The man who just swore on three Bibles to defend two constitutions as the new governor of Pennsylvania got the job for essentially one reason: He earned it.
Josh Shapiro, who grew up in a swath of Montgomery County that straddles the Turnpike just north of Philadelphia, was a high achiever from a young age, graduated from college in New York, got a law degree from Georgetown, won two elections to the state House and then two more for Pennsylvania attorney general, where he delivered some long overdue justice to some uber powerful entities, not the least of which was the Roman Catholic Church.
And get this – Shapiro’s biography happens to be true, which I see is no longer a requirement for the U.S. House of Representatives.
I only mention newly sworn in New York Congressman George Santos (R-Fantasyland), if that’s what he’s still calling himself, to put Shapiro’s reverberant election victory into context. When Shapiro scalded Doug Mastriano by 15 points last November, it wasn’t just a resounding dismissal of an election-denying, insurrection-enabling, subpoena-ignoring ReTrumplican; it was perhaps the definitive game-changing moment of the post-truth era.
Three distinct elements, three iterations of lies, commingled to position Josh Shapiro as the guy who waved off the red wave, which, maybe you remember, was the punditocracy’s notion that Joe Biden’s liabilities — inflation, gas prices, Afghanistan bungling, etc. — would put Republicans in power coast to coast.
The first of those elements was The Big Lie, the relentlessly disproven contention that Trump won the 2020 election. The electorate rejected that as nonsense, maybe because Trump lost 60 of the 61 voter fraud lawsuits brought by his lawyers, some of whom were laughed out of court by the very judges Trump appointed.
The second were the soft rhetorical lies deftly delivered by Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, who managed in their confirmation hearings to signal respect for Roe v. Wade as legal precedent and established law, but voted to overturn it at the first opportunity. Though Shapiro was the political opposite of Mastriano in every conceivable way, nothing allowed him to draw the capacious distinction like abortion rights. In Pennsylvania exit polls, a plurality of voters ranked abortion as their top issue.
The third lie was a Trump favorite, the one about how mail-in balloting was a recipe for electoral disaster.
The last one’s been around since even before Trump started to suspect Biden could beat him in 2020, or just about at the arrival of COVID. Trump explained his well thought-out objections in the presidential debate that September.
“There is fraud; they found them in creeks, they found them with the name ‘Trump’ in a wastepaper basket,” said the then president of the United States. “This will be fraud like you’ve never seen. They’re being sold and dumped in rivers. This is a horrible thing for the country.”
I wonder which ones they put in the creeks and which they put in the rivers. Who sold them? Who bought them? How much did they cost? Which wastepaper basket? But he might have been right on that last point — it’s a horrible thing for the country when the president just makes things up on live national television. A horrible thing.
Later in the campaign, Trump’s closest aides tried in vain to get him to stop fearmongering on mail-in ballots. It was going to hurt him bigly, and it was going to ruin down-ballot Republicans all over the country. And did it ever.
So while Shapiro and John Fetterman partied with Wiz Khalifa at their inaugural celebrations Tuesday night, GOP operatives all over in America but particularly in Pennsylvania were suddenly convinced that a primary component of any successful strategy for 2024 will be tied to mail-in ballots.
According to a story by Politico, a major part of the election postmortem Republicans are conducting will be the viability of persuading their voters that mailing in their ballots early is not only safe and legitimate, it’s also essential to winning.
“Most folks now on the Republican side recognize that if one party is voting for 50 days and the other party is voting for 13 hours, the party voting for 50 days is going to have a higher turnout,” Andy Reilly, a Republican National Committee member in Pennsylvania said for that article. “We have to embrace it and convince the Republican voters that there’s integrity with the mail-in voting process, i.e. that their vote will count.”
The problem with making that argument comes with a couple of obstacles, the largest of which remains that the party’s only declared presidential candidate for 2024 has only one note to sing on the matter.
“REMEMBER, YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” Trump posted on his social media platform last month. “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. WON’T AND CAN’T HAPPEN!!!”
Now the party that criticized vote by mail, challenged it in court, tried to legislate it away in state legislatures from sea to shining sea, will try to convince its fading audience that, um, maybe we didn’t know what we were talking about.
Enjoy Josh Shapiro.
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