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Binyamin Appelbaum

By Binyamin Appelbaum

Opinion writer

This essay is the fourth installment in a series on the thinkers, upstarts and ideologues battling for control of the Democratic Party.

A cardboard cutout of a presidential candidate could win California on the Democratic line and another 15 deep blue states. The question Democrats need to answer, the question that matters for the future of the Democratic Party and quite possibly for the future of democracy in America, is what kind of Democrat can win Pennsylvania.

As it happens, we already know the answer. His name is Josh Shapiro.

In his last three elections, beginning in 2016, Pennsylvania’s governor has drawn more votes than anyone else running in the state — presidential candidates, Senate candidates, other candidates for statewide office — and outperformed other Democrats in the exurban and rural areas where the party is struggling.

Centrist Democrats govern several of the states that President Trump won in 2024, including Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, who won office on a promise to “fix the damn roads,” and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, who has championed a bipartisan “Team Kentucky” approach to attracting corporate investment to the state.

Mr. Shapiro intrigues me because, in an era of widespread distrust in government, he has become the most popular politician in the nation’s most important battleground state by insisting that government can work.

He has a record of delivering clever political compromises, and he’s good at making centrism sound urgent. His political persona is a constant performance of vigor. As he reminds Pennsylvanians at every opportunity, he gets stuff done. His most celebrated achievement is reopening a collapsed highway in just 12 days.

Tuesday’s election results have supercharged the debate among Democrats about whether the road to political recovery runs toward the middle or the left. The reason the argument persists is not because the answer is unclear but because, for many Democrats, the clear answer is unpalatable. The party will not return to the White House, nor reclaim Congress, until it learns to embrace centrist politicians like Mr. Shapiro.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York does not demonstrate the viability of progressive candidates outside of a few big cities and coastal states. Nor can Democrats solve their problems by wrapping the same ideas in better paper. The party has marginalized itself so thoroughly that even Mr. Trump’s unpopular presidency isn’t doing much to make Democrats more popular. Everything Democrats want to accomplish is downstream from figuring out how to persuade voters in places like Pennsylvania — and in a bunch of places where the Democratic brand is held in even lower regard — that the party deserves another chance.

Mr. Shapiro’s recipe is a plausible basis for the party’s renewal. Democrats are the party that believes in government; they have to show that government can work. They have to deliver the stuff they’ve already promised: education, security, opportunity.

As Pennsylvania’s attorney general in 2020, Mr. Shapiro repeatedly battled Mr. Trump’s legal assaults on the integrity of the state’s election results, delivering the kind of confrontations that many Democrats crave. But the way to beat Mr. Trump is to show Americans that you have a better alternative.

Mr. Shapiro’s version of the Democratic Party is more patriotic than the G.O.P. and, in some sense, more conservative. It is a party that wants to improve public institutions rather than blowing them to smithereens, and to carry forward the basic elements of the American experiment: liberal democracy, a pluralistic society, free markets regulated in the public........

© The New York Times