Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania bounded off a big blue bus on Saturday afternoon with the other two governors of the critical “blue wall” states — Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tony Evers of Wisconsin — and headed down a steep hill to greet a gathering of Democratic canvassers in a park outside Pittsburgh.
It was the third of four stops that unseasonably warm, clear day for their Blue Wall bus tour. Though all three governors lead political battlegrounds critical to Vice President Kamala Harris’s chance at winning the presidency, only Mr. Shapiro came within a whisper of being on the ticket that they are now trying to elect.
But if there were any lingering resentments, or even disappointment, it was not obvious that day, nor is it evident in his punishing schedule of campaign appearances, interviews, advertising shoots, fund-raisers and behind-the-scenes outreach efforts for Ms. Harris and fellow Democrats.
Mr. Shapiro, his voice straining for emphasis, stressed what he sees as at stake in the election, for the nation, for his state and for him personally.
“I want to be really clear about something: This is not just about the politics of winning a race,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview in Baldwin Township, a suburb nestled in the wooded hills just south of Pittsburgh.
Speaking of his own experience repeatedly suing the Trump administration as the commonwealth’s attorney general and then battling the Trump campaign as it tried to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Shapiro called former President Donald J. Trump “a dangerous guy.”
“This is not about some temporary moment of politics,” he said. “It’s the future of this country.”
For a man of Mr. Shapiro’s ambitions, there are always some politics involved. If Ms. Harris wins in two weeks, the governor will be a hero to the cause, a 51-year-old politician from the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia who somehow became the Democratic Party’s unlikely outreach director to rural and working-class white voters — and who is young enough to look toward 2032 and the end of a Harris second term.
If Ms. Harris wins Pennsylvania but loses the presidency, Mr. Shapiro could well be the most obvious front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028.
Politically and personally, and for Mr. Shapiro’s own legislative agenda, much is riding on Democratic success on Election Day, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, Austin Davis, said.
“Every Democratic governor wants to deliver their state,” Mr. Davis said after a joint appearance with the governor in rural Slippery Rock on Saturday morning. “I can’t really say what the fallout would be” for failure, he added, “but I can tell you it would be high.”
As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Mr. Shapiro went to court to try to stop Mr. Trump’s ban on travelers from predominantly Muslim countries. He sued over the Trump administration’s effort to thwart mandatory coverage of contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act. And he was in court 43 times in late 2020 and early 2021 to preserve Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in the commonwealth.
Aides now point to the 1.2 million Pennsylvanians who may lose their health insurance in a second Trump term if the Affordable Care Act is again threatened, and they warn of federal efforts to infringe on abortion rights.
Mr. Shapiro is also helping to defend his party’s one-seat majority in the State House of Representatives and to try to cut into the Republicans’ six-seat majority in the State Senate. Success on those fronts, he likes to say, would help him get stuff done — though he uses a different word than “stuff.”
Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, is no doubt the biggest prize of the seven swing states. Same as the others, polling averages suggest a dead heat. The importance of Mr. Shapiro in delivering it for Ms. Harris is self-evident: He won the governor’s race two years ago against Doug Mastriano, a Republican, by nearly 15 percentage points, flipping some counties that had voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and cutting into Republican dominance in others.
That dominant showing fueled the push by many Democrats to get Mr. Shapiro on the ticket — and the open glee of some Republicans when Ms. Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota instead.
“I love Shapiro so much,” said Heidi Priest, 43, who came to Slippery Rock from nearby Butler, where Mr. Trump was nearly assassinated over the summer, to see her governor stump with Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat locked in his own tough re-election fight. “I had been really hoping he would be the vice president.”
Around noon that day, as they waited for the blue-wall governors in a small field behind the Stop-N-Glo Car Wash in Moon Township, Pa., a clutch of Democratic women was debating whether the governor had even wanted to be vice president.
“I don’t think he was really disappointed,” Marianne Mnich, a retiree in the township, said of the governor.
Valeris Klauscher of Crescent Township agreed: “I think he’s a bigger man than that.”
“I think he’s a smarter man than that,” said Joyce Reinoso of Robinson Township. “He wants to be the top dog.”
(Asked whether he had any lingering hurt feelings, Mr. Shapiro answered curtly: “I think Kamala Harris made a great choice in Tim Walz.”)
In fact, any suggestion that Mr. Shapiro could have easily delivered Pennsylvania if he had been Ms. Harris’s running mate misses some political fundamentals — about 2022 and 2024, said former Representative Conor Lamb, a Democrat from Western Pennsylvania, as he mingled with canvassers on Saturday afternoon in Baldwin Township.
“No offense to Josh,” Mr. Lamb said, “but he was running against the worst candidate of the cycle” in 2022.
Mr. Mastriano, a far-right state senator who has embraced Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lies, might have been a close ally of the former president’s, but he never had his appeal.
Mr. Shapiro’s name on the ticket most likely would have made little difference for Ms. Harris against a former president whose supporters are as dug in now as they were in 2016, when Mr. Trump won the state, Mr. Lamb said.
“It’s this close because the voters are entrenched,” he said.
Just up the road, a man in a T-shirt proclaiming “I’m a Trump Deplorable” groused at the gathering of Harris supporters and scoffed at the notion of Mr. Shapiro as a bipartisan bridge builder.
“I hate him,” the man said, declining to give his name.
Mr. Shapiro is using what leverage he has. The governor’s aides tallied almost 60 events for the ticket since President Biden bowed out of the race, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina. At least 20 appearances in Pennsylvania have come since he was passed over for Mr. Walz.
Some have been high profile: He appeared before a huge crowd in Philadelphia with Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz on Aug. 6, the same day she announced the Minnesota governor as her choice for vice president, and worked the spin room after the one and only debate between the vice president and the former president.
Other efforts have been more targeted. Mr. Shapiro has become a fixture on La Mega, a Spanish-language radio show out of Allentown, Pa., as well as on the conservative talk shows on WSBA radio out of York, Pa.
After a day of fasting for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Mr. Shapiro hopped a plane to Atlanta on Oct. 13 to stump with Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia in the suburban counties of Clayton and Fayette before flying back to Philadelphia that night to headline a major fund-raising dinner for Ms. Harris’s national finance committee.
“Listen,” Mr. Shapiro said in the interview, “I’m pouring my heart and soul into electing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”
Although he said he was in close communication with the vice president and her campaign, he declined to divulge any specific advice he had given or recommendations he’d made for key campaign stops.
But the governor’s fingerprints appear on the granular details of Ms. Harris’s travels, like the choice of holding a Labor Day rally featuring Ms. Harris, Mr. Biden and the governor at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5’s union hall. The union isn’t well known outside Western Pennsylvania, but it has a powerful presence in this key swing region. The governor has been particularly aggressive in calling in favors from unions.
Mr. Shapiro is also trying to shore up Democratic vulnerabilities elsewhere. He stumped for the vice president in Wisconsin in the largely rural Richland, Lafayette and Iowa Counties alongside Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat facing a tough re-election battle in that state. Over the remaining days, his spokesman, Manuel Bonder, said he would spend time securing the votes of Jewish Pennsylvanians concerned over rising antisemitism and the wavering support of some Democrats for Israel — a worry exacerbated by Ms. Harris’s decision not to pick Mr. Shapiro as her running mate.
It is a balancing act, selling Ms Harris to skeptical voters by emphasizing his own reputation for bipartisanship and moderation. In Slippery Rock on Saturday morning, the governor spoke about how he and Mr. Casey had gone up against the Biden administration to beat back an Energy Department proposal that could have shut down a steel mill in Butler County and cost 1,200 jobs. Without explicitly mentioning Ms. Harris’s past support for banning fracking, he talked up natural gas as part of his “all of the above” energy policies.
Then he commiserated with the Democratic faithful in a county where Trump signs come in bold clusters and Harris signs hardly exist.
“I know sometimes it can feel a little bit lonely here in Butler County when you’re a Democrat,” Mr. Shapiro told the crowd of about 100 that had gathered at the Twisted Oak Tavern at the edge of a golf course.
The governor advised attendees to take two yard signs, “one to send a message to all your neighbors — they’ve got company here in Butler County — and the second for when they steal the first.”
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