Josh Shapiro’s Next Big Step

Josh Shapiro / Photograph by Colin Lenton

On a pleasant, sunny weekend last fall, three weeks before Donald Trump would win Pennsylvania and every other swing state across America, three months before he’d complete his unlikely recapture of the White House, the national Democratic Party’s heaviest heavyweights came together for a couple of days in Philadelphia. For the party, there was, at least at that moment, still hope.

The get-together — a fall retreat and final pre-election check-in for 300 of the party’s top fundraisers — took place on the long holiday weekend in October, with many of the money crowd embedding themselves at the Ritz-Carlton on Broad Street, at the shoulder of City Hall. On Monday, the group would get updates from Kamala Harris campaign operatives about the state of the race, but things really kicked off the evening before with a dinner a few blocks up Broad at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, addressed the attendees at the start of the evening, as did a couple of other speakers. But it wasn’t until after dinner — grilled cod and beef medallions were on the menu — that what amounted to the keynote speaker arrived: Pennsylvania’s on-the-rise governor, Josh Shapiro.

The election season had been intense, but transformative, for Shapiro. Because of his popularity in perpetually purple Pennsylvania, he’d been a key surrogate for Joe Biden when he was still in the race. When Biden dropped out and the party turned to Harris, Shapiro was on the shortest of short lists to be her running mate, with her final choice coming down to Shapiro or Minnesota governor Tim Walz. She chose Walz, but the process gave Shapiro a big bump in status. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in late August, it seemed as if he couldn’t walk more than a few feet without being stopped for a selfie.

Now, inside PAFA, Shapiro — who’d spent a chunk of the previous month on the road, stumping for the Harris-Walz ticket — did his best to fire up the fundraising troops for the final weeks of the campaign. Adopting his usual close-your-eyes-and-you-might-think-it’s-Obama speaking style — staccato cadence, dropped endin’ consonants, rhetorical build — Shapiro told the group the race was close in Pennsylvania, close everywhere. It’s why they needed to keep working, keep making calls, keep bringing in dollars. The election, the fate of the country, depended on it.

Even before Shapiro finished speaking, a handful of people got up from their tables and moved to the front of the room, positioning themselves to get a word with the governor. When he finally concluded his remarks, those early movers were joined by dozens more.

Meanwhile, his popularity in Pennsylvania continues to be strong, with nearly 60 percent of all voters — and a fair number of Trump-supporting Republicans — saying they approve of the job he’s doing. “I’ll give you the assessment my mom would give,” says former state auditor general Eugene DePasquale. “She will just say he’s a smart guy who’s handling the state. I think people feel confident and calm with him as the governor.”

If Shapiro, who turns 52 in late June, does win reelection next year (potential GOP challengers include treasurer Stacy Garrity and U.S. Representative Dan Meuser), it will be the next logical step in his remarkably orderly political rise, one Philadelphians have watched up close: seven years as state legislator, five years as Montgomery County commissioner, six years as state attorney general, two and a half years as governor. To his supporters, Shapiro’s unbroken climb is evidence of his rare political talents. To his critics — and there are plenty, including some Democrats — his steady ascension reflects something else: cold ambition. There’s nothing that says both can’t be right.

If Shapiro has a brand, it might be proficiency — both in governing and in politics. “He operates on a different playing field,” says Shapiro’s friend John Saler, a retried Philadelphia lobbyist. “He just has an understanding of the body politic.” Indeed, Shapiro almost always seems to say the right thing, almost never makes a political mistake. And he’s worked hard to craft a reputation among the public as both a policy wonk and a regular guy. One day while I was talking to him for this story, for instance, I shifted away from politics and asked about his beloved 76ers. I was anticipating another buttoned-up response; instead, his shoulders slumped at the moribund state of the team. “Fuck …” he sighed.

Over the course of his career, Shapiro has had a knack for being in the right place at the right time — and that could prove true in 2028 as well. After a decade of Donald Trump’s chaos, might voters be ready for, as Mrs. DePasquale might put it, a smart guy who can handle things?

Of course, as Josh Shapiro knows, competence carries its own burdens.

In early April, just a few days before Shapiro and his family will be evacuated from the Governor’s Residence after that middle-of-the-night arson attack, he and I are sitting in his office inside the 120-year-old Capitol building in Harrisburg. The room is gorgeous and impressive, with carved woodwork, a high ceiling, and portraits of Pennsylvania’s past leaders hung high on the walls.

I’d seen Shapiro — dressed in his trademark blue suit and white open-collar shirt, one of his two go-to outfits — earlier that day at the nearby Hilton in downtown Harrisburg. He’d made a lunchtime address to members of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, emphasizing the commitment he’s made to agriculture during his time in office. As we settle in now, he says the talk was just one of many things on today’s calendar. “The amount of stuff I’ve done since that farm speech is pretty amazing,” he says as the late afternoon sun shines in his eyes.

He tells me he’s typically up in the 6 a.m. hour. If his wife, Lori, and their kids are in Harrisburg — the family splits time between the Governor’s Residence and Abington — he tries to help them get ready for the day while also fitting in exercise (either a walk or a weight workout) along with coffee, catching up on the news, and other reading.

“That morning moment of reading and exercising is really important to center me,” he says. “Then my days are, I mean, just nonstop.” He spends at least half the week traveling around Pennsylvania for meetings and public events, an approach that helps him govern — “I’m a visual learner,” he says — and certainly doesn’t hurt him politically. His official schedule typically ends mid-evening, at which point he often walks again on the grounds of the residence while catching up on phone calls. He finally shuts things down around 10:30 p.m. and flicks on a game, trying not to think about politics. He’s asleep by 12:30 or 1 a.m., recharging so he can do it all again the next day.

It’s an intense life, but it’s in keeping with the theme Shapiro has set for his administration: GSD. The initials — appropriated, consciously or not, from legendary Philly pol Vince Fumo — stand for either “get stuff done” or “get shit done,” depending on the company the governor is in.

During Shapiro’s first two years in office, a fair amount of shit has, in fact, gotten done. A number of people I spoke with for this story used the word strategic to describe Shapiro and noted that he’s open to new ways of approaching things. For instance, one of the accomplishments of his first year in office was the creation of an official economic development plan for Pennsylvania, something the commonwealth hasn’t had in nearly 20 years. The plan — forged in consultation with business leaders and members of the legislature — zeroes in on five industries for investment and growth in Pennsylvania: agriculture, energy, life sciences, manufacturing, and robotics and technology.

“There’s hundreds of things you can invest in,” Shapiro explains to me, “but I said, let’s focus on five key areas, and let’s figure out how we drive investment around those areas out to communities, especially those that have been ignored and left behind.” He pauses. “I assume you live in the Philly area, right?”

I tell him I do.

“So you know that a lot of the focus historically has been on our downtowns, or on our sprawling office parks in suburbia,” he continues. “But it never really focused on our main streets or our farmlands.” His administration, he says, is trying to invest in all kinds of communities.

The economic approach is another thing that feels win-win — smart policy meeting smart politics. Agriculture accounts for almost one in 10 jobs in Pennsylvania, after all, and so it certainly feels worthy of investment. At the same time, it’s been ages since people living in the state’s farming communities thought Democrats gave a crap about their lives. Few of them are rushing to change their registrations, but Shapiro is getting their attention. “When it comes to politics, not everyone is a fan,” Pennsylvania Farm Bureau president Chris Hoffman says of his members. “But for the general side of agriculture, they respect him and trust him.”

Shapiro has also tried to be strategic when it comes to dealing with Pennsylvania’s closely divided legislature, where Democrats hold a one-seat majority in the House and Republicans have a four-seat edge in the Senate. An early misstep notwithstanding — more on that flub in a moment — he’s generally looked for common ground between the parties. During his first two years, D’s and R’s have come together to pass a record increase in education funding, along with an expansion of a tax break designed to help seniors stay in their homes. Shapiro has also taken steps to make Pennsylvania more competitive for business, reducing wait times for permits and state services and accelerating the decrease of the corporate income tax rate. It’s not exactly the New Deal in terms of ambition, but it’s better than gridlock. Put points on the board, Shapiro likes to say.

Shapiro has been strategic as well when dealing with the revolution and retribution of Donald Trump’s second term. He hasn’t set himself ablaze over every Trump policy shift or provocation, but he has been outspoken about Trump’s tariff chaos, and in several cases he’s gone to court to fight federal funding cuts that hurt Pennsylvania. While progressives might dream of something more Resistance-like, Shapiro has been disciplined about staying in a particular lane: I stick up for Pennsylvanians.

Of course, for all his strategizing, the real hallmark of Shapiro’s first term is the way he’s handled the crises and unexpected events you can’t really game-plan for. There’s no better example than the overpass collapse that shut down I-95 in Philly in June of 2023. Shapiro immediately rushed to the scene, then worked with engineers, transportation crews, and state officials to figure out a way to reopen the road not in weeks or months, as many feared, but in days. When traffic was flowing again, he championed it — explicitly as an example of government working at its best, implicitly as evidence of his own competence. He’s been similarly high-profile during other out-of-the-blue incidents, from the manhunt for an escaped Chester County prison inmate in 2023 to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer.

Josh Shapiro surveying the I-95 collapse in June 2023 / Photograph via Commonwealth Media

People who like Shapiro say his guaranteed presence in such moments is a sign of strong leadership. Nonfans roll their eyes, seeing it as another example of his opportunism. As one Republican griped to me, “He loves to hold a press conference, he loves to do a press release. That’s about all the shit he’s getting done.”

The governor hasn’t completely avoided negative headlines. During his first year, there was a months-long stalemate over the state budget, owing largely to the administration’s political mishandling of Lifeline Scholarships, a proposed form of vouchers that would let some students in Pennsylvania’s lowest-achieving school districts attend private schools on the public dime. Shapiro supported the scholarships while he campaigned, and the Senate passed a version of the budget that included funding for them. But Democrats in the House balked, ultimately forcing Shapiro to use a line-item veto on the program — at which point Republicans called him a welcher. It took five and a half months before a new deal was struck and the budget went into effect.

Even more damaging was the resignation, in the early fall of 2023, of Sha­piro’s­­­ secretary of legislative affairs, Mike Vereb, following a settlement in a sexual harassment case against Vereb. While they couldn’t be further apart in personality — Shapiro is polished; Vereb, a former West Conshohocken cop, is known for his rough edges — the two men share a long history. Both are from Montco; they served together in the state legislature for several years, and after Shapiro became AG, he hired Vereb, a Republican, as his legislative liaison.

Shapiro tapped Vereb to play the same role when he became governor, but it didn’t take long for trouble to hit. In a statement filed with the state’s Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, a woman who was hired to be one of Vereb’s deputies alleged that, beginning just weeks into the administration, Vereb made a series of crude, sexually charged statements in front of or addressed to her, then retaliated against her when she objected. Her statement lists several incidents, but a few stand out.

Several weeks into the job, the woman said, she brought up the issue of Vereb’s behavior directly to him. By this point, not only had Vereb allegedly made sexually suggestive comments to her, the woman’s statement said, but other people had asked her about Vereb’s behavior, noting his reputation for excessive alcohol use and marital difficulties. She said Vereb grew defensive.

“If you and I decided to enter into a sexual relationship, that would be our business,” the woman, who hasn’t been named in the media, quoted Vereb as saying. “If you decided you wanted to do that, and go close the door to this office, tell me to bend you over this conference table, hike your skirt up, and fuck you from behind, that would be our decision to make. Maybe we’ll get there and decide that.”

When the woman told Vereb she wasn’t interested in that, he allegedly said, “Well, fuck you then,” and gave her the finger. But that evening he called her at home — drunk, she believed — and made further crude comments. Again, she shot him down.

In her statement, the woman said that after that, issues about her performance suddenly started to be raised, despite the fact that she’d previously been told she was doing a good job. After a series of meetings involving Vereb and other administration members, the woman resigned. She and her attorney took her case to the EEO, and in late May officially filed suit with the state Human Relations Commission. By the end of August, she and the Shapiro administration had reached a settlement awarding her $295,000.

The substance of the case is certainly disturbing, but there are also questions about the way Shapiro himself handled it. Though the settlement was signed on September 1st, an announcement that Vereb (who hadn’t commented publicly on the allegations) was leaving the administration wasn’t made until September 27th — and then, apparently, only after reporters who’d gotten a copy of the settlement asked the administration for comment. What’s more, when reporter Todd Shepherd, from the website Broad + Liberty, filed a right-to-know request several months later for documents potentially connected to the harassment, including the victim’s emails, there were gaps in what the administration produced. The matter ended up in Commonwealth Court, where administration lawyers told the court that emails from the victim were unavailable. Her account had been deleted.

Finally, when the matter got press attention during last summer’s veepstakes, a spokesman for Shapiro said the governor actually hadn’t been aware of the situation until “months” after the woman’s complaint was filed — a statement many people have found simply impossible to believe.

“Mike Vereb was his right-hand man, and you’re telling me nobody went to Governor Shapiro and said, hey, this is what’s going on, just to give you a heads-up?” says State Representative Abby Major. A Republican from Western Pennsylvania, Major had given guidance to the victim early on; Major herself had been harassed by Delco state legislator Mike Zabel, who subsequently resigned.

“I’m not a pundit,” he said. “I mean, I’ve never lost an election and tend to outperform other Democrats in communities like this. But, you know, I’m not showing up to campaign. I’m showing up to learn and deliver for these communities.”

Does he — son of the Philly suburbs, graduate of Georgetown Law — feel comfortable in places like this?

“First off, this is not new to me,” he answered. “I’ve been coming to these communities since I first campaigned for attorney general in 2016. … We might have different choices for president, we might be registered in different parties. But I actually think we all want the same things, right? You want good schools for your kids, your grandkids. You want safe communities to live in. You want your rights and liberties protected. You want a job in the area that you love, and you want to know you can raise your kids in the community you love and have opportunity for them in the future.”

Josh Shapiro at a Mifflin County event in March / Photograph via Commonwealth Media

Shapiro’s frequent seeking of shared turf springs in part from his temperament; he is, by nature, a problem solver. But it also reflects his political journey. When he first got involved in politics in the late 1990s and early 2000s — he was chief of staff for U.S. Representative Joe Hoeffel — Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the Philly suburbs. Nevertheless, he managed to win. In his first race for state representative, he knocked on 10,000 doors and upset Republican Jon Fox. Seven years later he knocked off Republicans again — he and fellow Democrat Leslie Richards won two of three Montgomery County commissioner seats, putting the party in the majority for the first time in 140 years. When Shapiro ran for reelection as attorney general in 2020, he was the only Democrat to win statewide, surviving — with 51 percent of the vote — the unexpected, Trump-led red wave.

His secret? Shapiro’s political instincts are one reason he’s been able to turn red — or at least purple — areas and offices blue. Joe Radosevich, who ran two campaigns for Shapiro and served as his chief of staff in the attorney general’s office, says his former boss “is very capable of identifying weaknesses within the coalition on the other side and reaching out to people who aren’t being represented.” And because he’s not an ideologue, he’s credible when he does that.

Meanwhile, in office, Shapiro has a sharp sense of issues that will play well with the masses. As attorney general, he built a name for himself by taking on the Catholic Church over sexual abuse and the pharmaceutical industry over opioids. Both read as brave crusades against powerful institutions, but the political risk was probably fairly small. Were there many voters siding with pedophile priests or Big Pharma? As governor, meanwhile, Shapiro innately understood the opportunity presented by the I-95 crisis. In a time of deep skepticism, being able to show that government could find a quick, creative solution to a problem would be a huge win.

Shapiro combines his sharp political sense with preparation, hard work, and discipline. In public, whether it’s during an event, press conference, or podcast interview, he’s almost always on message and unflappable. “In private, if he’s mad or frustrated, you know it,” says a former Montco official. “But as soon as the lights come on, he becomes the diplomat. He’s careful what he says.” The former official adds, “He is as prepared as anyone you’ll ever meet in any profession.”

For Shapiro, preparation means regularly reaching out to people beyond his immediate team. Talk to business and political figures in Philly’s power crowd, and you’ll routinely hear that they just got a text from “Josh,” just had a phone call with “Josh,” just saw “Josh” at an event. Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton, who represents parts of Southwest Philadelphia and Delco, says the regular calls she got from Shapiro when he was attorney general amazed her. “I would say, can you tell me what app you’re using, so I can start to call folks just to say hi — not to ask for a favor?” she laughs.

Which isn’t to say Shapiro puts personal bonds above politics. In 2011, when Montgomery County Democrats thought they finally had an opportunity to win control of the three-person board of commissioners, Shapiro reportedly declined to run with his former boss, Joe Hoeffel, who was already serving on the board. Party bosses ultimately threw their support to Shapiro. Hoeffel, who dropped out, saw Shapiro’s entry into the race as a betrayal, telling the Inquirer, “You don’t want to turn your back on him. Loyalty is not his strong suit.”

Of course, none of these traits would make much difference if Shapiro weren’t able to connect with voters, but, as his nine-for-nine record in elections proves, he is. “Voters see him as true to his values,” says Shapiro’s longtime pollster, Jef Pollock, president of Global Strategy Group. Most political professionals would counsel a Jewish person like Shapiro to play down religion when running statewide in Pennsylvania; the commonwealth’s “T” — the more rural areas beyond Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — includes plenty of conservative Christians. But Shapiro has leaned into his faith and his family, and even conservatives who might not vote for him seem to give him credit for it. (For the record, statewide voters also liked another Jewish governor, Ed Rendell. But Rendell’s faith always seemed to be more in the Eagles than in the Torah.)

All of this — Shapiro’s instincts, discipline, connection with voters — came together in his run for governor in 2022. Despite the governor’s chair being open (Tom Wolf was term-limited), Shapiro ran totally unopposed in the Democratic primary, as if he were the incumbent. When radical MAGA loyalist Doug Mastriano captured the Republican primary, Shapiro’s win in the general election was all but assured. But he made the most of the moment, spending nearly $73 million — and beating Mastriano by almost 15 points.

That huge margin of victory, combined with Shapiro’s undefeated electoral record and general impressiveness, almost instantly had people talking about him as a future presidential contender. In September of 2023, I saw Shapiro interviewed at the prestigious Atlantic Festival, where CBS News’s John Dickerson talked to him about the miracle he pulled off with I-95. A few weeks later Shapiro was in New Hampshire — home, as New Hampshire-ites like to say, of the first-in-the nation primary — speaking at the state Democratic convention.

By the time the 2024 presidential campaign heated up last summer, Shapiro, the popular governor of a purple state, had become a key player for Democrats. While early on in the process he was said to be upbeat and deeply focused on delivering Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, the Biden campaign team put him in some difficult positions, including asking him to go on CNN and MSNBC the day after the president’s disastrous debate performance in late June. Shapiro gamely did it, acknowledging that Biden had had a bad night before quickly pivoting to how disastrous Donald Trump would be for the country. Still, it was an assignment no politician would want. What’s more, according to the current bestseller Original Sin, a little more than a week after the debate, Shapiro told Biden directly that he was concerned about his electability.

Josh Shapiro with former Vice President Kamala Harris at Reading Terminal Market in July 2024 / Photograph by Ryan Collerd/Getty Images

It’s fairly clear that, after Biden dropped out and Democrats rallied around Kamala Harris, Shapiro very much wanted to be on the short list of her possible vice presidential picks. He did nothing to discourage speculation that he was being considered, and aides reportedly reached out to labor leaders, asking them to sign a letter of support of Shapiro that was being sent to the Harris campaign. (Shapiro’s team disputes this account.) By the final weekend, he, Tim Walz, and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly were the only ones still standing.

“The whole process was humbling,” Shapiro says when I ask, that day in his office, what it was like to be a top contender for the second-highest office in the country. “I remember sitting in that chair over there” — he points to the conference table — “when they called and said we’d like to vet you for the vice presidency of the United States. And trying to get my wife on the phone — she was with our kids, and I couldn’t get her — wanting to share it with her.”

While he was happy to be vetted, did Shapiro actually want to be chosen? Various news outlets reported — and people I talked to confirmed — that when Shapiro met with Harris one-on-one in the final round of the process, he spent his time not selling her on what he’d bring to the ticket, but asking questions about what role and power he’d have in her administration. In short, he treated it like a negotiation. That might be smart tactically — it’s the only time a vice presidential candidate really has much leverage with the presidential candidate — but it’s a strange play if your overriding goal is to be picked.

Shapiro reiterates to me what he said often after Harris announced she was choosing Tim Walz. “I’ve stated many times publicly that Kamala Harris had a deeply personal choice to make. But what I was going through over those two weeks, or whatever it was, was that I had a deeply personal choice to make as well.”

I’d heard Shapiro make that comment before, and it is, when you really think about it, a fairly audacious statement. For starters, it suggests that he and Harris were equals in the selection process, which, of course, they weren’t: She was the sitting vice president and the presumptive presidential nominee of her party; he was a state governor who at that point hadn’t even served two years. And yet the implication is … well, if she offered it to me, maybe I’d do her a solid and accept. What’s more, it hardly suggests that Shapiro was willing to put personal concerns aside and do whatever it might take to stop Donald Trump’s return.

To be clear, there were very good political reasons for Shapiro to not want to be on the ticket. If he and Harris lost, it would dent his reputation — particularly if Shapiro couldn’t even deliver Pennsylvania. Of course, the only thing worse than losing might have been winning. Over the last 189 years exactly one sitting vice president — George H.W. Bush — has been elected president. (Harris, of course, would have made it two.)

It’s possible Shapiro really did want to be part of the ticket, at least under the right circumstances. One person who told me Shapiro was focused and fired up early in the summer sensed something different when they saw him after the veepstakes. “It wasn’t something he said,” the person told me. “It was just a vibe. Like he’d been burned.”

Does Josh Shapiro want to be president?

I asked half a dozen people who know Shapiro well if they’ve ever discussed it with him. All said it’s never come up, at least not in a non-joking way. When I ask Shapiro if he can see himself as president of the United States, he tells me he’s aware that people are talking about him that way. The previous weekend, he says, he and one of his kids were at Dick’s Sporting Goods buying baseball pants, and he was stopped numerous times by people wanting pictures and offering encouragement. But then he says what most politicians in his position say — probably the only thing you can say: “It doesn’t distract me from the work that I’m doing every day. I took an oath of office to serve and protect 13 million Pennsylvanians. I love what I do.”

Shapiro might not be in a position to say he wants to run, but he’s certainly doing all the things you’d do if running were your goal. To begin with, he’s building a national fundraising base. Philly lawyer Alan Kessler tells me he continues to get calls about Shapiro from fundraising friends across the country. The governor has also continued to engage Cooper Teboe, a young fundraising pro from California who was part of his 2022 run, helping him raise money in deep-pocketed Silicon Valley. (In that race Shapiro’s two biggest individual donors — giving more than a million dollars each — were Californians with ties to tech.) With Teboe still on the case, Shapiro for Pennsylvania brought in $12 million last year, including even more big money from California.

Looking over Shapiro’s campaign finance reports from the last two years can be entertaining since there are a fair number of recognizable names: from Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw ($100,000) to former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg ($2 million), megadonor George Soros ($500,000), Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg ($25,000), architect Frank Gehry ($250,000), super agent Ari Emanuel ($100,000), and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman ($1.1 million). Election rules prohibit Shapiro from using money he’s raised as a gubernatorial candidate in a run for president, but so what? The bigger the war chest he can build up for 2026, the better his chances are. And nothing would provide more momentum going into 2028 than a big reelection win.

Photograph by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Shapiro is also saying yes to plenty of national media requests, including doing Stephen A. Smith’s podcast at the Super Bowl in February and Bill Maher’s HBO show in March. When he’s not doing other people’s media, Shapiro is creating his own. His administration formed a digital strategy department of six people, and they’re busy churning out multiple posts per day across TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook. Some show clips of Shapiro’s speeches or capture him interacting with Pennsylvanians, while others require the governor to show off some acting chops. In one, posted in May, we see Shapiro sitting behind his desk, forlornly shaking his head. The caption reads, “POV: You just ate your last Uncrustable and you’re still hours from your last event of the day.” The post got nearly 20,000 likes, though social media does come with risks. “Dudes making reels and tiktoks when we making minimum wage out here,” one commenter griped.

When it comes to the presidency, perhaps the real question about Shapiro isn’t whether he wants to run, but how strong a candidate he could be. Getting the Democratic nomination certainly wouldn’t be easy, given the number of people who are said to be considering a run, from Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pete Buttigieg to what feels like most of America’s governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois’s JB Pritzker, and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear. And then there are the potential outside-the-box, disrupt-the-system candidates, including billionaire Mark Cuban and the aforementioned Stephen A. Smith.

Another challenge: the attacks Shapiro will get from the Democratic left, some of whom dubbed him “Genocide Josh” for his support of Israel (though Shapiro is highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu). In 2028 progressives will also zero in on his support of those Lifeline Scholarships and general friendliness with business.

All that said, if Shapiro does run, he’ll be a formidable candidate. Not only are there his prodigious political skills, but he’s done the thing Democrats know they need to do if they ever want to start winning national elections again: spoken to the middle and shown he has a feel for what’s going on in the lives of everyday people.

I ask him if he appreciates the frustrations voters have with the system, frustrations that drove so many of them to Trump.

“I understand why folks are so frustrated by the system,” he says. “I think the difference between me and Donald Trump is [that] lots of folks have voted for me as well to be a reformer, to fix the system, and I actually have. Donald Trump has made it worse.

“He’s someone who’s used the system to enrich himself, who’s used the system to attack people based on what they look like, where they come from, who they love, who they pray to. He’s someone who has hurt our economy the first time and is on the cusp of hurting it again.”

Trump’s method of change, I say to Shapiro, is to blow things up completely. But it seems like Shapiro’s bet is on something else: competence.

“Competence, yeah, but with real reform,” he says.

It’s not exactly a bumper sticker, but it does sound like … what’s the word? … a strategy.

People in politics marvel that opportune moments just seem to find Shapiro. Some of his fellow governors, I’m told, were jealous about I-95 — why couldn’t they have a scenario like that to show off their own crisis management chops? And while the arson attempt at the Governor’s Residence was undoubtedly traumatic for Shapiro and his family, no doubt rivals envy the attention it brought the governor.

Such jealousy misses the fact that those moments are only opportune because of the way Shapiro has handled them. After the arson incident, Shapiro held a press conference in which he forcefully denounced political violence on all sides and doubled down on his commitment to his faith. A few days later he and his family held a reception to thank the first responders who extinguished the fire. When reporters asked if he thought the fire was a hate crime (the suspect told police he targeted Shapiro because of his support of Israel) Shapiro stayed in his lane; that was a decision for prosecutors. To rebuild and restore the damaged part of the residence, Shapiro has brought together past Pennsylvania governors and first families of both parties for a unified fundraising effort. Every step has been spot-on — including Shapiro’s appearance on Good Morning America and an op-ed he penned in the New York Times.

Of course, that kind of mastery makes Shapiro’s rare missteps — like the Mike Vereb situation — stand out even more. During the vice presidential process, a number of national media outlets wrote about the Vereb case. ABC News interviewed a woman named Cathleen Palm who said she’d been bullied and threatened by Vereb when Shapiro was attorney general. “Josh and I will ruin you,” she alleged that Vereb said to her. (Shapiro denied any knowledge of the incident and denounced the behavior. Palm declined to talk with me on the record.)

Such scrutiny will only intensify if Shapiro runs for president, and such allegations make you wonder: Why did Shapiro hire Vereb in the first place? Numerous people I spoke with for this story told me Vereb had a well-known reputation in Harrisburg for drinking, womanizing, and abrasive behavior. It’s hard to believe Shapiro hadn’t heard the stories himself. In fact, in her witness statement, the woman claiming sexual harassment actually quoted Vereb as saying he and Shapiro had discussed Vereb’s bad behavior. “Mike … stated that ‘he was previously vetted by the Governor on this topic,’” her statement reads, and that “‘he promised the Governor that this would not be an issue again coming into this office.’”

So why would Shapiro, always so politically savvy, take such a risk? And why would the governor, not known for political loyalty, stand by Vereb for so long?

A few weeks after my in-office interview, I requested some additional time with Shapiro — in part, I made clear, to ask more about his relationship with Vereb. Administration press secretary Manuel Bonden, with whom I’d had numerous conversations while reporting this story, never responded to me. Meanwhile, Mike Vereb didn’t reply to an interview request I sent via email.

Context matters here, a lot. No one has accused Shapiro of sexually harassing or intimidating anyone; this is about someone who worked for him. In contrast, the current occupant of the White House has himself been found liable for sexual abuse and found guilty of paying off a porn star with whom he had an affair. Kamala Harris and Josh Shapiro weren’t equals during the VP process; Shapiro and Donald Trump aren’t equals here.

But all this says something about the political and cultural moment we’re in — and have been in for at least a decade. In literary terms (at least in the eyes of his supporters), Donald Trump is an antihero — a character who might be deeply flawed personally but is fighting for some higher good. For the people who love him, Trump’s character deficiencies are not only forgivable; they make him more appealing. See, he is who he is. He’s not trying to fool anybody.

Josh Shapiro has presented himself to the world in the exact opposite way — smart, hardworking, practical, upstanding, competent. But some part of us looks at that and says: Sure, you do the right things. But are you doing them for the right reasons?

I mentioned earlier that several people described Shapiro to me as “strategic.” Another word I heard was “calculating.” It strikes me that they mean nearly the same thing — the only real difference is in your point of view.

Published as “Josh Shapiro’s Next Big Step” in the July 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.