Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s place on Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential shortlist last year was a surprise to nobody. He was, in fact, the obvious choice on paper: popular governor of a swing state, moderate in both policy and demeanor, extraordinarily talented at electoral politics.
But like most practicing Jews, Shapiro supports the existence of the State of Israel. And while his particular opinions on Israel’s governance aren’t much different from those of the man who ultimately got the nod as veep—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—his visible and proud Jewishness and his willingness to call out anti-Semitism among pro-Hamas mobs who targeted Jewish businesses in Philadelphia made him an untenable option for the Democratic Party’s base. So we all watched in real time as the Harris team talked itself out of the only rational choice.
Would Harris have won with Shapiro on the ticket? Probably not. Would the Democrats have won with Shapiro, or someone like him, at the top of the ticket? The Harris-Walz disaster seemed to foreclose the possibility of ever finding out. Gaza became the litmus test for progressive political activist groups. And the overt backlash in the party to Shapiro’s Jewish upbringing was a horrifying moment that, it was assumed, nobody wanted to repeat.
But that assumption may have been rash. Shapiro has been giving no indication that he plans on passing on 2028, at least as of now. And now Binyamin Applebaum of the New York Times has responded to Mamdani-mania by making the case that swing-state moderates are still the way to go:
“In his last three elections, beginning in 2016, Pennsylvania’s governor has drawn more votes than anyone else running in the state — presidential candidates, Senate candidates, other candidates for statewide office — and outperformed other Democrats in the exurban and rural areas where the party is struggling….
“He’s in favor of more money for the police and for public defenders. He has pushed to increase funding for public schools and to provide school vouchers to parents. He has delivered some high-profile wins for businesses, notably a cut in the state’s corporate tax rate. He also has retained strong support from unions by backing a higher minimum wage and vowing to block any right-to-work legislation.”
All this remains part and parcel of why Shapiro wins elections but also why an emboldened progressive base would rather lose than win with him. Applebaum acknowledges as much. But the article takes pains to avoid the elephant in the room. In April, a man angry about Shapiro’s support for Israel tried to kill him and his whole family over it. The attempted killer tried to burn the Shapiros’ house down while they were inside it, but the Shapiros escaped. Applebaum mentions that it was on Passover but otherwise breezes right past the matter.
That is one way Democrats might try to avoid the issue—just ignore it. Another possibility, and a more likely one, came from a tweet that got effectively piled-on until it was deleted. But more interesting to me than the wording was what it said about where things go from here. It was from a progressive who noted, in response to the article on Shapiro, that he and his friend “agreed that Shapiro would be the dream candidate for Democrats in 2028 if not for his pro-Israel baggage.” His solution? “I hope he can credibly and visibly commit to ending military aid to Israel before the primary.”
Much of the response to the tweet was aimed at the euphemistic first sentence. But the second sentence is what’s important going forward. It would be much more satisfying for the progressive left to get Shapiro to renounce his people than to ignore him altogether. And so the strategy is simple: Offer him a place in the party elite in return for a public apology for his Jewishness.
Shapiro isn’t going to take that offer. But the subtler version of it will buzz like a fly around him for the foreseeable future. Democrats will want Shapiro to play down the stuff he likes about Israel—Jews being alive, good food—and to chime in only when he has something negative to say—Bibi this, Bibi that.
We can call this the Schumer Model. It’s not that they’ll need him to be anti-Zionist; they just want him to keep mum unless he has an anti-Zionist-ish thing to say.
And further, this applies no matter what Shapiro’s personal ambitions are. The governor of Pennsylvania won’t be ignored by the media. So his party will lay on the guilt, urging him not to unnecessarily divide the left. To be a team player. To, perhaps, know his place.
It’ll be up to Shapiro to resist this quiet capitulation. In politics, we learned a long time ago that emancipation isn’t always a synonym for freedom.
