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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Shapiro may be short and have a lot of baggage, but he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that. I wouldn't count him out.

I think the only thing that could legitimately knock him out of the running is if the Ellen Greenberg case actually gains some traction outside the Fox news info sphere.

he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that

Which seems to be the problem if the Atlantic story is any way accurate. Lot of enemies inside the party who will be all too happy to knife him in the back should he formally run:

The worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania politics is that the governor is disliked—in certain cases, loathed—by some of his fellow Democrats. The causes vary: policy disputes, personality clashes, accusations of meddling and sabotaging and ceaseless self-promoting. When Shapiro was being vetted for vice president in the summer of 2024, Erin McClelland, whom Democrats had recently nominated for Pennsylvania treasurer, stunned the state party by suggesting on social media that Shapiro would “undermine” Harris—adding other insults for good measure.

...The private commentary from Democrats is worse. In 30 years spent climbing the party ladder, Shapiro has acquired a long list of enemies. If he wasn’t already aware, the governor found out the hard way in 2024, when a not-small and not-subtle chorus of Democrats made their misgivings about him known to Harris and her team. (A Pennsylvania lawmaker told me that, at one point, a member of Harris’s vetting operation called him to say that in their decades working in party politics, they had never witnessed so many Democrats turning on one of their own.) If Shapiro chooses to run for president in 2028, Democrats in the state told me, the backlash will be far more visible.