Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said Vice President Kamala Harris will “have to answer to how” she never publicly voiced concerns about her former boss, Joe Biden’s, fitness to serve as president, even though she had a front-row seat in his administration. (Watch video below.)
In an interview with Stephen A. Smith released on Thursday, Shapiro was asked to weigh in on Harris’ recent assessment that she was wrong to hold back from advising Biden against pursuing another presidential run.
“Look, I haven’t read the former vice president’s book,” Shapiro said of Harris. “She’s going to have to answer to how she was in the room, and yet never said anything publicly.”
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Shapiro stressed that he didn’t have the same access to Biden as Harris, but still engaged with him and his team regarding their campaign’s performance in Pennsylvania, a swing state.
“I think, Stephen, you understand, if you can’t win Pennsylvania, it’s pretty darn hard to win the national election,” Shapiro said. “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.”
Shapiro suggested that Biden’s team did not give the former president an accurate picture of his projected performance in the state.
“I told them what I was seeing in the polls. I think it seemed to me that maybe his staff wasn’t counseling him with all the information that we knew on the ground here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro added.
Fast-forward to 38:47 for Shapiro’s comments on Harris:
In her new book set to be published next week, Harris conceded that it was a mistake to rest the call on whether Biden would run for reelection on just him and his wife, Jill.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” she said in an excerpt released by The Atlantic. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Still, Harris made clear she did not believe Biden was unfit to serve despite his poor performance in the debate against Donald Trump in June 2024, which prompted a wave of calls for him to exit the race.
“I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country,” she said.
Meanwhile, in a separate excerpt of her forthcoming memoir, Harris confirmed she considered Shapiro to be her running mate but said she “had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.” She also claimed that in the process, the governor bombarded her staff with questions about the vice president’s residence and claimed he showed “lack of discretion” in the lead-up to her vice presidential pick announcement.
A spokesperson for Shapiro told Politico, “It’s simply ridiculous to suggest that Governor Shapiro was focused on anything other than defeating Donald Trump and protecting Pennsylvania from the chaos we are living through now.”
Shapiro, who is widely considered a 2028 presidential hopeful, did not rule out running for the White House in the next election.
“I’m concerned about what I’m seeing in my party, and I know that I have a voice that needs to be heard in that process, how that voice ultimately gets heard, how it manifests itself, what I ultimately do, we’ll see,” Shapiro told Smith.
Harris has also not closed the door to launching another presidential run in 2028.