There was probably more than one reason why Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz rather than Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro to be her running mate. It may well be that Shapiro rubbed Harris the wrong way in their interviews when she was auditioning potential candidates. The same factors that led Senator John Fetterman to advise her against picking Shapiro might have influenced her. Shapiro does not have a reputation as a team player. His steady rise through Pennsylvania politics has been fuelled by genuine talent as well as the sort of naked self-interested ambition that would have to be put on hold if he were to be the No. 2 in a campaign and an administration.
But there’s little doubt that the decision to bypass a popular governor who could have played a decisive role in winning a key battleground state that Harris must have if she is to beat former President Donald Trump in November wasn’t made solely because of Shapiro’s healthy ego. As we all know, that is a quality that hardly marks him as an outlier among politicians. Instead, it was his identity as a Jew and an unabashed supporter of Israel that sparked an ultimately successful campaign among Democrats to spike the Shapiro boomlet.
His positions on Israel and the war on Hamas are not, in fact, very different from those of the other men Harris was considering, including Walz and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. They, too, support Israel’s right to exist and condemned the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, as well as expressed concern about the pro-Hamas demonstrations that have become the hallmark of a surge in American antisemitism during the last 10 months. Like them, Shapiro supports proposals for a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict that is hopelessly out of touch with what Palestinians want; all are critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But only the possibility of Shapiro being a heartbeat away from the presidency caused leftist magazines like The New Republic and Slate to denounce him for being “egregiously bad on Palestine.” As reports in The New York Times and other publications also made clear, his willingness to stand up on the issue in recent months was seen in a different light than that of other pro-Israel Democrats. The fact that he had rightly compared the pro-Hamas antisemites to members of the Ku Klux Klan, while Harris had voiced understanding and sympathy for them, was seen as disqualifying.
Indeed, it got so bad that when an op-ed Shapiro wrote for his college newspaper in 1993 popped up, in which he voiced scepticism about the Oslo Accords and doubted whether the Palestinians would ever choose peace, he was forced to back away from it. Of course, everything he wrote at that time was subsequently proven correct. But when confronted with it, Shapiro acted as if it was a youthful indiscretion. “Something I wrote when I was 20, is that what you’re talking about? I was 20.”
This is an election in which leading Democrats believe they are going to need a united party with their left-wing activist base fully on board with the national ticket. Shapiro being an affiliated synagogue member who attended Jewish day school and sends his own children to them, as well as has a record of support for Israel dating back to his youth, made him unacceptable to that crucial wing of the party.
That put Harris in something of a dilemma.
If winning the election and “saving democracy” from alleged threats by former President Donald Trump and the Republicans were primary goals, then Shapiro was her best bet. Naming him gave her the best chance of tipping Pennsylvania, where Trump has led for most of the year, back into the Democratic column. And his centrist approach would have expanded the Democratic coalition, giving it a better chance to win over independent voters who have also favoured Trump this year.
Indeed, his gracious and respectful attitude to the victims of the attempted assassination of Trump in his state last month struck a chord with both Republicans and Democrats at a time when most politicians seem determined to drive us farther apart.
It also would have also shored up Jewish support, both in terms of votes and campaign contributions. It’s not clear whether that would have won Harris any more Electoral College votes. But in a year when there are some signs that even the most partisan Jewish Democrats have been shocked by the way left-wing protestors have been allowed to run amuck on college campuses and in the streets of U.S. cities spouting hate for Jews and Israel since October 7, it would have sent a message to Jews that they still have a home in a Democratic Party, even though many in its left-wing base think that they are intersectional villains who are guilty of “white” privilege.
More than that, it would have given Harris a “Sister Souljah moment” like the one that Bill Clinton seized in 1992 when he criticised a black artist for saying there was nothing wrong with blacks killing whites and in doing so, demonstrated both his centrist bona fides and a willingness to take on extremists within his party.
But Democrats don’t believe in Sister Souljah moments anymore. Harris, who supported a fund that bailed out Black Lives Matter rioters in 2000, had no appetite for confronting the antisemitic, anti-Israel wing of her party. While there are still far more votes to be won in the pro-Israel centre of American politics than on the pro-Hamas left, choosing the person that leftists have now dubbed “Genocide Josh” would have guaranteed dissension inside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and riots outside of it.
Walz is no leftist, but he was definitely the most left-leaning of all the potential vice-presidential nominees that were finalists for the Democrats. That’s why members of the far-left congressional “Squad” and Socialist Democrats like Bernie Sanders celebrated Harris’s choice. Though Democrats are rebranding him as being no different from Shapiro in most respects, he’s clearly the favorite of “progressives.” He’s a supporter of Ilhan Omar, imposed draconian COVID-19 lockdowns on his state and dithered for three days before finally agreeing to the anguished pleas of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to send in the National Guard to stop Black Lives Matter rioters from burning down the city in 2020.
Walz is a capable politician, and there are some Democrats who think his experience as a Midwestern high school football coach is exactly the kind of résumé line that Harris needs to balance her reputation as a San Francisco liberal. It’s also true that most Republicans breathed a sigh of relief when they heard of her decision. Putting Shapiro on the Democratic ticket might not have guaranteed them victory, but it would have made the task for Trump and the GOP in battleground states a lot harder. That would have also been the case if Harris had picked Kelly, a former astronaut and U.S. Navy combat pilot with centrist appeal.
Had Harris chosen Shapiro, it would have signalled that she was determined to steer the Democrats back into the political center on not just Israel but other issues like school choice, though Shapiro’s stand on that topic is also anathema to the Teachers Unions that hold so much sway among Democrats.
Above all, the rejection of Shapiro after he was bashed by so many on the left serves as a reminder of how much the Democratic Party has changed in the last 24 years.
At this moment, August 2000 seems like a very long time ago. When then Vice President Al Gore chose Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman to be his running mate, the decision was hailed as a brilliant political move by the Democratic Party’s nominee. It both solidified the hold of moderates on the Democratic Party and marked the first time a Jew was named to a national ticket. Like Shapiro is now, Lieberman’s views were liberal on most issues. But he was also a well-respected centrist Democrat as well as an observant Jew, whose piety and plain-speaking manner was admired by people of all faiths.
As is true of almost all vice-presidential nominees, neither Lieberman nor his Republican counterpart Dick Cheney played a decisive role in determining the outcome of an election that was razor-close and decided in favour of George W. Bush by a mere 553 votes in Florida. Lieberman’s nomination was a milestone in American history that seemed to prove that Jews were accepted virtually everywhere in the United States and could aspire to the nation’s highest offices without being subjected to antisemitic invective.
The attacks on Shapiro illustrate that this is no longer the case.
That is not to say that Shapiro has no future in national politics. Should Harris lose this year, he will immediately be classified as among the likely Democratic presidential contenders in 2028. Perhaps political fashions will shift in the next four years in a way that will ease his path. For now, though, it’s hard to imagine the Democrats picking someone who is considered a centrist and well as seen as a throwback to an earlier era where pro-Israel Democrats were the rule and Israel-haters were the exception in the party.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).
