This article was produced in partnership with NOTUS. It is the fifth article in a series featuring local reporters across the country telling in-depth stories about key 2026 races.
On an early morning in June 2023, a tanker truck transporting thousands of gallons of gasoline crashed on an exit ramp underneath I-95 in Philadelphia. The truck burst into flames, killing the driver, causing an overpass to collapse, and shutting down a vital commercial and commuter corridor traveled by about 160,000 vehicles every day. Experts predicted it would take months to rebuild.
At that point, Josh Shapiro had been Pennsylvania’s governor for five months. This was the kind of disaster that, if handled well, could earn a state-level politician considerable acclaim, or, if handled poorly, could doom their career. And Shapiro seemed to know it. He quickly signed a disaster declaration to secure federal funds. Then he and a crew of emergency management and construction specialists concocted a creative temporary fix for the highway, involving recycled glass and a jet-engine-powered dryer normally used on NASCAR tracks. They even livestreamed the repairs. To everyone’s surprise, the roadway reopened in 12 days.
Shapiro held a triumphant press conference to mark the accomplishment. Mascots from the city’s major sports teams were in attendance. For the event, the governor swapped his customary suit and tie for a bomber-style jacket over a white Oxford shirt. Standing behind a platform branded with the words “Rebuilding I-95” and flanked by a coterie of labor leaders and elected officials, Shapiro pressed and held his lips together for a moment before debuting what would become a mantra for his tenure as governor: The reconstruction of the highway, he said, was proof that “we can get shit done.”
In the years following the I-95 collapse, Shapiro would emerge as a national political figure — possible vice presidential nominee in 2024, now a likely presidential contender in 2028. In the process, the 53-year-old has become a significant player in the ideological wars roiling the Democratic Party. He is one of the de facto leaders of a Democratic faction that wants the party to steer a more moderate path, away from the progressivism of Bernie Sanders and AOC. He is also an observant Jew and a defender of Israel at a time when the Gaza war and larger questions about Zionism have deeply divided Democrats.
If you’ve read about Shapiro in the national media, chances are it was through the lens of these big-picture questions. When he recently sat for a Q&A with Politico, for instance, about half the interview focused on Israel and antisemitism.
Shapiro also very much wants voters to see the guy from the I-95 rebuild — the governor who gets shit done. “I’m gonna run on that GSD agenda,” he recently said in an interview with Al Sharpton, describing his current reelection campaign for governor. “I’m gonna run on how we’ve made people’s lives better — their schools, their safety, their economic opportunity.”
A confidant of the governor, the suburban Philadelphia pastor Marshall Mitchell, told us that calling Shapiro ambitious “might be an understatement.” But, he added, “It’s not blind ambition. It is a desire to use the life that God has given you to get shit done, get stuff done, and help people out.”
But the Shapiro of the I-95 crash is not the entire story. Nor is the national-media version of Shapiro, the one who is a hyper-articulate voice on the ideological direction of the Democratic Party. There is also the entirety of his governing record — which we have witnessed and chronicled as reporters at Spotlight PA, a nonpartisan and nonprofit newsroom. We aren’t, of course, in a position to render a judgment on his tenure in office; should he run for president, voters across the country will have to do that for themselves. What we can say is that anyone who has served as a governor will invariably accumulate wins and losses, and Shapiro is no exception. As Democratic voters nationwide get to know him in the months and years ahead, it’s worth understanding not just where he has succeeded as governor but also where he has arguably fallen short.
Shapiro, who grew up outside Philadelphia, has been on a political winning streak since college. At the University of Rochester, he made school history by getting elected student-association president as a freshman. After graduating in 1995, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work in Congress, quickly rising to become one of Capitol Hill’s youngest chiefs of staff.
Moxie helped. He worked for then-Rep. Joe Hoeffel, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, who remembers the first time he met Shapiro. The 25-year-old walked straight up to Hoeffel, introduced himself, and asked to be his legislative director. “He made a good first impression,” Hoeffel told us. “A little brash, a little self-confident. I say that with respect. You need to be that way in Washington.” Shapiro was a tireless networker, Hoeffel and others recall, helping him establish connections that would later benefit his political career.
After nearly a decade in Washington, Shapiro itched for something different, as he detailed in his recent memoir, “Where We Keep the Light.” He had risen through the ranks of congressional staff, and none of the other opportunities in Washington, including becoming a K Street lobbyist, spoke to him. Instead, now married and a father, he decided to return to his home state and enter local politics.
In 2004, he ran to represent his suburban Philadelphia district in the state House of Representatives. It was a solidly Republican district that few expected him to win, but Shapiro reached beyond the traditional Democratic base, seeking to appeal to centrists, independent and unaffiliated voters, and even Republicans. He won by 9 percentage points and cemented an approach to politics that would carry over to his lawmaking days, his six-year stint as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, and his tenure as governor.
Today, he may invoke traditional liberal themes (“No matter what you look like, where you come from, who you love, who you pray to or choose not to pray to, you have a place here in Pennsylvania”), but some of his record seems intended to appeal to the center and right. His budgets over the past three years have increased funding for school-to-work programs such as apprenticeships and vocational initiatives. And he is an unabashed supporter of law enforcement who has frequently called policing a “noble profession” and has added tens of millions of dollars to the budget for hiring state troopers.
Shapiro’s clearest wins as governor have come through executive orders and actions. Early in his tenure, he issued an executive order establishing a money-back guarantee for delayed government permits — part of an overall push to make government move “at the speed of business.” He also acted via executive order to remove college-degree requirements for most state jobs.
The governor seems particularly proud of his track record encouraging businesses to invest in Pennsylvania. His administration has issued dozens of press releases highlighting private sector projects in the state, including an Eli Lilly GLP-1 factory, an Urban Outfitters distributorship, and Amazon data centers. He has attracted “over $41 billion in private-sector investment,” according to a June press release, “while creating more than 24,000 good-paying jobs across the Commonwealth.”
Shapiro’s economic efforts — and other tacks to the center — have earned him some GOP fans, such as Jim Schultz, a White House attorney in President Donald Trump’s first administration and a former lobbyist who now works for a gambling technology company with stakes in Pennsylvania. “Republicans like me care about education, business, job creation, a strong economy and government efficiency,” Schultz told us. “Shapiro made a promise on each one and he’s delivered on those promises.”
But look a little closer and Shapiro’s ability to get what he wants from both his Republican opponents and his fellow Democrats appears more complicated. Take school vouchers. Shapiro is one of the highest-profile Democrats in the country to support private school vouchers for kids in low-performing public schools. In 2023, during closed-door talks on his first state budget proposal, his administration sent a letter to lawmakers affirming his support for vouchers. Around the same time, he appeared on Fox News saying that “every child of God deserves a shot here in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
A week later, the GOP-controlled state Senate passed a budget deal that included $100 million for a voucher program. Republicans and their allies said the deal was backed by Shapiro and expected it to pass the state House of Representatives, where Democrats held a one-vote majority.
Following a private meeting between Shapiro and Democratic lawmakers with “a lot of raw emotions” and “a lot of hard feelings about a lot of things,” Democratic state Rep. Peter Schweyer told us shortly after, “we got to a good place.” That place included Shapiro promising to veto his own priority — the $100 million for school vouchers — from the final deal if Democrats put up the votes to pass the budget. When it passed a few days later, Shapiro upheld his end of the bargain. Republicans, furious at the betrayal, delayed the budget’s signing by a month and stalled other key budget-related bills into December. (For his part, Shapiro has said there never was a deal.)
The residual hard feelings have ossified Harrisburg’s dealmaking environment in the years since. All four of Shapiro’s budgets have been signed past the statutory June 30 deadline; the 2023 and 2025 budgets went unfinished for 100-plus days. It’s not unusual for state legislators to blow the deadline, but 2023 ended a period of relative fiscal peace under Shapiro’s Democratic predecessor, Tom Wolf, who had built a better working relationship with the Republican-controlled legislature in his second term.
On the campaign trail during his 2022 bid for governor, Shapiro advocated raising the minimum wage, enacting stricter gun laws and passing nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people. While in office, he has called for the state legislature to legalize recreational marijuana, close corporate tax loopholes, increase public transit funding and restrict private equity’s ability to buy hospitals.
None of these items have become law. Most have passed the House, in some form or another, but then died in the Republican-controlled state Senate. For instance, a possible corporate tax cut did not entice lawmakers to raise the state’s $7.25 minimum wage, and an anti-private equity bill hasn’t advanced amid opposition from nursing homes and other health-care interests.
For Shapiro’s supporters, there’s an easy justification for these false starts. “Harrisburg didn’t say no. Republicans in Harrisburg said no,” said Mark Segal, a Philadelphia journalist and gay-rights activist who’s advised Shapiro for nearly two decades.
Still, the governor has the power to focus the attention of the public and the legislature. And it’s undeniable that Harrisburg has had an unproductive few years. In fact, during Shapiro’s tenure, the state legislature has passed record-low numbers of laws.
Moreover, some of Shapiro’s policy accomplishments simply built off Wolf’s work. Shapiro’s reelection campaign, for example, trumpets his approval of universal free breakfast in public schools, which he advocated for and included in his first budget. But it was Wolf who first implemented the program in his final year in office. Shapiro has just continued it.
Shapiro’s term has also not been scandal-free. One of his most trusted advisers, Mike Vereb, was accused of sexual harassment by a female subordinate while serving as Shapiro’s secretary of legislative affairs in 2023. His administration quietly settled the matter and Vereb resigned. But the public became aware of the allegations when they were leaked to the media. Shortly after, we were the first outlet to report details of the $295,000 settlement paid to the complainant. Shapiro has said little about the incident, sticking instead to broadly defending his administration’s process for reporting and investigating workplace abuses. (Vereb has repeatedly declined to publicly discuss the allegations.)
In addition, Shapiro’s relationship with the state Capitol’s press corps has been tepid — a contrast to his solicitous approach to national outlets. He has not responded to our requests for interviews over the years, including for this piece, and, in general, local Capitol reporters rarely get a chance to ask him more than a few questions in a press gaggle.
There are also pockets of the state that feel Shapiro left them behind as he climbed the political ladder. In 2018, as attorney general, he released a report detailing a breathtaking level of abuse by Catholic clergy in Pennsylvania — more than 1,000 victims and hundreds of priests who were alleged abusers — as well as a systematic and deliberate cover-up of it all. In the months following the report’s release, Shapiro played a key role in lobbying lawmakers to amend a statute of limitations that prohibited survivors of long-ago abuse from bringing civil suits against their abusers and the institutions that protected them. Attempts had failed over the years to convince reluctant state legislators — most of them Republicans — to temporarily lift the statute for similar crimes. But the report’s release and the attention it was receiving around the world were widely viewed as a turning point.
We covered that frenzied time in the Capitol. The intense pressure campaign on the legislature was unlike anything we’ve seen before: survivors standing outside legislative offices reading aloud portions of the 1,000-page report and displaying photos of themselves as children; impromptu press conferences popping up in the Capitol rotunda; parents of victims waiting for lawmakers outside their offices to plead for change.
Though the push to change the statute of limitations ultimately failed that session, Shapiro later told the media, “This is far from over.” And survivors took that to heart.
When Shapiro became governor in 2023, they hoped he would use his bully pulpit to get a statute of limitations measure across the finish line. Bill Wachob is a former state Democratic lawmaker who was abused as a preteen by an abuser who had himself been molested by a priest. He understands that as governor, Shapiro can’t unilaterally change the law. What he can do is prioritize the matter for lawmakers.
“I’ve been around politics, politicians, and legislatures my entire adult life. I know that when a governor wants something done, it usually gets done,” Wachob, who has worked as a political consultant for the past four decades, wrote in an open letter to Shapiro earlier this year. “So, when a Governor who prides himself on ‘Getting Stuff Done’ allows this issue to languish year after year, it becomes impossible to ignore the question: Why the indifference?” Recently, Wachob told us, “He’s really dropped the ball on this.”
Arthur Baselice Jr. — a retired Philadelphia police officer whose son, Arthur Baselice III, was sexually abused by a priest and later died of a drug overdose — was one of the people who, along with his wife, stood with Shapiro in front of the marble steps in the Capitol rotunda during the campaign to get the statute of limitations lifted. Today, he believes Shapiro walked away when the fight became too hard. “So, tell me, what has he accomplished for the victims?” he said. “I would like him to look me in the face and tell me. And I don’t want to hear sorry. You can’t apologize to the dead.”
Sex-abuse survivors are not the only constituents who feel that Shapiro the attorney general abandoned them once he became governor. So do some residents of Dimock, a rural town of about 1,200 people in northeast Pennsylvania, whose lives were upended by fracking, the controversial process of extracting natural gas from underground rock.
For over 15 years, local residents have been waging a campaign against the fracking industry. They claim it has left their hometown unrecognizable, with water that is undrinkable and residents with headaches, nosebleeds, and other health problems. For a while, it seemed Shapiro would be their hero: As attorney general, he reached out to residents and invited them to Harrisburg to testify before a grand jury that his office had convened on natural gas drilling. The subsequent report, released in 2020, called for stricter rules for Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry.
As attorney general, Shapiro also charged a gas company with polluting Dimock’s water. Later, in the months between his campaign for governor and his swearing-in, he negotiated a plea that required the company to accept the charge of polluting the town’s water (though not admit guilt), pay the water bills of affected residents for 75 years, and commit $16 million toward rebuilding a public water line.
But a day after Shapiro announced the plea, residents learned that state regulators in Wolf’s outgoing administration had agreed to lift a 12-year moratorium on drilling in a 9-square-mile area underneath Dimock. A spokesperson for Shapiro’s office denied at the time that it played any role in the Wolf administration’s decision, but some residents were outraged with him nonetheless. When she learned of the moratorium lifting, Dimock resident Victoria Switzer, who had stood next to Shapiro when he announced the plea, said she felt duped. “I am so mortified that I was paraded and made a puppet,” she told Inside Climate News.
Shapiro, then the governor-elect, said he would review the decision to lift the moratorium once in office, but he has never reversed it. (State environmental officials say surface drilling is still not allowed in that area, and the deep-bore drilling occurring there will not impact water quality.) “I know the folks in Dimock … feel like they were props for Shapiro,” Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition, a grassroots organization that advocates for clean and renewable energy, told us. “They just feel like they were used, so there is a lot of ill will.”
In 2024, a handful of Dimock residents confronted Shapiro at a union hall in Scranton, where he was presenting his energy plans. Some expressed frustration that construction of the new water line was taking too long, and that they still did not have clean water. Craig Stevens, an activist who went to that meeting, held up pictures of children and polluted water. “These are the children that have been poisoned,” Stevens told Shapiro, according to WVIA Radio. “That’s their water.”
Local resident Ray Kemble was escorted out of the room after accusing the governor of betraying the town. When Shapiro was in the running to be the 2024 vice presidential nominee, Kemble and 10 other activists wrote an open letter to then-Vice President Kamala Harris calling him a “heartless politician.”
Shapiro, who describes himself as an “all-of-the-above” governor on energy, has disappointed others with his environmental record too. Pennsylvania is the third-largest net supplier of energy to other states, and the state is second only to Texas in domestic natural gas reserves. Shapiro jockeyed and received federal funding for hydrogen production, an industry that taps these reserves. He has also supported an ongoing data center build-out. And, as part of a deal to finish last year’s late budget, he agreed to kill a program put in place by Wolf that limited carbon emissions from power plants — an initiative that had been long opposed by both organized labor and business groups.
Environmental advocate Patrick McDonnell — chief of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection under Wolf and now leader of the environmental nonprofit PennFuture — notes that Shapiro has delivered some additional funding to place solar panels on schools, to clean streams, and to plug abandoned gas wells. But the governor’s overall environmental record has left him underwhelmed. “All-of-the-above,” McDonnell told us, means that, among other possibilities, “you’re in favor of whoever calls on the phone.”
And yet, despite all of this — the setbacks on many policy priorities, the subsets of voters who feel alienated — one thing is undeniably true about Josh Shapiro: He is popular. Very popular. Current polls show him easily winning a second term this November against Republican Treasurer Stacy Garrity.
Leading up to primary day in May, we spoke to voters in urban, rural, and suburban precincts. In Allentown, Sapphire Kinard, an 18-year-old Democrat, supports Shapiro. “I think he does a good job of connecting his ideals to the kids,” Kinard said. “He posts a lot on social media. Informative, but fun.”
A 42-year-old nonprofit worker named Emily Behm in Philadelphia’s outlying suburbs told us unprompted she hopes Shapiro runs for president, listing her reasons in quick succession: He “genuinely gives a shit”; he has sued President Trump (24 times and counting); he’s “a good moderate” whom even her Republican husband likes. “We need someone not crazy,” Behm said. “We don’t need extremists.”
In an increasingly chaotic world, his responses to crises — including the collapse of I-95 — give people a sense of stability. This makes him broadly appealing to wide swaths of the Democratic base, said Jamie Perrapato, a longtime suburban Philadelphia Democratic political organizer. The state’s Democratic rank and file, she said, “would do anything Josh Shapiro would ask them to do for the cause. In whatever ways Josh would ask people to step up, they would.”
Part of his popularity may simply stem from his skills as a communicator. He’s not just an excellent speaker; he and his team have proven adept at the new world of digital branding. They produce a constant stream of content — clips of him delivering a perfect soundbite to a cable host, video collaborations with social media influencers. His local critics, meanwhile, just don’t seem to break through.
There’s no doubt, in short, that Shapiro would be a formidable candidate. The bigger question is whether he would be an effective president — someone who can get laws through Congress, a tactician who can work with his own party and his political enemies, too.
Following the Trump administration, said Marshall Mitchell, the Philadelphia pastor and Shapiro confidant, “we are going to see an era of reform that will surpass what we saw after Watergate, and we will need people of immense will who are able to suspend even their own participation in systems and structures to create a more perfect union.” He added, “That’s going to take leadership, and that’s going to take a real moral compass.”
For Mitchell, Shapiro is at the top of the list of people who have such a moral compass. But as Mitchell — and Shapiro himself — would tell you, it isn’t always enough to have a moral compass; you also have to get shit done. Can Shapiro do both? If he runs for president, national voters will have to add up his successes and setbacks, and then decide.
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