Baruch Obama

Josh Shapiro is having fun, and the crowd is loving it. “Let’s be clear,” the Pennsylvania governor says in his windup. Sometimes, instead of “let’s be clear,” it’s “let me tell you something.” He throws in some “y’alls” with a wide smile. The g’s have fallen off his gerunds. He’s wearing a well-tailored dark suit, but no tie—his signature. When he gets going, his right index finger pokes the air. He’s almost bouncing as he pivots from one side of the audience to the other, in nearly perfect rhythm with his words. Then comes the crescendo; he’s shouting now, but only just loud enough to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Finally, the patriotic peroration—another signature. This one’s a story about Ben Franklin and that famous line: “A republic, if you can keep it.” He exhorts the audience to “show that this is not who we are as a nation.”

That voice, that cadence—it’s all so familiar. Close your eyes, and you could almost imagine that you’re listening to the nation’s first Black president. But he’s the man who hopes to be the first Jew to win the White House.

Shapiro, who is 53 and heavily favored to win reelection this fall, is one of several Democrats eying a 2028 White House campaign who have drawn—and even encouraged—comparisons to the 44th president. Like Barack Obama, Baruch Obama emphasizes pragmatism over doctrinaire progressivism; he has performed well in conservative areas of Pennsylvania that voted for Obama before turning to the right. Shapiro can wield a rhetorical knife, but he infuses his messaging with appeals to hope and optimism.

[Read: Josh Shapiro takes a gamble on his faith]

Yet the most obvious similarity is that when Shapiro gives a speech, he really sounds an awful lot like the Democrats’ most renowned speechmaker. It’s a once-you-hear-it-you-can’t-unhear-it type of thing, to the point where some Shapiro watchers believe he’s consciously imitating Obama. “He didn’t used to talk like this,” one Democrat who has closely followed Shapiro’s rise up the Pennsylvania political ranks told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid starting a public feud with the governor.

Shapiro’s Obama echo attracted notice during the 2024 presidential campaign, when he was under consideration to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. “Is he doing an … Obama?” Ronny Chieng asked in a memorable roast on The Daily Show. J. D. Vance mocked him too. “He talks like Barack Obama,” Vance said on a podcast. “It’s like if I tried to do a really bad impression of Barack Obama.”

Asked to respond to Vance at the time, Shapiro laughed off the charge. “Barack Obama was probably our most gifted orator of my time, so it’s kind of a weird insult,” he told reporters. My colleague Tim Alberta, in the profile he wrote of Shapiro earlier this year, documented the makeover that the governor underwent as he gained prominence—one that included a new hairstyle and sharper clothing as well as the Obama-esque way of speaking. “I just don’t hear it,” Shapiro told Alberta about the oft-noted comparison. “I don’t think I’ve changed my cadence or my rhythm or how I speak.” (A spokesperson for Shapiro declined to comment for this story.)

Obama and Shapiro have known each other for two decades, and the younger Democrat has said that Obama set an example he has “tried to emulate.” Shapiro was an early endorser of Obama during his presidential run, and Obama joined Shapiro at a large get-out-the-vote rally in Philadelphia on the eve of his election as governor four years ago. (It was there that the Democrat I spoke with first noticed—along with many others—how closely Shapiro resembled Obama: “It was him and Obama back-to-back, and that was a moment where people were like, Jesus Christ.”)

The two men have other things in common besides a speaking style. Both have owned dogs named Bo. And they both played basketball in their youth and remain huge fans of the sport. (Shortly after Lebron James signed with the 76ers, Shapiro said that he’d personally tried to recruit the NBA legend to Philadelphia.)

Not everyone hears Obama when they listen to Shapiro. “I had never thought that,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania, told me. “He has a similar cadence, but I don’t think it’s a thing.” Mikus noted that politics “is a lot like football: Everybody steals from each other.” Shapiro, he suggested, also made a decent point in his rejoinder to Vance in 2024. “If you’re going to be compared to anybody, it sure as heck doesn’t hurt to be compared to the most popular figure in Democratic politics,” Mikus said.

The Obama comparison certainly doesn’t appear to be hurting Shapiro in Pennsylvania, where a poll released last week by Siena University showed him leading his Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, by 20 points. A boffo performance in November could propel him into the top tier of what is likely to be a crowded Democratic presidential field, especially if Shapiro’s coattails help his party flip Republican-held House seats and retake the majority. But he’ll face plenty of skeptics. Shapiro’s long-standing support for Israel is a liability with progressives who have demanded an end to U.S. aid for the Jewish state. Among swing-state overperformers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona—former astronaut, husband to Gabby Giffords—has a more compelling biography, and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is a competitor for the Baruch Obama label: He’s also Jewish, he makes mainstream Democrats swoon, and, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey has noted, he can, when he gets revved-up, also sound a bit like Obama.

[Read: Who’s afraid of Josh Shapiro?]

Will Shapiro’s Obamaesque speeches inspire Democratic voters yearning for a charismatic communicator, or will they make him seem like a knockoff—an overeager pretender to the party throne? For an expert opinion, I consulted David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, who has probably seen the ex-president deliver speeches as often as anyone alive. Like Mikus, Axelrod told me he hadn’t noticed the resemblance until people started pointing it out a couple of years ago. “He wouldn’t be the first person to try to emulate, or imitate, the president,” Axelrod said.

He added that the ribbing Shapiro receives over his Obama-like stylings may end up being a funny footnote. But the association, should it burrow deeper in people’s minds, does carry risk for Shapiro. “Authenticity is the coin of the realm, and people want to know that you’re comfortable with yourself and that you’re being yourself,” Axelrod said. Voters crave it perhaps now more than ever.