The Governors Who Are Supposed to Save the Party
Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Wes Moore of Maryland have been anointed by the Democratic establishment as the bright hopes for the party's presidential future. The coverage has been fulsome: young, telegenic, competent administrators, positioned in states that matter. Shapiro carried Pennsylvania by nearly four points in 2022. Moore won Maryland — a blue state, admittedly — by a commanding margin. These are the faces that Democratic donors are passing around at dinner parties when they ask each other: who's next?
I've watched this particular ritual play out several times in my adult life. The party in opposition identifies a governor from a consequential state, projects national ambitions onto them, and then discovers somewhere between the state capitol and the primary trail that the things that made someone successful in one context don't transfer cleanly to another.
What Governing Pennsylvania Actually Tells Us
Josh Shapiro is a capable administrator who has managed Pennsylvania's bureaucracy competently and stayed out of the kind of obvious scandals that end political careers. He's also governed in ways that reveal the fundamental tension at the heart of modern Democratic politics: he's tried to be moderate enough for the state's considerable working-class and suburban conservative population while remaining acceptable to a national donor class and activist base that is substantially to his left.
That balancing act works at the state level, where the electorate is defined and knowable and where a governor's actual record can be evaluated against local conditions. It becomes dramatically harder in a national primary, where the activist base votes first and the general electorate votes later. Shapiro has already faced intraparty fire over school choice — he signed a budget that included education savings account funding, which the teachers' unions treated as an act of near-treason. That fight will follow him everywhere a national audience is watching.
Wes Moore is a more interesting and in some ways more revealing case. He's a compelling personal story — Army Ranger, Rhodes Scholar, bestselling author — and a genuinely skilled communicator. He's also governing Maryland, which is not a swing state. His coalition is built on a base that does not reflect the national composition he'd need to assemble to win a general election.
The Bench Problem Is Real
Here's what the Shapiro-Moore conversation actually reveals: the Democratic Party does not have a deep bench of executives who have governed large, genuinely competitive states in ways that produced durable majority coalitions. The party's recent presidential nominees — Biden, Clinton, Obama — were each in their way exceptional candidates who either lost or won by margins that didn't reflect the underlying structural challenges the party faces with working-class voters, rural voters, and voters outside the major metropolitan areas.
My grandmother voted Democrat her entire life because the party, in her era, represented the coal miners and steelworkers and farmers who made up her community in western Pennsylvania. She died before she'd have had to make the choice that millions of similar voters have made over the last decade: a party that speaks their cultural and economic language, or a party that speaks someone else's.
Shapiro and Moore are not going to resolve that tension. They're smart enough to know it exists. Whether they're skilled enough to bridge it in a national campaign is a different question, and one that won't be answered by favorable profiles in magazines that already agree with them.
The 2028 primary will tell us whether either of them is the real thing. Until then, the coverage is more about Democratic wish fulfillment than Democratic strength.
