Josh Shapiro’s Midterm Gambit Could Set Him Up For 2028 — Just Don’t Ask If He’s Running

In a side room of a historic railway station in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. I’d been teeing up a question about the geographic diversity of the enormous state he governs, its regional tribes and varying allegiances to convenience stores and sports teams (Sheetz or Rutter’s or Wawa, Steelers or Eagles), and his own Eagles had suffered their fourth consecutive loss that day. “Are you getting emotional?” I joked, hopeful for a rare crack in the governor’s discipline and control. It was actually just that the sun had been setting in his face as he’d delivered his fourth stump speech of the day outside. He gave me a courtesy chuckle. “I’m just trying to see, sorry.”

By then he’d covered about 140 miles through four counties in Northeastern Pennsylvania. In Bradford County, Trump +48 territory up against the New York state border, he’d alluded to “your neighbor, my opponent” without naming the Republican Treasurer Stacy Garrity, his gubernatorial rival who’d gone to high school not far from the VFW hall where he spoke. In Wyoming County (Trump +37), he told a packed room of Democrats at the Tunkhannock Public Library that he knew it was lonely in their party there, and urged them to grab two lawn signs so they’d have a spare when the first got stolen. In Luzerne County (Trump +19 in 2024, though Shapiro won there by a point in ’22), he rallied under the seal of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers alongside electeds current, retiring, aspiring and past — including ex-Sen. Bob Casey in a burgundy quarter zip — where he extolled “the union way of life” and shouted out the insulators.

In all cases his speech made only the briefest request for voters to send him back to the governor’s mansion. Polls currently show him trouncing Garrity, a decorated Army Reserve veteran once seen as a top recruit for the GOP, by over 20 points, and he has a remarkable 60% approval rating in a state that’s swung from Trump to Biden and back again by sub-2-point margins. Rather, his speech faced two other directions — up, toward what he repeatedly called the “chaos, cruelty and corruption” of the Trump White House, and down the ballot, to the federal races in Pennsylvania that could determine control of the U.S. House, and the state legislative races that will define his likely next term as governor.

The Trump stuff is notable in the context of Shapiro’s near-universally suspected 2028 presidential ambitions. It’s been well documented that the governor is doing many of the things that people running for president do: releasing a memoir, pumping out social media clips, starting a federal PAC, not directly answering questions about whether he’s running for president. “Can we just cut and paste?” he says when I take my own half-hearted run at this. We both know what he’s going to say.

Which is this: He’s focused on 2026, on his own state. Unlike other presumed 2028 hopefuls, he’s not doing the early-primary groveling circuit; instead, he’s expending a great deal of shoe leather and capital right at home. But it’s hard not to see his Pennsylvania focus as its own kind of 2028 strategy. For one thing, it’s a convenient way to pick his spots on national issues: He can go after Trump without dwelling on more polarizing subjects — Israel policy, say, or the general direction of his party. For another, it’s an opportunity to flex his influence in a vital swing state while Democrats are desperate for a winner to return them to the White House.

Though many national eyes are focused on the state’s four, and possibly more, swingable U.S. House districts, the tougher challenge is further down the ballot — namely, flipping the GOP-held state senate and securing unified Democratic control in Harrisburg for the first time since 1993. Shapiro has held out the Republican chamber as proof of his bipartisan dealmaking abilities to “get stuff done” for Pennsylvanians — or “get shit done” depending on the audience, but either way it’s brand enough that his campaign sells “GSD” merch. He also attacks the state senate as a campaign-trail foil, blaming GOP opposition for the inability to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage, codify abortion rights in the state, build more housing, and so on. In this, he’s testing a kind of bare-knuckled bipartisanship that tells Republican lawmakers in the state, and maybe later the nation: Work with me or I’m coming for your jobs.

It’s a risk that is, like much of Shapiro’s career, calculated. If he doesn’t secure a trifecta, he’ll likely still be able to point to victories in U.S. House seats that have been trending toward Democrats anyway. If he succeeds, he won’t have the state senate to neutralize pressure from his left flank just when he’s (presumably) positioning himself for the moderate lane of a 2028 Democratic primary. Kim Ward, the Republican senate president pro tempore who is no fan of the governor’s, put it this way: “He’s able to run as a moderate because we protected him.” Berwood Yost, the director of the center for opinion research at Franklin & Marshall College, noted: “If you’ve got national aspirations, your weakness is with the progressive elements of your party. … Be careful what you wish for.”

Josh Shapiro’s electoral success has depended on appealing to Republicans since he won his first race for state rep over two decades ago, sending out mailers in his then-predominantly Republican Philly-area district declaring: “My plan is neither Democrat nor Republican — it’s common sense.” He beat a well-known Republican opponent by 10 points. Seven years later, he scored another political upset, helping break GOP control on the Montgomery County board of commissioners for the first time since the Civil War and becoming the chair. In his reelection campaign, he persuaded so many Republicans to write him in that he was both the Democratic and the Republican nominee. (Needless to say, he won the general.)

He would repeat the pattern statewide — in his AG race in 2016, when he won Pennsylvania on the same ballot that Trump did, doing about 2 points better; and in his 2022 governor’s race, when he stomped a weak opponent by nearly 15 points while outperforming another notable statewide candidate, John Fetterman. He did this partly by running on Republican-friendly issues including tax cuts and school choice. His inaugural speech was “pretty bipartisan,” Ward told the AP back then. She told me she was hopeful at the time.

At its best, his brand of basic, nonideological competence took the old saw that there’s no partisan way to fix a pothole and applied it statewide. “He thinks more like a municipal leader, in that he’s focused on getting things done,” said Jody Allen, a Shapiro supporter who serves on the township board in Chadds Ford. Allen pointed to the ne plus ultra of GSD, which was the 12-day sprint to reopen I-95 after a bridge collapse in Shapiro’s first year in office. For proof of get-shit-done concept, it was hard to beat, and it earned him bipartisan applause (plus a subheadline musing about “President Shapiro?” in the Inquirer, which noted the made-for-political-advertising imagery of the governor surveying the damage with a “concerned but determined expression.” This was 2023). It was a genuine achievement well-messaged: Shapiro’s administration livestreamed the construction, and he took the opportunity of a visit from President Joe Biden to announce it was proceeding ahead of schedule.

Back in Harrisburg, however, the spirit of bipartisan comity was about to fall apart.

Shapiro had backed a school-voucher program he’d negotiated with the Republican-led senate, then found that much of his own party would not back it in the House. So, Ward said, he reneged on the deal. “I could never trust him again,” she said. “When push came to shove, he folded like a wet T-shirt.”

Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for the governor, disputes that characterization of what occurred. “It’s clear that years ago in the process of a budget negotiation there was, as there tend to be, an issue that did not reach common agreement among all parties involved,” he said. “Since then, the governor and House Democrats and Senate Republicans have passed commonsense budgets that required all sides coming to agreement.”

“‘Get shit done,’ to me, kind of pales when he could have put his popularity on the line to just let House Democrats have a vote” on school choice, said Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant in Pennsylvania. “And it’s like, look, this is something you campaigned on, and then you didn’t even try.” Shapiro has said that he continues to support the concept but that the parties must reach a compromise bill in the legislature that does not take money out of public education.

Meanwhile, the aisle-crossing governor seems to have concluded that it would be better to beat Republicans than to join them. He has plowed $7 million from his campaign fund into the state Democratic party led by his ally Eugene DePasquale, which is undertaking a coordinated midterm push to elect Democrats up and down the ballot. “We have an incredibly popular governor, an incredibly popular lieutenant governor, which helped create the environment — obviously with everything that’s happening internationally too — where we’d have this historic chance to flip the state senate, expand our state House majority and obviously reelect the governor,” DePasquale said. “It was like, let’s keep the coordinated campaign under the state party, let’s find a way to get the resources we need so that we can basically do the equivalent of a presidential election in a midterm election.”

It’s not all gridlock in Harrisburg, though. Late in October, Shapiro announced, complete with a glossy social-media photo spread, that he had signed 58 bipartisan bills into law on “commonsense steps,” from AI regulation to health care access. “That’s how government should work,” read an Instagram post. “That’s GSD.” Within hours, he released ads for four Democratic state senate candidates, accusing the incumbent senate Republicans of blocking his agenda — including two authors of bills he’d just signed. “It goes to show why I have long said he’s the most insufferable politician in Pennsylvania,” said Nicholas.

“The governor has been very clear from day one about his focus on fighting to flip the senate and elect as many leaders down the ballot as possible who will work with him to actually get stuff done instead of blocking his commonsense priorities,” Bonder said. “At the same time, he has been one of the only governors in the country with a divided legislature, and so of course that has meant bringing people together from both parties to deliver results, and signing a lot of bipartisan legislation.”

Whatever the critiques, there is just no getting around his approval rating, which makes him one of the most popular governors in the country. He maintains the formula for this isn’t that complicated — he says he could “point to a million specific policy things” but that fundamentally “you have to show up and not just talk, but actually listen, and then do.” This kind of thing is fairly standard Democratic fare, though, and it’s intoned by far less successful pols than Shapiro. So, really, why do Democrats in general struggle with this?

“I can’t speak to how other elected leaders conduct themselves,” Shapiro says, again declining to take the national bait. “I just know this is how I’ve always conducted myself.”

But what works politically in Pennsylvania has natural national relevance for other Democrats, given the state’s 19 electoral votes, and its microcosmic mix of archetypical American regions — 13 million people distributed among vast farm country and fast-growing suburbs, old coal and steel towns and new logistics hubs, big-city neighborhoods and counties shaped by newcomers. Appealing to, or at least losing better among, all those kinds of constituencies is the defining puzzle for the party in 2028.

Still, “I’m not sure his formula would work for other national Democrats,” said Democratic former Rep. Susan Wild, who represented Pennsylvania’s swingy 7th district before losing to a Republican last cycle. “If you want to be bipartisan — and I was in that seat myself — you’re invariably going to piss off your own party.”

That works for his popularity in a closely divided swing state, where those upset with him in either party aren’t as numerous as the vast, approving middle. But the 2028 Democratic primary electorate is divided along different lines. Shapiro emphasizes common-ground stuff over culture-war issues. “As a party,” he told me, “we need to focus on tangible results … how do we give a kid a great education? How do we make sure they’re safe in their community? … How do we create jobs?... How do we cut costs?” As for social issues, he frames them in terms of freedom: “for women to make decisions over their own bodies, for two people who love each other to get married ... for kids who are born into the wrong body and are looking, not to get bullied, but for care and comfort.”

Who knows how this applies outside of the state, but if his current Pennsylvania campaign really is an audition for higher office, Yost thinks it’s a smart strategy — especially if other candidates wind up splitting the progressive lane. “The more candidates in the pool, the fewer progressives he needs to bring to his camp,” he said. “Focus locally, build your brand here, and then when the time comes you’ve got your base and you’ve got your brand and you hope there’s enough other people in the race.”