On Monday night, Vice President Kamala Harris had narrowed her search for a running mate to two men: Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Each had pros and cons.
In Walz’s favor, he had the distinction of applying the term weird to J.D. Vance, a word that the entirety of his party’s elites then picked up and ran with. Against Walz was the fact that Minnesota is not a swing state and Walz himself is a progressive, like Harris, making it unclear what he would add to the ticket.
In Shapiro’s favor was a 61 percent approval rating in a must-win state for Harris and a history of working across the political divide and choosing moderate, popular positions on everything from school choice to Covid-19 restrictions to degree requirements to corporate taxes. But working against him turned out to be something insurmountable: Josh Shapiro is a proud Jew.
Almost as soon as Harris began her search for a running mate in earnest, a campaign from the progressive left made it clear that the anti-Israel wing of the party would not vote for Shapiro. Though his support of Israel is identical to that of every other contender, though he hates Benjamin Netanyahu a lot, though his view on college campus protesters (he called it “absolutely unacceptable” that “universities can’t guarantee the safety and security of their students”) is the most common, most popular view, none of this was a match for his last name, the fact that he is an observant, kosher-keeping proud Jew, and that, like the vast majority of Jews, he supports the state of Israel.
In their criticism of Shapiro, leftists pointed to the fact that he excoriated University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill for refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of the Jews—I know, what a monster!—that he called on Penn to shut down the anti-Israel encampments, which violated university codes and guidelines—the shame!—and that he told The New York Times, “If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes.” How dare he suggest antisemitism should be condemned, no matter what side it comes from!
As The Babylon Bee put it Monday night, “Democrats Worried Choosing Jewish Vice President May Cost Them The All-Important ‘Death To America’ Vote.” By Tuesday morning, the Harris campaign had turned farce into tragedy and picked Walz for Harris’s running mate.
There can be no doubt about it: there was only one reason to reject Shapiro, and it was that the Democrats would rather cater to their antisemitic base and lose the election than embrace the vast non-antisemitic American middle and win. “You also have antisemitism that has gotten marbled into this party,” Van Jones said on CNN Tuesday. “You can be for the Palestinians without being an anti-Jewish bigot, but there are some anti-Jewish bigots out there.”
There’s an argument to be made—and Free Press reporter Peter Savodnik has made it smartly—that the goal in picking a vice president should be to do no harm. And, like it or not, in the current version of the Democratic Party, Shapiro harms the ticket. But consider what this means: the most qualified person to help a major party nominee win the presidency was passed over because he’s a proud Jew with a strong connection to his heritage.
This is not to say that Walz is without merit. As Sohrab Ahmari points out, he passed significant pro-worker legislation around issues like non-compete clauses and nursing home standards. But there’s a reason everyone thought Shapiro would be the pick: Walz’s record overall is that of a card-carrying progressive. He set up a phone line so Minnesotans could report their neighbors for violating Covid rules. He allowed Minnesota’s health department to ration lifesaving Covid drugs based on race and made Minnesota a “trans refuge state,” signing a law that allows Minnesota custody of a child whose parents refuse “gender-affirming care.” He also misrepresented his military record, which included abandoning his unit just as they deployed to Iraq for the first time in 2005.
Of course, Harris is entitled to pick the VP she thinks will most help her win. But that man was Josh Shapiro, and there is only one reason he was passed over: the antisemites of the Democratic Party had their say.
For a different view on this subject read Joe Nocera’s Tim Walz Is No Radical
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek and the author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. Follow her on X @bungarsargon, and read her piece “The Democrats’ Shameful Betrayal of Biden.”
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