A new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Dawsey, New York Times reporter Tyler Pager and Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf reveals just how close Shapiro came to boarding a sinking ship. Among other interesting details, “2024: How Trump Retook The White House And The Democrats Lost America” offers a behind-the-scenes account showing that Harris’s VP selection process was less about finding the best partner for governing and more about finding someone who wouldn’t threaten her authority or ambitions.

Oliver Bateman

When Harris interviewed Shapiro at her residence on Aug. 3, things went south quickly. According to the book, “He came across as overly ambitious, pushing Harris to define what his role would be … [and] conceded it would not be natural for him to serve as someone’s number two, leaving Harris with a bad impression.” Pennsylvania residents should take heart, because that’s not ambition talking. That’s a politician with enough self-awareness to know his own worth and enough spine to ask reasonable questions about a job that would define his political future.

Compare that to Walz, who practically prostrated himself during the interview process. The book notes that “Walz was deferential, showing no interest in himself, only how he could support Harris.” He even volunteered reasons why Harris shouldn’t pick him, admitting he’d never used a teleprompter and confessing, “I’m really nervous about the debate, and I don’t think I’ll do well.”

Boy, was he right about that last part. Watching Walz face off against JD Vance was like watching a high school debate champion take on someone’s confused but well-meaning uncle. While Vance commanded the stage, Walz nervously scribbled notes, having already told Harris that he had a tendency to forget things or speak imprecisely. The optics were brutal, but they perfectly encapsulated one of the Harris campaign’s fundamental problems: prioritizing loyalty over the kind of ruthless competence that could overshadow the accidental candidate.

Harris’s panel made clear that Walz was the favorite, with staff unanimously behind him. But unanimous agreement in politics usually means groupthink, and groupthink rarely wins elections. Amazingly, it might have come down to drink orders: Shapiro and Mark Kelly asked for water, while Walz requested a Diet Mountain Dew, a beverage choice he shares with JD Vance and so many other white “rednecks” that Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear had to apologize after he questioned how anyone can possibly prefer that drink (Kentucky has some of the highest-per capita Mountain Dew consumption in the nation).

NO ONE’S LAPDOG

Contrary to the progressive narrative that tried to paint Shapiro as too pro-Israel for the ticket, the book’s authors make clear this wasn’t the decisive factor. While the progressive wing of the party opposed Shapiro, his positions actually aligned with the Biden administration and other VP contenders. The real issue was simpler: Shapiro wouldn’t be anybody’s lapdog. When he called Harris’s team after the interview to express “further reservations” about leaving his job as Pennsylvania governor, it wasn’t cold feet. It was a man who understood that being second fiddle on a doomed campaign was a terrible career move.

Fast forward to today, and Shapiro’s instincts look prescient. While Harris’s campaign burned through a billion dollars and finished $1 million in debt, Shapiro has been quietly building his own political future on his own terms. At the recent Energy and Innovation Summit that U.S. Sen. David McCormick hosted at Carnegie-Mellon University, Shapiro demonstrated exactly why he’s too valuable to waste as someone’s number two. While the Harris campaign held rallies with unpopular former Republican Liz Cheney in affluent suburban enclaves, Shapiro was working across the aisle to secure tens of billions in energy investment for Pennsylvania’s economic future.

His earlier work as attorney general on the Hawbaker case, where he pursued a construction company that stole $20 million from workers, shows he knows how to pick fights that matter to regular people. That’s the kind of populist credibility some Democrats thought Shapiro could’ve brought to the Harris ticket. He was young at 51, had a moderate profile that could counterbalance perceptions of Harris as a California liberal, and was a “compelling speaker in the mold of Barack Obama.”

That Obama comparison cuts both ways. Some Democrats, the authors found, worried Shapiro channeled the former president “to the point of parody” — but he now appears to be working to tone down the more obvious Obama-isms in recent appearances and social media posts. Beyond that, Shapiro has other challenges he needs to address. At that energy summit, he seemed to be wearing lifts, and at around 5 feet 6 inches, he’d be the shortest president since James Madison. His transparency problems, from deleted emails and secret climate working groups to spending $350,000 in taxpayer money on private law firms with heavily redacted invoices, also require serious attention.

But these are fixable problems for someone who controls his own political destiny. Had he joined the Harris ticket, he’d be forever linked to a campaign that blamed its failure on everything except its own strategic mistakes. The campaign’s top officials went on Pod Save America and pointed fingers at the truncated timeline and global inflation, yet none was willing to concede their own faux pas.

THE WHAT IF?

Imagine if Shapiro had gotten the VP nod. He’d be forever associated with a campaign whose last notable attempt at working-class authenticity consisted of a lame ad featuring someone who seemed like an actor delivering focus-grouped lines calling Trump a “silver spoon boy.” He’d be tied to the candidate who thought appearing on SNL was more important than explaining her economic vision to struggling families. He’d be the guy who couldn’t deliver his home state, where Trump won by 2 points while Republicans swept every statewide office.

Sometimes the best career move is the job you don’t take. By having enough self-respect to ask hard questions and enough political sense to see a losing hand, Josh Shapiro dodged a political fiasco.

And Democrats desperate for a return to national relevance in 2028 should thank him for it.

(Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.)