Opportunity never knocks on the same door twice, but Josh Shapiro does. And it’s made all the difference in a career trajectory that has him on the precipice of his state’s governorship.
Shapiro, the Democrat and current state attorney general who just won his party’s gubernatorial nomination, is standing in the Conemaugh Health System’s Willow Street parking lot in downtown Johnstown after giving the speech he was supposed to deliver primary election night but was postponed because of a positive COVID test.
Behind him is the Firefighters Memorial Bridge, its rustic beams glistening in the sunset; in front of him are the last of his supporters who attended the event waiting to shake his hand. One of them asks Shapiro why he’d give his big speech in Cambria County, of all places.
Shapiro tells him the story of running for the statehouse in 2004 in a conservative district, the one he grew up in, and getting angry one night when Republicans would not let him speak at an event.
“I came home so pissed that night. My wife’s like, ‘You’ve got to figure something else out.’ And so, I put on black running shoes and my suit, and I began the next day knocking on doors,” Shapiro said. “I personally knocked on 18,000 doors in an overwhelming Republican district, which we won. And to this day, I have people stopping me in grocery stores, ‘Oh, you knocked on my door!’”
Shapiro said 18 years later, they still remember he showed up.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner after his event, Shapiro said he applies this same purpose to places like Cambria County; only this time, he is chasing Democratic voters who last voted for a Democrat in 2008 when they cast their ballot for Barack Obama.
This once-stronghold of their New Deal coalition has been left behind for the Democrats’ new party of the ascendant: a coalition of left-leaning, college-educated millennials, minorities, single women, and elite liberal whites, who often think voters who live in places like Cambria (or any of the other 65 counties that don’t have Philadelphia or Pittsburgh in them) are deplorable.
Shapiro is having none of that. “I truly take my cues more from Washington County than I do Washington, D.C.,” he said. “If I listen to folks here, if I understand the challenges that they face, if I hear them articulate their frustration about our politics, it enables me to be a candidate that’s more connected to them and not some national storyline.”
That’s one reason Shapiro has such a strong chance of winning during an election cycle expected to be atrocious for Democrats.
“He is the only person running for any office in this state that makes sense about the issues,” says Ron Williams. The retired steelworker is sitting on a cement embankment wall, leaning against the steel guardrail that separates him from the steep fall into Stonycreek River below. The Pennsylvania native and Republican voter is here in Johnstown to listen to Josh Shapiro launch his campaign for governor one week after the Montgomery County Democrat won his party’s nomination.
“Look around you,” he says, his hands spanning the city around him. “Johnstown needs help.”
Williams says he has always been a hard no on Donald Trump, but he offers a harsh assessment of his successor: “Biden, I don’t like Biden either. He’s too weak. And he really has made a mess of things. But Shapiro, I like him.”
“Josh Shapiro is likely to be a successful Democratic candidate in a year that will probably shape up well for Republicans everywhere else here in the state and across the country,” Millersville University political science professor G. Terry Madonna told the Washington Examiner.
Madonna said Shapiro has demonstrated that he understands the need to build a coalition of voters that includes people like Williams. “The thing Shapiro has always understood since he first ran for state representative, in a then very Republican district, is not to assume someone won’t vote for you just because of how they have voted before,” said Madonna.
“Unlike many in today’s Democratic Party, he doesn’t walk away from the working-class Democrat; he walks towards them and embraces them,” Madonna added. “This is something Hillary Clinton never understood and Joe Biden understood only marginally.”
But as Keystone College political science professor Jeff Brauer pointed out, when you are running for office during the other party’s wave year, you need more help than just being a good candidate; you need a weak opponent. Enter Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial nominee.
Mastriano, a state senator, beat out a crowded primary field with the help of an endorsement from Trump, perhaps in a nod to the enthusiastic promotion Mastriano gave the former president’s “stolen election” lies. As the Washington Examiner has reported, “Mastriano attended both a QAnon-linked event in Gettysburg and the Washington, D.C., rally that took place before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.” In June, he complied with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee to provide documents related to his efforts to overturn the election, including “letters Mastriano sent to top lawmakers and the Department of Justice to join efforts to overturn the election, as well as his suggestions to send alternate electors to Washington, D.C., as the Electoral College certified the election. Mastriano shared the letters on Twitter at the time, and he included the links in the documents shared with the committee.” Mastriano’s actions have raised concerns about what he would do as governor of a crucial state in 2024 if he had more power to manipulate aspects of the election.
Mastriano has other weaknesses as a candidate. “Mastriano has not won statewide office; he lost a bid for Congress in 2018 and has only been serving in the state Senate since a special election in 2019,” said Brauer.
More importantly, you can’t win a statewide Pennsylvania election on the strength of the GOP base alone. “Even after recently winning the Republican nomination for governor, he has not attempted to pivot toward the middle for the general election, which is often necessary in winning statewide in Pennsylvania,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean Shapiro’s door-knocking will let up. He credits campus dorm door knocks for his win for class president as a freshman at the University of Rochester, the aforementioned run for state representative in 2004, his run for Montgomery County commissioner in 2011, and his back-to-back runs for statewide office for attorney general.
In fact, the only race he admits he ever lost was when he was running for student president of Akiba, a Jewish day school in Merion.
An observant Jew, Shapiro keeps kosher and is always home for Shabbat dinner on Friday night. He and his wife, high school sweetheart Lori, have four children.
“My family is why I do this work, but I also do this work because I am grounded in my faith,” Shapiro told supporters during his speech. “I recognize we may not worship the same God, or worship at all, and that’s fine. But I want to tell you what my Scripture teaches me. And that is that ‘no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it.’”
That task also means taking his own party to task. On energy, Shapiro says, “This is where, frankly, some people in my party get in trouble. We’re very quick to say, ‘Oh, well, we’re going to’ — what’s the language here? ‘We’re going to retrain you.’ Right? OK. You ever go ask a boilermaker to climb up the shaft of a windmill? Do you know they can’t? Do you know why? Because to be a boilermaker, you’ve got to be over 6 feet tall, and you’ve got to be, I think, it’s over 190 pounds or something close to that size. … You’ll have to look up the exact numbers. But to work in a turbine here, you’ve got to be shorter than me and under 160 pounds; and so, when you’re saying to someone, ‘We’re going to retrain you,’ that demonstrates, frankly, an ignorance about the reality of our energy opportunities here in Pennsylvania.”
During his speech, Shapiro’s mention of an all-of-the-above approach to energy received a warm reaction from the attendees. On rebuilding police departments, he is strident: “When I’m governor, we will hire 2,000 more police officers in our communities to make sure people are safe,” he told the crowd. “And hear me on this. We are going to bring the police and the community closer together. When you hire more police officers, that’s an opportunity for that police officer to get out of the patrol car and walk the streets and see the humanity in our children and know their names and listen to the people who really run the neighborhoods, and that is the grandmoms sitting on the porches.”
With a personal, pragmatic approach and a weak and flawed Republican candidate in his favor, the final question is how does he handle an outside force that might hurt him the most: a deeply unpopular President Biden wanting to come to the state of his birth to campaign with him?
If the president comes to Pennsylvania, of course he would welcome him here, Shapiro said. “But I’m focused on my race. I always have, and I’m going to run my race on the issues, much of which you heard here today. Practical things are going to make people’s lives better. And at the end of the day, the folks who live around here and all across Pennsylvania, they’re interviewing me to be their governor. They want to know what I’m going to do for them. And I’m going to focus on answering that question. Not some question that people in D.C. think is important.”
Philadelphia-based Democratic media strategist Larry Ceisler said Shapiro would be unlikely to do it any other way: “Look, this is who he is. Josh is going to run his own race on the issues that are important to Pennsylvania voters and not a national election; I think that is the right approach for him.”
Salena Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner.
