Since 2016, that Republican has been Trump, though he underperformed against Biden in the region in 2020, which was a factor in his narrow loss. In Pennsylvania’s GOP-trending, working-class areas, there have still been enough Right-leaning voters who believed Biden was a force of normalcy and moderation compared to Trump. Shapiro is viewed in this mould, and it’s how he managed to win Obama-to-Trump counties in 2022.

And since his gubernatorial victory — an historic winning margin against a nationally recognised weak, militantly conservative GOP opponent — Shapiro has spent extensive time in Trump-friendly regions. The Governor was hailed for his remarks after the death of one Trump rally attendee in western Pennsylvania. “He handled the Trump shooting really well. Like a statesman,” one Republican strategist told NBC News.

If Harris selected Shapiro, the vice-presidential pick could play a rare and unusual role in the electoral outcome. He’s the popular Democratic governor of a state with a divided legislature and Republican voter registration gains. Moreover, he has the highest approval rating for a first-term Pennsylvania governor since moderate Republican Tom Ridge in the Nineties.

Since his elected career began in 2004, Shapiro has crafted a moderate-to-progressive, bipartisan political persona, which he has presented with regular cable news hits. “My plan is neither Democrat nor Republican — it’s common sense,” read one mailer in Shapiro’s first successful state legislative run in a then-GOP suburban district. He has subsequently never lost a race. And in 2016, when he won the state attorney general’s race, Shapiro outperformed Trump when he narrowly carried Pennsylvania. “There are hundreds of thousands of voters who voted for both Donald Trump and Josh Shapiro,” one Democratic strategist told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

As Governor, Shapiro is best known among Pennsylvanians for his stewardship of rebuilding a collapsed section of a Philadelphia highway along one of the Northeast’s busiest corridors. His first executive order was lifting the college degree requirement for 65,000 state jobs, garnering national bipartisan praise. Shapiro, a conservative Jew, has in the past year also condemned antisemitic demonstrations in Philadelphia, saying that the former University of Pennsylvania president failed to show “moral clarity” during her disastrous congressional hearing last December. “Our colleges, in many cases, are failing young people,” Shapiro told the New York Times in May.

When he was previously attorney general, he probed the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the opioid crisis and released a bombshell report on the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover up of sexual abuse in state dioceses. “It is really the first thing I’ve worked on in my political career,” Shapiro told Philadelphia Magazine in 2021, “where I would have been okay losing my job over it.”

Despite statewide popularity, especially around Philadelphia, Shapiro risks breaking his career-long winning streak if he joins a Harris ticket. But with Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance expected to be parked in Pennsylvania these next four months, a Shapiro pick would improve Harris’s margins in the state’s growing suburbs and even Trump-friendly counties.

“Folks are worried about costs. They’re worried about crime. They’re worried about stuff like that,” Shapiro told Kara Swisher earlier this year. “They shouldn’t also have to worry about their democracy and their institutions.” A Shapiro pick would test the electoral outcome of this enduring message — the former a concern prevailing among the Rust Belt’s working-class voters, the latter embraced by affluent voters in suburbs.