By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, December 03, 2025
There is a lot to pore over in Tim Alberta’s typically
meaty profile of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, in The
Atlantic. It is worth a read in its entirety. There was, however, one
particularly salacious passage that requires some unpacking.
Shapiro succumbed to an unguarded moment when Alberta
reflected on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign and the prospect of her choosing the
governor as her running mate. When the nod went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz,
the Harris campaign floated a variety of self-serving rationales for the move
that cast Shapiro in an unflattering light. In Alberta’s formulation, the
campaign characterized Shapiro as “selfish, petty, and monomaniacally
ambitious.” The whole experience has duly embittered Shapiro.
One of the many competing claims the Harris campaign made
to explain its otherwise inexplicable decision to take a pass on the talented
and popular swing-state governor in favor of a lummox from a state that hasn’t
voted for a GOP presidential candidate in over 50 years was that Shapiro wanted
to decorate the Naval Observatory with works by Pennsylvania artists. The cad!
The banality of the alleged offense notwithstanding,
Shapiro seemed genuinely stunned. “She wrote that in her book?” he asked
incredulously. “That’s complete and utter bulls***.”
“I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies,”
he continued:
“I mean, she’s trying to sell books
and cover her ass,” Shapiro snapped. The governor stared past me now, shaking
his head. As I began to ask a different question, he held up a hand. He looked
disgusted. With me? With Harris? No, I began to realize: He was disgusted with
himself.
“I shouldn’t say ‘cover her ass.’ I
think that’s not appropriate,” Shapiro said. His tone was suddenly collected.
“She’s trying to sell books. Period.”
She is, and Shapiro knows why — although he caught
himself before the indiscretion escaped his mouth.
Shapiro’s bid was tanked by the vaguely antisemitic whisper campaign his Democratic opponents mounted in the
effort to prevent anyone other than a progressive from joining the already
progressive Harris ticket. The Harris camp made no secret of its efforts to ingratiate itself with the violent and menacing
anti-Israel rabble in the streets, and Shapiro’s elevation would have
undermined that lunatic project.
One bizarre effort by the Harris campaign to obscure its
true motives apparently rang true to NBC News reporter Yamiche Alcindor. “Josh
Shapiro was seen as not someone who could deliver the state of Pennsylvania
based on internal polling,” she wrote
in August 2024 of a governor who had won a statewide race by 15 points two
years earlier. “The source also said Harris’ team was unconvinced that any one
person could guaranteed [sic] any of the battleground states for the
ticket.”
If no one could guarantee their own state as a
part of the Harris ticket, that says a lot more about the campaign’s principal
than about her prospective running mates.
Another theory posited by Harris’s allies undermines that
explanation entirely. Harris was “looking for ‘more of a governing partner’
than an electoral boost,” NOTUS reported.
The Wall Street Journal’s sources in Harris’s orbit confirmed
the degree to which Shapiro intimidated their candidate: “Some Democrats also
privately questioned whether Shapiro would be well-suited to serve in a
supporting role.” The fact that much of the remainder of that article is
dedicated to the Democratic activist class’s discomfort with Shapiro’s Jewish
identity tells the tale.
The Keystone State governor has earned his consternation
with the Harris campaign. He was cravenly defamed by an operation that could
not admit that it was bending over backward to accommodate bigots. In the end,
however, Shapiro dodged a bullet. The governor stands a good chance of running
on a national Democratic ballot one day. Kamala Harris never will again.
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