THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN REMINDS US THAT IT WOULD HAVE DEMONIZED JOSH SHAPIRO, TOO

Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate instead of Josh Shapiro, and the press wants us to know that Harris made a huge mistake. Politico Playbook enumerates some of the anticipated GOP attacks on Walz:

... Republicans we spoke to said they are readying a multi-prong attack, based largely on Walz’ record as governor, that will seek to undermine the folksy appeal that the Harris campaign is playing up:

— That Walz turned Minnesota into what the AP has called a “trans refuge” ...

— That Walz has given undocumented immigrants incentives to come to the U.S. ...

— That Walz slow-walked requests to call in the National Guard to stop the 2020 rioting following the death of GEORGE FLOYD....

— And that Walz is an avuncular face on a socialist agenda....

These are all issues that make Republican voters' heads explode; in their bubble, everybody is still angry about politcal unrest four years ago, and everyone is obsessed with gender. They call everyone they disagree with on any issue a socialist or a communist. There might be some gettable voters who'll respond to these attacks, but it's clear that people who'll really respond to them are the ones who were already certain to vote for Trump.

We're supposed to believe that Team Trump really feared Josh Shapiro and is delighted that he's not Harris's running mate. The Bulwark's Marc Caputo reports:

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.

This is supposed to make us think that a Harris-Shapiro ticket would have been harder to beat than a Harris-Walz ticket. Maybe that's true. But what it tells me is that the Trump campaign had a strategy for attacking Shapiro. It deployed that strategy to keep him off the ticket, but it would have deployed the strategy with more ferocity if he'd been on the ticket. In other words: Walz has vulnerabilities, but so does Shapiro.

Many young progressives who are ready to vote for Kamala Harris were planning to sit out a race between Trump and Joe Biden, or were planning to vote third party. Obviously the Trump campaign would have worked the "Genocide Josh" angle if Harris had chosen Shapiro -- and if you think that wouldn't have mattered because there aren't very many voters in this cohort, I'll remind you that Jill Stein's 2016 vote totals in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were greater than Trump's margin of victory in those states.

Also, there are stories about Shapiro that normie voters might have found troubling, especially if the right-wing noise machine promoted them relentlessly. I was seeing them in the days before Harris made her pick, and I'm sure Trump's team had something to do with that. The most lurid is the case of a young woman who died in 2011 from twenty stab wounds, some of which were at the back of her neck. The death was first ruled a homicide and later ruled a suicide. The dead woman's parents still think it was murder, but in 2019 the office of then-Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro agreed with the suicide finding. There are rumors, which appear to be unfounded, that that Shapiro is close to the family of the dead woman's fiancé, who found her body and made the 911 call. The state Supreme Court has agreed to hear the parent's case challenging the suicide finding. (The Philadelphia Inquirer has the best roundup of facts in this case.)

A reporter who attended J.D. Vance's campaign appearance in Philadelphia yesterday noted this:

Whoops. These flyers were scattered on the media tables at the Vance event in Philly. Someone with a campaign staff lanyard came around to collect them and blamed a rough volunteer… pic.twitter.com/8qVXbMEvS3

— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) August 6, 2024

The site is real and is still up. (An archived version is here.) The site is a crude mess, but it does cite the story of the stabbing victim, as well as a story that has appeared in the mainstream press involving alleged sexual harassment by a former aide. It also cites a Daily Caller story headlined "Harris VP Short-Lister Collaborated With Trans Lobby To Target Counselors Who Don’t Gender-Transition Kids." (In other words, Walz isn't the only VP short-lister the GOP planned to trans-bash.)

Maybe you think none of this would have been a problem for a Harris-Shapiro ticket. I agree that the Harris campaign is very good at counterpunching. But it's clear that picking Shapiro wouldn't have been risk-free.