirrors the national landscape of American life.”

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