Opinion -Why Josh Shapiro Would Make a Difference for Ms. Harris

The Pennsylvania Night of November 12: When Blacks Meet Blacks: a Pandemonium that Will Not Break Them for the Betterment of America

On Tuesday night, the Georgia State Convocation Center was filled with so many people that many of them seemed to be wanting to ward off another Trump administration. There was no mistaking the pandemonium. In the same state where Donald Trump was indicted on election interference charges, Vice President Harris drew her biggest crowd of supporters. Kamalamania had arrived.

Onstage, star power radiated in every direction. Rapper Quavo underscored the importance of voting. Megan Thee Stallion twerked to “Savage.” US senator Raphael Warnock, in the tenor of Martin Luther King Jr., spoke of “an America that embraces all of our children.” The night had kicked off with Stacey Abrams, a lodestar of Georgia’s changing political future, who reinforced Harris’ moral imperative for the country. The arena filled with chants of not going back.

It was an unlikely sight. These are not likely times. Harris will be the first woman and the first Black and South Asian president if she wins in November, a first in the country that has been haunted by the specter of race.

To get there, Harris will need the support of Black voters, a typically reliable voting bloc for Democrats but one that has loosened slowly. A majority of Black voters identify with the Democratic Party in 2020 because of their college degrees, according to one study. The number dropped to 99 percent by the year 2023. The party will likely cede ground to Black voters this year as they have since President Barack Obama was elected, noted a Data For Progress study.

The event was an important test of Harris national appeal. It featured all the raucous ornamentation of a rock concert, and perhaps for the first time since the 2008 campaign, Democrats were again mindful of the urgency before them, and what it called for. When the vice president took the stage, she wasted no time. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said of his criminal past, and that much was true.

It was also true that the rally was a portrait of a multicultural America as much as it was calculated political theater—the very scene that inspires voters to show up on Election Day, but one that also gets called out for its over-the-top fanaticism.

They weren’t entirely off the mark. Since Harris entered the race less than two weeks ago, she has undergone a remarkable catapult into popular culture. Every identity group was the beginning of grassroots organizing. Informal Zoom rallies were held. Record amounts of cash poured in. The campaign raised over 200 million dollars in a week, most of it from first-timers. Harris had also done the impossible by knocking Trump out of the news cycle, reorienting the media’s center of gravity while embracing the viral kismet of Brat Summer.

Ms. Harris will not win Electoral College swing states and the presidency unless she convinces voters that her administration will share the sort of centrist policies and leadership that were essential to the victories of Mr. Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. And an emphatic and persuasive remedy to that problem would be to pick Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as her running mate.

For those who look at politics as a mosaic of identities, Mr. Shapiro would also reassure Jewish voters — long a key part of winning Democratic voter coalitions — at a time when many of them see hostility and antisemitism coming from some in the far left of the party. Some pundits and analysts will wonder if adding an observant Jew to a ticket headedby a Black woman is a ticket to nowhere. But the elections of Mr. Obama and now the surge of Ms. Harris suggest that America is a lot more focused on party unity and stopping Donald Trump than on race and religion. Remember that Joe Lieberman was the first Jewish vice-presidential nominee, in 2000, and he deepened the heft, experience and integrity of the ticket led by Al Gore.

Vice President Kamala Harris has one overriding weakness as a candidate for president — she is perceived as being to the left of Joe Biden. Ms. Harris supported single-payer health care and was critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. More recently, opponents have blamed her for what they see as a too-porous southern border.