Picking Josh Shapiro could be dangerous for Harris — here's why

Kamala Harris has gained strong support as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. Putting Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, on the ticket would risk fracturing that support.

The most divisive issue among Democrats is the U.S.-enabled Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza. To unify the party and defeat Trump’s MAGA forces, Harris needs to distance herself in a meaningful way from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy. If she does so, she can win back the votes and energy of young activists, progressives, racial justice organizers, Arab Americans and Muslims — many of whom devoted weeks or months of their lives in 2020 to defeating Trump on behalf of the Biden-Harris ticket.

But a Harris-Shapiro ticket would jeopardize all that.

Today, parallels are apparent with the pivotal events of 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson — increasingly unpopular among Democrats and others because of his Vietnam War policies — stunned the political world by announcing he would not seek re-election. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the party nominated LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey — who had not even run in the primaries — as its standard-bearer. Humphrey’s halting efforts to distance himself from Johnson’s policies were too little, too late, and he was unable to connect with many of the dedicated Democratic activists and voters who were opposed to the war. After failing to detach himself sufficiently from LBJ's war, Humphrey lost a winnable election to Republican Richard Nixon.

If Harris now chooses a running mate who strongly connects her to Biden’s policies on the Gaza war, which are widely unpopular with much of the Democratic base, party unity — and the chances of defeating Donald Trump — would be undermined.

Overall, Josh Shapiro is liberal and sometimes progressive on domestic issues (though notably not when it comes to fracking for natural gas or tax subsidies for private schools). But on the contentious issue of Israel’s relentless war against civilians in Gaza, Shapiro sounds much less bothered by the lethal violence than by U.S. activists for Palestinian lives, many of whom he has demonized. Here’s a bit of the history:

In 2021, after Ben & Jerry’s (a company founded and led by Jewish Americans) refused to sell its products in Israel’s illegal settlements, Shapiro, who was then Pennsylvania's attorney general, threatened the company by urging state agencies to enforce a constitutionally suspect law targeting advocates of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, against Israel over its discriminatory policies. Shapiro smeared such advocates by claiming that “BDS is rooted in antisemitism” – although the effort has wide support globally, including from many Jews, as a thoroughly nonviolent tactic aimed at advancing Palestinian rights.

After the horrific Hamas attack of last Oct. 7, several dozen Pennsylvania-based Muslim groups wrote a letter protesting Gov. Shapiro’s one-sided comments: “Not only did you fail to recognize the structural root causes of the conflict," they argued, "you chose to intentionally ignore the civilian loss of life in Gaza.” Responding to the letter after Israeli bombs and missiles had killed more civilians in Gaza than had been killed by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7, the governor’s spokesman said: “We all must speak with moral clarity and support Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Last December, after he amplified the Capitol Hill demagoguery of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., a MAGA loyalist, Shapiro contributed to the firing of the University of Pennsylvania president. Shapiro said of Penn's leader: “I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” By then, after two months of Israeli bombing, more than 17,000 Gazans had been killed, most of them women and children. Later that month, Israel was charged with violations of the Genocide Convention in South Africa’s filing at the International Court of Justice.

In early April, after Democratic governors in other states had called for a ceasefire in Gaza, Muslim leaders in Philadelphia criticized Shapiro for his refusal to do so.

Beginning in late April, Shapiro and his office repeatedly prodded campuses to “restore order” and take action against student protest movements such as Penn's Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which called on the college administration to provide greater transparency on university investments, divest from Israel and reinstate the banned student group Penn Students Against the Occupation.

On May 9, Shapiro invoked student “safety” in demanding the encampment be shut down. Police shut it down the next day, arresting 33 people. In two different interviews, Shapiro seemed to compare campus ceasefire activists, many of whom are Jewish or students of color, to “white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs” and “people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia making comments about people who are African American.”

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In May, as activism continued to grow over Israel’s lethal violence against civilians in Gaza, Shapiro issued an order aimed at Israel’s critics that revised his administration’s code of conduct to bar state employees from “scandalous or disgraceful” conduct — a vague and subjective directive criticized by the legal director of Pennsylvania’s ACLU as a possible violation of free speech protections.

In a July 23 tweet on X, progressive leader and former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner wrote: “Choosing Governor Josh Shapiro for Vice President would be a mistake. Governor Shapiro compared pro-peace protesters to the KKK. That’s simply unacceptable & would stifle the momentum VP Harris has. Hopefully she is looking to build a broad coalition to beat Trump.”

A broad coalition to defeat Donald Trump and the fascistic MAGA movement is exactly what we need. Making Josh Shapiro the nominee for vice president would create internal conflict within that coalition, which is exactly what we don’t need.