By admin 
Ever since Kamala Harris started thinking about picking him as her running mate, Josh Shapiro has been the subject of a familiar kind of whisper: People maintain that they don’t have a problem that the Pennsylvania governor is Jewish and a Zionist – but insist others will.
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Whether or not he gets into the 2028 presidential race, he says, the pundits and the posters should realize that they’re getting him and voters wrong when they say he can’t be part of the future of the Democratic Party because he’s too centrist, too buttoned up or too supportive of Israel.
“I’m living in the real world, where I’m interacting with people every day as someone who’s open about and proud of his faith,” Shapiro told CNN in an extensive interview not far from his home. “And what I experience for the people of Pennsylvania, the toughest swing state in the entire country, is tolerance, is goodness and above all else, is just a desire to have their elected leaders go to work for them every day and deliver real results.”
For now, Shapiro says his focus is on Pennsylvania – “the state that decides it all,” as he likes to say, where his approval ratings remain high and he once again drew neither a primary challenge nor a strong Republican opponent. He’s looking to run up the score in his reelection campaign this fall and help flip up to four US House seats after his picks for each race won their primaries.
But a politician who alludes to a famous passage from a rabbinic text in nearly every major speech has also decided to run headlong into talking about Israel, whether for a future presidential campaign’s sake or just to influence a conversation that tends to land on him more than any other Jewish politician in the United States.
He knows the Israel issue is one of the hardest in a Democratic Party that is becoming increasingly critical of Israel amid the casualties in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks. After much deliberation, Shapiro decided he couldn’t outrun the questions about where he stands – and he didn’t want to.
“I felt that we needed to inject some truth and some reality into the conversation,” he told CNN.
“For those who do not want there to be a Jewish state, oftentimes they will predicate their views on this notion that being grounded in a religion and being a democracy can’t coexist. I think it’s important to point out the hypocrisy of that view: when there are 46 majority Muslim nations, 23 of which have Islam as their official religion either because of statute or their constitution, and only one has Judaism as their official religion, and yet we’re focused just on the Jewish state,” Shapiro added.
“Second, for those who don’t want Israel to exist in the region, I think that they are for permanent war — and I have for decades been for peace, for striving to have two states living peacefully side by side, and I would argue that we need to have a peace deal, not just between Israel and the Palestinians, but the entire Arab world.”
Shapiro criticizes former President Joe Biden’s administration for not making that kind of multilateral peace deal a priority, saying they had a “missed opportunity.”
He also complains that President Donald Trump is enabling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is “steering Israel down a dangerous and dark path, creating more isolation for Israel. And I believe that his leadership of Israel has created many of the geopolitical problems that we’re seeing across this country and the globe.”
‘Are we in Josh Shapiro country?’
Swap out a few paragraphs of the speech Shapiro gave May 19, the night his House primary picks went 4-for-4, and he has an address for the campaign launch ready to go.
He could even do the speech in the same location: an old G-force training facility for early astronauts that’s been turned into a flashy event space, with the control room still in place next to the room where he took a final pass through his remarks ticking through examples of the phrase he rarely goes more than a few sentences without using: getting stuff (or “sh*t,” the word that appeared on-screen in his reelection launch video) done.
His boosters are already geared up for the morning after the November midterms to say that the big night they’re expecting will provide a strong rationale to run for something bigger next year. And of course, he’s talking a lot about foreign policy for a man whose current job is based in Harrisburg.
“Are we in Josh Shapiro country?” progressive state Sen. Vincent Hughes (whose wife, Sheryl Lee Ralph, plays Barbara Howard on “Abbott Elementary,” set in Philadelphia) declared at the rally.
Shapiro set out early this year to line up a slate of candidates for four Republican districts he says Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told him could very well decide the majority in the House, helping recruit, fundraise, campaign and organize operations for them.
“It was the final click for me: if I have the governor’s support, I think I can do this now,” said Bob Brooks, the firefighters union president who had both Shapiro’s endorsement and Zohran Mamdani’s consultants working for him.
Ahead of Shapiro at the microphone at the rally was Bob Harvie, who’s running against Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, one of three Republicans who won in districts that Harris carried over Trump in 2024. Harvie told CNN afterward about Shapiro, “His being on the top of the ticket was a factor in taking on this race.”
Though Shapiro talked William Penn iconography and trying to win a majority in the state Senate for the first time since 1992, gone is the line he liked to fall back on when running in 2022 that he was more focused on his state’s Washington County — a rural area where he did better than other Democrats in his three statewide runs so far — than Washington, DC.
Now he talks about the seven ways he cut taxes and how Trump and what he calls the president’s “enablers” in Congress are to blame for higher health care premiums and higher costs.
“My perspective hasn’t changed. The people I listen to has not changed at all. If anything, it’s even more focused on Pennsylvania,” Shapiro told CNN. “But you can’t ignore what’s happening in the world.”
Bucks County, though, is also full of the types of voters who keep on voting for both him and Trump. He didn’t pick the spot just to tell the crowd about how his high school sweetheart wife had grown up there.
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Shapiro has lawyers looking at pushing back on what he called a “blatantly illegal” announcement from the Justice Department last month that the IRS would be “FOREVER BARRED AND PRECLUDED” from any audit or any action against Trump, members of his family or related trusts.
And as he started to lay out in his rally speech, the former state attorney general wants to prosecute what he says is the administration’s corruption, saying that he believes state courts can be put into play “not to be punitive against an individual, but to make clear that as we head into the next 250 years, that this type of behavior is not going to be acceptable for anybody that comes next.”
Shapiro alleges Trump is “obviously also not well.”
“It is clear that it’s getting harder for him to hold a cogent thought. It’s harder for him to remain awake during meetings,” he said, adding: “He is not able to focus on the tasks that matter to the American people, like bringing down costs.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle responded to that with an email calling Shapiro “a clueless little moron who will never be president,” adding that Trump “remains in excellent health and he is working 24/7 to Make America Great Again.”
Backstage at the May 19 rally, Shapiro was checking the results on his phone, calling Brooks to congratulate him while the candidate was still giving his victory speech. The next afternoon, he was in Scranton with Mayor Paige Cognetti, whom he also helped get into the race against GOP Rep. Rob Bresnahan.
Janelle Stelson, making a second run against GOP Rep. Scott Perry, said that though she’s known Shapiro since covering his previous inaugurations while still working as a local news anchor, she hadn’t expected him to show up at her launch party for this run or endorse right away.
They’re not particularly close personally, but “he means so much to so many people that I mention him in almost every conversation I have,” Stelson told CNN.
Asked if she thinks running this year with Shapiro’s expected coattails will help in her rematch, Stelson said, “Uh, yeah.”
‘I feel very confident in my standing’
Harris saw it differently in 2024 during a running-mate search that both she and Shapiro have covered in their post-election books. She wrote about not liking his always-striving vibe. He wrote about being suspicious why he was asked if he had ever been or dealt with an agent of the Israeli government, feeling the question was antisemitic. Harris allies say it was a standard question prompted by his brief stint in a low-level position at the Israeli embassy early in his career.
That stint, his criticism of some campus protests over the Gaza war and a college newspaper column he wrote doubting that Palestinians had the ability to establish their own homeland all became fodder for criticism of him. Some pro-Palestinian voices dubbed him “Genocide Josh.”
In their interview at her official residence, Harris – who was getting nudged to pick Shapiro by Barack Obama and her brother-in-law, Tony West, among others – built up to a big question: Could she win Pennsylvania without him?
He didn’t know, Shapiro told her.
In the end, she did not.
Even if everything goes Shapiro’s way this year, there’s plenty of skepticism from home-state Democrats – and not just about his views on Israel – that people on the left say will be amplified if he tries to go national.
“In the deep-blue parts of the state where the base is, Josh Shapiro is not enough to win Pennsylvania,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for the very left-leaning Justice Democrats, which supports left-leaning primary candidates around the country.
Told of that sentiment, Shapiro responded: “And those voters have supported me, and I’m grateful for their support.”
For now, the argument is playing out in the most solidly Democratic spots in the country, like the South Philadelphia congressional district that state Rep. Chris Rabb won and which he jokes has “more raccoons than Republicans.”
Rabb is a proud democratic socialist who was joined on the trail by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He also campaigned with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who said the US “deserved” the September 11, 2001, attacks, a comment Piker has since said he regretted making, and saying Hamas was “1,000 times better” than Israel, which he says he doesn’t.
Sitting outside a high school catching voters in the heat of primary afternoon, Rabb said his House primary victory spoke to Democrats wanting to move in a direction that doesn’t necessarily align with Shapiro’s brand of politics.
Asked to assess the politics of the governor, Rabb said, “I believe his ethic is running from the political center, and I am running from the moral center. And there is some overlap, but they’re very different centers.”
Shapiro called Rabb the morning after the primary, and they had a long talk about working together. But read that quote, Shapiro said he needed to know the context before responding. Told the context, he said he still would hold off from responding directly.
He did take a swing at the sentiments, though: “I want change. I want radical change. But you don’t need chaos in order to do that,” he said.
“I’m not going to personalize this, but there are people that want to analyze me and chirp from the outside. I ignore the noise. I focus on getting stuff done,” Shapiro said. “And I would just point out, politically, I’ve now run for governor twice with no primary, with a unified Democratic Party behind me, and I think we head into this reelection in a very strong position after winning my first election with a record number of votes. So I feel very confident in my standing here.”
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