The decision by Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota governor Tim Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro to be her running mate arrived like a political thunderbolt earlier this month. He seemed like a lock — the overwhelmingly popular governor of the most important swing state — so speculation swirled over why he was snubbed. Was it because he was Jewish and skipping him spared the outrage of anti-Israel activists on the left? Was it because he was too moderate on charter schools? Or was it simply because he just did not vibe with Harris the way Walz did?
Shapiro wasn’t dwelling on it in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, but reporters were. On Tuesday morning, a gaggle of journalists surrounding him with television cameras and audio recorders asked yet again about why he wasn’t the vice presidential nominee. “Was his religion a factor in him not being chosen as vice president?” asked one. Shapiro quickly insisted he was “proud of his faith” and that this was untrue. Instead, he said it was “being injected into the conversation” by Donald Trump who is the real racist and the real anti-Semite.
Though this was a well-practiced answer on national cable TV news, it would now appear on local news in California whose delegation he addressed on the second day of the convention as he made the rounds to impress Democrats he may need for a future campaign. California having the donors one needs to run in the nation’s largest state, let alone nationally.
For all of the attention on the United Center in prime time, there are sort of mini-conventions at hotels across the city hosting each state’s delegation every morning. After shaking off a hangover or short night’s sleep, attendees cram into a conference room to eat buffet-style scrambled eggs and bacon and listen to even more speeches. For the South Carolina delegation, that meant Shapiro followed Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker, both of whom had run for president in 2020 and campaigned extensively in the first-in-the-South primary.
Booker in particular was a tough act to follow. Halfway through his remarks, he abandoned the podium and delivered the rest of his speech on a chair in the middle of the conference room. He captivated the crowd so much that not a single forkful of honeydew was consumed as he talked about the emotional impact of watching Ketanji Brown Jackson become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Shapiro stepped up to the podium and, in his most Obamaesque cadence, joked that “my rabbi always tells me I spend more time in Baptist churches than I do in synagogue. He gets a little mad at me.” He followed with what has become a staple of his speeches: “Greetings from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a state with a lot of letters in it but where I focus on three letters every day G-S-D, getting stuff done.” Afterwards, he took selfies with the inevitable crowd that lined up around him. One offered Shapiro condolences over losing out to be vice president. “I was rooting for you,” he said as his iPhone’s camera flashed. “It’s all good,” Shapiro responded, looking unphased. “Really good.”
He had given well received stump speeches to two different state delegations and hopefully a few potential voters in a future primary had been impressed. On Wednesday, Shapiro will address the entire convention in prime time. He won’t be in the feature slot dedicated to the vice presidential nominee, but there will still be plenty of potential future voters watching.
