Few, if any, major Democratic elected officials have navigated the politics of the past few years as deftly as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Shapiro easily won three straight statewide elections in a state that voted for Donald Trump two out of three times, and elected a Republican Senator, too.
Shapiro is obviously smart. He probably has the highest IQ of any statewide elected Democrat in America. He’s also shrewd. He has been pragmatic: Remember he threw out all sorts of regulations and normal constraints in order to repair a collapsed highway overpass in a matter of days.
While other prominent Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz went full-woke in recent years, Shapiro has avoided that, while successfully handling pressure from his party’s radical left wing.
This all changes now.
Shapiro easily won reelection and Pennsylvania Democrats, who already controlled the state House of Representatives, have won the state senate. This gives Shapiro a governing trifecta — and there’s plenty of reason to believe this will be bad for Shapiro’s aspirations for higher office.
Shapiro has made moderate policies in the past, but he has also buckled in the face of his party’s special interests. Recall in 2023, when he backed down from his support of school choice because the teachers unions, who have the Democrats’ in a vicegrip, objected.
Recall earlier this year, when Shapiro was one of the biggest champions of data centers, and then this fall, he did a 180.
Shapiro is talking today about transit and minimum wage. But that’s not what his party’s base, and much of his legislature will care about.
Expect a hard tack to the left for Pennsylvania in the new year, and expect Shapiro to meekly go along. The special interest groups and the more ideological lawmakers will all push Shapiro to pass radical legislation on race, transgenderism, sex-ed in schools, welfare, prosecuting Republicans, persecuting religious organizations, and who knows what other issues have been percolating up in the liberal group chats?
Sure enough, amid a Blue Wave, Shapiro is already looking more like a weather vane.
Shapiro, who has been ruthlessly attacked by his party’s anti-Israel Left, just went ahead and endorsed the most anti-Israel statewide Democrat in the country, Abdul el Sayed. Sayed’s most important campaign proxy, Hasan Piker, is antisemitic, anti-American, and pro-terrorist.
And just a couple of days ago, Shapiro ostentatiously embraced transgender ideology in its entirety.
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Promising to protect “trans children” is saying that some boys are really girls and some girls are really boys. Also, if you assert the existence of “trans children” you are implicitly endorsing harmful interventions such as puberty blockers.
Shapiro, at the first bit of pressure from the Left, has rushed in that direction. He sees this, no doubt, as a matter of self-preservation. But it probably won’t make any easier his path to higher office.