Trump World Fueled an Anti-Shapiro Whisper Campaign

AS KAMALA HARRIS BEGAN WINDING DOWN her search for a running mate, Donald Trump’s team knew one thing clearly: It didn’t want her to pick Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of swing-state Pennsylvania whose more moderate record made him a formidable opponent.

So the Trump campaign and its allies moved to quietly kneecap Shapiro. It did so by forging a de facto alliance with the enemy of its enemy, the progressive left, which opposed Shapiro—the only Jewish candidate on Harris’s shortlist—largely because of his pro-Israel stances. The result was a swelling of progressive opposition (some of it organic, some artificially fed) that, among other things, saw Shapiro’s online critics dub him “Genocide Josh.”

“Where we could, we amplified the leftists on Twitter. We fed Shapiro oppo [opposition research] to the media. We did what we could to create more noise and discontent,” a Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal campaign workings, told The Bulwark prior to Harris making her pick on Tuesday.

“We didn’t do that with Tim Walz,” the adviser said of the progressive blue-state Minnesota governor who ultimately scored the VP nod.

On Tuesday, after the vice president announced her pick of Walz, there was a sense of relief from Trump’s team and among many on the right. Publicly, GOP operatives flooded social media and the airwaves with criticisms of Walz’s record on transgender therapies for minors, his progressive views of criminal justice and immigration, and his leadership of the state amid the Minneapolis riots after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. Privately, they celebrated the Walz pick, believing they’d managed to avoid what could have been a fatal campaign setback had Shapiro been selected.

Trump’s advisers say they believe their whisper campaign against Shapiro almost certainly did not factor into Harris’s decision. Her politics align more with Walz’s, and some reports have suggested that the two had better chemistry than she and Shapiro. But the fact that Republicans had so much anxiety about Shapiro and so little about Walz provides a telling look into howTrump’s campaign sees the state of the race.

FOR MONTHS, TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN has viewed Pennsylvania and its 19 Electoral College votes as the linchpin to winning back the White House. Shapiro’s 15-point win in the 2022 governor’s race loomed large in their psyche. Beyond geography, Trump’s campaign is keenly aware that his loss of white-male voter support alongside slippage in the suburbs in 2020 cost him re-election. Shapiro’s centrist chops (backing school vouchers, tough-on-crime policies, support of Israel) proved effective with both groups.

After Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, the former president said he was “going to leave him in Pennsylvania.” But Vance’s rollout was rocky as Democrats pointed to past incendiary comments about “childless cat ladies” and his conservative views on abortion and families. Walz led the way in the effort to define Vance as “weird”—an early volley in the Democratic VP tryouts that earned him plaudits on the left.

Vance has since been traveling across the country. On Tuesday, he sought to repay the favor.

“They make an interesting tag team because, of course, Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and then the few that got caught, Kamala Harris helped bail them out of jail,” Vance told reporters Tuesday. The Harris campaign said Walz did not “allow” criminal activity and called the criticisms of Harris “debunked,” pointing to a Washington Post story.

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In the eyes of Democrats, Walz is not a consolation prize to Shapiro. He’s a value add in his own right. 

Many in the party see him as a common-sense, Midwestern antidote to Vance’s extremism, pointing to Walz’s appeal to progressives as well as his record as a centrist in Congress, where he was first elected in 2006 after flipping a GOP-leaning seat and earning an A rating from the NRA. As governor, Walz was decidedly more liberal—for starters, he now has an F rating from the NRA for promoting gun control.

According to Politico, Harris was attracted to Walz’s gubernatorial record: He enshrined abortion rights and advanced child tax credits and free school lunches for poor families and kids. She also liked his biography. Walz is a former history teacher, football coach and veteran, although conservatives are already attacking his military record. 

There is hope, in some circles, that Walz can use that resume to help Harris make inroads among working-class white male voters. President Joe Biden had made some gains among that electorate and his departure from the race has prompted fear of backsliding. NOTUS reported on Tuesday that Harris has a looming “Scranton problem.”

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But Trump World doesn’t believe, as of now, that Walz has more appeal beyond the typical Democratic voting base. After the pick was announced, Republicans began sharing an analysis from MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki who noted that the governor’s win in 2022 was largely due to the “standard Democratic victory model” of running up the score in blue cities and suburbs, not collecting extra votes in rural and small-town Minnesota.

“This is where Dems have lost ground and Walz, in 2022, he didn’t gain any ground,” Kornacki said. “The idea that he’s got this automatic appeal with these small town areas . . . you don’t see it in what he actually did on the ballot.”

Trump campaign adviser Brian Hughes said swing-state voters won’t like Walz’s record and they don’t like Harris’s, either. The Trump campaign, which has played defense over Trump’s incendiary comments about Harris’s racial identity, indicated the campaign plans to now play up, what they described as, the antisemitic criticisms Shapiro faced in his party.

“In her first decision as a presidential candidate, she bent the knee to ultra-left anti-Israel Democrats,” Hughes said. “In Walz, she chose her ideological ‘mini-me.’ He may be a 60-year-old roly-poly white guy, but he’s a radical.”

At a Tuesday unity rally in Philadelphia with Walz and Harris, Shapiro let it be known there were no hard feelings. Instead, he spent his time attacking Trump and Vance, whom he said “can’t be honest with the American people.”

The crowd began chanting “he’s a weirdo.”

A mildly amused Shapiro let it linger. “If I hear you right,” he chimed in, “and I think I do, you’re chanting, ‘he’s a weirdo.’”

The crowd roared in approval.