Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks during a rally to kick off the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic nominee for president, and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia, August 6, 2024.
Over the past week, so many articles have argued that Kamala Harris blew it by not picking the centrist Josh Shapiro as her running mate and opting instead for leftist Tim Walz that by now it’s an established genre. In its editorial, The Wall Street Journal singled out as Walz’s radicalism his signing into law a tax hike on Minnesotans who make more than $1 million per year, establishing paid family leave, extending abortion rights, and measures that favored electric cars. In its editorial, The Washington Post cautioned against Walz’s affront to “broader fiscal awareness,” as evidenced by his signing into law “a new child tax credit, free school breakfast and lunch for K-12 students and billions of dollars on affordable housing and infrastructure,” as well as enhancing abortion rights and allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. Similar complaints have been lodged by Jon Chait and Ruy Teixeira, among others.
And they’re right that Josh Shapiro hasn’t signed any such things into law.
What’s astonishing about this critique is that it misses a defining difference between Walz and Shapiro. In November 2022, for the first time in more than a decade, Minnesota voters gave Democrats control of both houses of the legislature, as well as re-electing Walz. Whereas in November 2022, Pennsylvania voters elected Shapiro as their governor and gave control of the state’s lower house to the Democrats—even, however, as Republicans retained a majority in the state’s Senate.
So the more plausible and accurate way to compare Walz and Shapiro is to look at Walz’s record in his first term, when like Shapiro today, he could not get the policies he favored through the legislature. Every one of Walz’s alleged sins against centrism that his critics trot out occurred only in the past year and a half, when, unlike Shapiro, he was able to get progressive populist economic and social policies through the legislature.
What the Walz critics have also failed to grapple with is how many of these ostensibly left policies Shapiro actually supports, but cannot now get through Pennsylvania’s divided legislature. In fact, Shapiro has promoted a host of these policies, though they’ve not been able to clear the legislature due to Republican opposition. They include the Fairness Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to the categories of people who can’t be discriminated against in employment and housing. And where Shapiro hasn’t been able to pass a law creating paid family leave, he’s mandated it for state employees through executive orders, and included a universal free breakfast program in his 2023 budget, which the legislature did enact (though Republicans wouldn’t go for universal lunches).
In other words, the kinds of policies put forth by President Biden’s Build Back Better bill—paid family leave, more affordable child care, and the like—not only had almost universal Democratic support in Congress in 2021, but almost universal support among Democrats not in Congress, including centrists like Shapiro. Similarly, support for LGBTQ rights and policies addressing the climate crisis also extends deep into the ranks of Democratic centrists. (Joe Manchin’s opposition is primarily a function of West Virginia exceptionalism.)
Am I saying that Walz and Shapiro are two peas in a pod? Clearly not. Walz ranks among the most pro-labor of Democrats, having signed the first-in-the-nation state ban on “captive audience” meetings, in which employers compel their workers to attend anti-union rants. Shapiro, by contrast, supports school voucher programs, which weaken public education and are thereby anathema to the unions of school teachers. Shapiro cracked down on anti–Gaza War, pro-Palestinian campus protests, whereas Walz let protesters and University of Minnesota officials work out a settlement, which led to a voluntary nonviolent dismantling of the encampments.
Walz’s progressivism is also partly a product of Minnesota’s remarkable and long-standing coalition of unions; civil, women’s, LGBTQ, and immigrant rights groups; and environmental organizations. Working together, those groups’ causes became the causes of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and of its governor. Unity at that level eludes progressive groups in most states, including Pennsylvania.
But there is a baseline unity among Democrats virtually everywhere, which features support for policies like paid family leave, a child tax credit, and support for unions, climate mitigation, and gay rights. Tim Walz is down with that, and so, most of the time (though not all), is Josh Shapiro, even as his inability to turn those policies into law is less the result of his centrism, and way more that of a Republican-controlled state Senate. That the media has failed to figure this out is, well, appalling.
