Can Pennsylvania’s Shapiro Survive Woke Scrutiny?

Josh Shapiro has emerged as one of the frontrunners to play second fiddle to Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket. On paper, it makes sense—a popular moderate in a swing state, a former prosecutor who crusaded against the Interests (particularly the Catholic Church over child abuse coverups), and a reassuring presence for the pro-Israel portion of the Democratic coalition, which has been concerned about the replacement of the Israel-boosting Joe Biden with the more ambiguous Harris.

Yet Shapiro may bring some liabilities particular to Harris’s rainbow-coalition-flavored candidacy. Mike Vereb, a Republican who served as a top aide for Shapiro in his time as attorney general and as governor, resigned in 2023 following accusations of sexual misconduct in the workplace, including one allegation that Vereb joked about using sex in negotiation with a female legislator. Shapiro denied that he was aware of the behaviors—an excuse that did not wash with him in his suits against the Catholic bishops, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Brandon McGinley drily observed—and emphasized the prominence of women on his staff. If I were a liberal, I’d start shrieking about “tokenism.” 

L’affaire Vereb has been reinvigorated in the mainstream and left press this week, with pieces in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Salon, and the Daily Beast. The National Women’s Defense League has issued a statement disparaging Shapiro’s actions. Harris is expected to make a decision about her VP pick this weekend; were I Shapiro, this is not the sort of news cycle I’d want on Friday afternoon. 

Not that it is necessarily the worst thing coming down the pike for the caudillo of the Keystone State. A second, more serious problem may arise from the reopening of the investigation of Ellen Greenberg’s 2021 death in the form of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court case. Shapiro’s office ruled that Greenberg, who suffered 20 stab wounds, had committed suicide. This finding has been contested by her parents and independent journalists, one of whom claims that Shapiro was friends of Greenberg’s fiancé’s family. Irrespective of whatever broader conspiracy or outright corruption might or might not lurk behind the case, the prosecutor’s office’s change of cause of death from homicide to suicide defied common sense. A case involving as the victim a young, attractive professional woman particularly promises to tug heartstrings among female suburban voters, one of the core groups that brought Democrats to power in 2020. Surveying this along with the Vereb controversy, the Harris team has to ask, Does Shapiro have a woman problem?

Concerns like these about unsavory behavior aren’t unique; nor are they necessarily damning. The Access Hollywood tape, the Stormy Daniels case, and the E. Jean Carroll case pinned, more or less persuasively depending on your outlook, various kinds of bad behavior on Trump. Yet current Republican voters, including the remnant of the religious right, have shown an “our son of a bitch” outlook—while they may find the details of Trump’s private life distasteful, they are not particularly invested in his personal moral purity. This is a point of real difference with at least the activist wing of the Democratic party, which has for 60 years shown a highly developed appetite for purity-testing, struggle sessions, and, for the unworthy, elaborate groveling. 

Of course, this all may not matter. It is not clear that vice-presidential candidates matter to voters in aggregate, with the visible exception being George McGovern’s ill-fated running mate, Thomas Eagleton. Moreover, as the social right has learned the hard way in the GOP, complete alignment with one party over the course of a generation leaves you with precious few alternatives. Will the social left vote for Donald Trump? It seems unlikely. Will its voters even stay home in appreciable numbers? Again, particularly as the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West campaigns look dead in the water, it seems unlikely. 

Yet the Democrats are in uncharted waters. For the first time since the birth of the modern nomination process, the presumptive top of the ticket has not received a single primary vote. The coalition is already at odds with itself over the Israel–Gaza war. If the rumors about Shapiro’s malfeasance gain traction with the social-justice left, activists could make this month’s Democratic National Convention at Chicago, already redolent of 1968, a chaotic, embarrassing, and damaging scene on the televisions of Americans looking for assurance that the Democrats are calm, organized, and in control. Beyond, a distasteful vice-presidential candidate could dampen one of the Harris campaign’s conspicuous strengths to date, small-dollar donations. 

Of course, caving to the left does little to reassure voters, either; putting J.B. Pritzker on the ticket plays into the newly moderate GOP’s caricature of Harris as a dangerous radical. The Democrats are in a sticky, if not quite impassable wicket. Josh Shapiro is just unlikely to ease them out of it.

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