Josh Shapiro has said Kamala Harris will “have to answer” for why she did not publicly alert people to Joe Biden’s declining ability to serve during his term in the White House.
The Democratic Pennsylvania governor was a candidate to become Harris’s running mate when she replaced Biden as the Democratic party nominee for president late in the 2024 campaign after the president dropped his re-election bid, but narrowly lost out to the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz – whom Harris dishes on in her new book.
Shapiro is also regarded as a potential 2028 candidate for the White House.
Shapiro’s remark came when he was asked by Stephen A Smith on a political podcast about Harris’s memoir, 107 Days, published next week but already seen by the Guardian. In that book she draws a distinction between Biden’s ability to govern and to campaign for re-election – and that she had concerns over the later.
Harris also said that Biden’s decision to run for a second term, only turning over the Democratic candidacy after a disastrous TV debate with Donald Trump, was based in “recklessness. The stakes were simply too high.”
Shapiro said he had not read Harris’s account, but added: “She’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room and yet never said anything publicly.”
Shapiro was asked how Americans should feel “when we hear something that we suspected but wasn’t acknowledged by politicians who were looking for our support, and then we find out later we were right, and they should have spoken up, and they should have shown more courage”.
Shapiro said that while he wasn’t present for White House discussions, he looked at the 2024 race from the perspective of Pennsylvania, which Harris ultimately lost.
“If you can’t win Pennsylvania, it’s pretty darn hard to win the national election,” Shapiro continued. “And I was very vocal with him, privately, and extremely vocal with his staff about my concerns about his fitness to be able to run for another term. I was direct with them. I told them my concerns.”
In the book, Harris questions her decision to not confront Biden, explaining that “of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out” and feared that, if she did, it would be seen as “incredibly self-serving” and “poisonous disloyalty”.
In Harris’s account she writes that Shapiro, before she had interviewed him, had asked how many bedrooms were in the vice-president’s residence and if the Smithsonian would lend Pennsylvania art for display.
Harris writes that she “mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision” and told him that was “an unrealistic expectation” and “a vice-president is not a co-president.”
Harris also writes about her consideration of Pete Buttigieg, saying that he would have been “the ideal partner” as her running mate if he had been “a straight white man”.
“I had nagging concerns that, of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man,” Harris writes. Then adding a gay man to the ticket: “It was too big a risk.”
Buttigieg – who, like Shapiro, Harris and Gavin Newsom, the California governor, are considered likely 2028 candidates – told Politico that he was “surprised” to read the passage from the book suggesting that, as a gay man, he was too risky.
“My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” he said. “I wouldn’t have run for president [in 2020] if I didn’t believe that.
On countering Trump, Shapiro said: “Some people would say that the only way to deal with it is to fight fire with fire, to replicate his behavior to some degree,” Shapiro said, “just to be able to fend off the onslaught of momentum he appears to be building as his presidency continues.”
But Shapiro pointed to his own election victories in Pennsylvania, winning by “bringing Republicans and Democrats and independents together”.
