Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was already irritated by what he describes as “unnecessarily contentious” questions from the team vetting him to be Kamala Harris’s running mate when a senior aide made one final inquiry: “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?”
The question came from President Biden’s former White House counsel Dana Remus, who was a key member of Harris’s vice-presidential search team.
Shapiro, one of the most well-known Jewish elected officials in the country—and one of at least three Jewish politicians considering a run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination—says he took umbrage at the question. “Had I been a double agent for Israel? Was she kidding? I told her how offensive the question was,” Shapiro writes in his forthcoming book, Where We Keep the Light, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its release on January 27.
The exchange became even more tense, he writes, when Remus asked whether Shapiro had ever spoken with an undercover Israeli agent. The questions left the governor feeling uneasy about the prospect of being Harris’s No. 2, a role that ultimately went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. After Harris and Walz lost to Donald Trump, many Democrats were critical of her decision to bypass Shapiro, the popular governor of the nation’s largest swing state. In his book, Shapiro says that the decision may not have been fully hers; he says he had “a knot in my stomach” throughout a vetting process that was more combative than he had expected. Shapiro wrote that he decided to take his name out of the running after a one-on-one meeting with Harris that featured more clashes, including about Israel.
The account highlights some of the fault lines that Democrats are navigating as they try to put the 2024 campaign behind them and chart a path back to the White House. With his book, Shapiro aims to showcase why Democrats lost and how his brand of consensus-building politics can usher them back to power. But before the consensus building, it seems, Shapiro felt compelled to do some score settling.
Harris, after all, had written a surprisingly candid account of her truncated and, ultimately, tortured selection process for a running mate, and it did not make Shapiro look good. When my colleague Tim Alberta first informed Shapiro of Harris’s description of their meeting in her book, 107 Days, he grew uncharacteristically sharp-tongued. “That’s complete and utter bullshit,” he told Alberta. “I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies.” Shapiro is more measured in Where We Keep the Light, taking pains not to attack Harris herself and instead blaming her staff for probing him in a way that at times felt gratuitous.
“Remus was just doing her job,” Shapiro wrote about the Israeli-spy inquiry. “I get it. But the fact that she asked, or was told to ask that question by someone else, said a lot about some of the people around the VP.” (Remus and an aide to Harris did not respond to a request for comment.) In a statement, Shapiro’s spokesperson Manuel Bonder didn’t address the apparently unpleasant vetting process, and would only say that the governor had written “a very personal book” about his faith, his family, and what he has learned from a career of public service. He said the 2024 election was “one small part” of Shapiro’s “much broader story.”
Shapiro does not write about the vice-presidential search until near the end of his book, which otherwise serves up the standard fare of a pre-campaign-launch political memoir, tracing his rise from a childhood in suburban Philadelphia to the governorship of the nation’s fifth-most-populous state. Shapiro writes about the importance of his Jewish faith, his role pursuing justice for survivors of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, his admiration for—and early support of—President Obama, and the astute political instincts of his wife and adviser, Lori.
The book opens with the harrowing firebombing of the governor’s mansion on Passover last year by a man who later told prosecutors that he blamed Shapiro for the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. Shapiro and his family had to flee the home, which suffered significant damage from the fire, in the middle of the night after being alerted by a state trooper. The governor writes that his willingness to publicly embrace his Jewish faith before and after the attack has been welcomed by people of various religious backgrounds, suggesting that his experience as part of an observant Jewish family would be a prominent part of any run for the presidency.
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Where We Keep the Light is typical of the sort of memoir that candidates release before running for president. In it, Shapiro extols the virtues of using politics to improve people’s lives. He also makes subtle but clear policy distinctions between himself and other prominent members of his party, including some eyeing the party’s presidential nomination.
He gets ahead of some of the major questions that Democrats are likely to face in the 2028 primary, writing, for example, that he would have handled coronavirus lockdowns differently, that he did not support the defund-the-police rhetoric in the summer of 2020, and that he privately suggested to Biden that he should consider dropping out of the presidential race after an abysmal debate performance against Trump. He also defends his support for cutting taxes and his more permissive stance on fossil fuels, policies that put him outside the mainstream of the Democratic political class. He writes that anti-Semitism has become “much scarier, much more real” in recent years and suggests a clear distinction between free speech and protest activity that veers into intimidation.
But the governor also devotes several pages to providing his side of the story from the 2024 search for a vice-presidential candidate, after Harris wrote a detailed account of the traditionally secretive process, which included a less-than-warm meeting with Shapiro.
Their sit-down on August 4, 2024, took place shortly after Shapiro got off the phone with Remus, telling her that he had no way of knowing if he had ever communicated with an undercover Israeli agent.
Harris wrote that before they met at the Naval Observatory, Shapiro asked staff there about how many bedrooms the compound had and whether the Smithsonian might loan him art to decorate the place. The unmistakable implication was that the governor, seen by some Democrats as an ambitious operator with his eye on the presidency, was already measuring the drapes before being selected for the No. 2 role. Shapiro, not surprisingly, offers a different take, writing that his brief discussion with staff from the residence was only “small talk” that had been “analyzed, misrepresented, and picked apart by members of the vice president’s team.”
After Harris and Shapiro sat down, in a dining room that had been cleared of most furniture other than two chairs and a table, there was little in the way of small talk or pleasantries. Each described the conversation as blunt, lacking the traditional warmth of two people trying to determine if a four-year partnership would work. Their discussion was especially tense when Harris asked Shapiro if he would apologize for some of his comments about protesters at the University of Pennsylvania who had built encampments to decry Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and, in some cases, intimidated Jewish students.
Shapiro wrote that he “flatly” told Harris that he would not. It was one of several times he claims that he had to stand his ground after Harris’s team brought up issues on which he had taken a different stance from hers and asked if he would be willing to apologize or otherwise make a public about-face.
Shapiro wrote that he understood the campaign’s desire to probe his background and policy positions, but “didn’t see anything wrong with not aligning perfectly” with Harris on all issues, adding that “they weren’t going to expand her universe by doing the exact same thing that she had been doing all these years.”
He told Harris’s team that he respected their role and was submitting willingly to the vetting process, but he was “not going to apologize for who I am or for the positions I’ve taken over the years.”
“It nagged at me that their questions weren’t really about substance,” he wrote. “Rather, they were questioning my ideology, my approach, my world view.”
After the back-and-forth on policy, Shapiro asked Harris some questions of his own, probing for a sense of what kind of role she wanted her vice president to play. Harris, he wrote, described her own experience as vice president in stark terms, saying she had had a rough time in a position that had little autonomy or executive authority.
“I was surprised by how much she seemed to dislike the role,” he wrote. “She noted that her chief of staff would be giving me my directions, lamented that the vice president didn’t have a private bathroom in their office, and how difficult it was for her at times not to have a voice in the decision making.”
Shapiro said he tried to make a case for a more equitable partnership, with the vice president having unimpeded access to the president and the ability to weigh in on decisions before they were made. “I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation,” Harris wrote in 107 Days. “A vice president is not a co-president. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.”
The disagreement over the role ultimately left both politicians feeling that a Harris-Shapiro ticket, for all its electoral promise, may not be a good fit. “It could have gone differently, had I left that meeting thinking that she would want a partner and someone to bounce things off of before she ultimately made her decisions,” Shapiro wrote. “There was a world in which it could have worked, but that was not this world.”
Shapiro eventually returned to Pennsylvania with his mind made up—though not before Remus spoke with him again, he writes, and suggested that the role of vice president might be a financial burden for him and his wife: Shapiro’s financial vetting showed that he didn’t have much money, and the vice presidency would require Lori to buy a new wardrobe and pay the costs for second-lady-level hair and makeup, even as the couple would be required to pay for food and entertainment at the vice president’s residence.
Shapiro said he was taken aback: “Are you trying to convince me not to do this?” he recalls asking. Remus responded that she just wanted him to be sure this was something he wanted. In the end, Shapiro wrote, he realized that it was not.
Harris later wrote that her first choice for vice president was actually Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but felt it was “too big of a risk” to add a gay man to a ticket led by a Black woman with a Jewish husband.
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With Shapiro, Harris, and Buttigieg all on a list of potential presidential hopefuls in 2028, the vice-presidential selection process from 2024 is reemerging at a key moment.
As much as Democrats would like to turn the page on the presidential race that ushered Trump back into the White House, Shapiro’s book offers another opportunity to pick apart one of the most pivotal decisions of the 2024 campaign. And it likely isn’t the final word on the vetting process. The second leg of Harris’s book tour is scheduled to start on February 2.
