Politics: Cleaning House

When he arrives at the Sunrise ­assisted-living facility, Shapiro strides into the building confidently — confidently, at least in part, because he knows he has something the senior citizens here want. When he was desperate for every vote he could get, back in 2004, Shapiro promised he’d bring these people doughnuts if they elected him. Now, every time he comes, it’s with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts under his arm.

Before handing out the treats, though, Shapiro wants to tell his constituents what he’s been doing for them. He paces the room energetically, bantering with the crowd of around 30, many in wheelchairs, and not all of whom are all there. After talking about how his six-year-old, Sophia, started kindergarten the day before, Shapiro tells the group he’s “trying to reform Harrisburg” and “change the way government works.” He talks about a bill he has introduced to make Pennsylvania’s investments “­terror-free,” and about making the state less dependent on foreign oil. He mentions Dennis O’Brien, then fields questions on topics ranging from gun control to absentee ballots. How does he get along with Governor Rendell? “Very well. I’m working closely with him on energy and reform.”

When an older man addresses him as “Congressman,” Shapiro smiles and says, “Thank you for the promotion.” Then he passes a tray filled with 100 Munchkins.

THE ONLY TIME Josh Shapiro ever lost an election, he was running for student president of Akiba, the Jewish day school in Merion. It wasn’t even close, according to the classmate who beat him. “He was all style, no substance,” says Ami Eden, now a Manhattan journalist, whose all-­gravitas high-school campaign consisted of a poster depicting himself as Indiana Jones and a promise to get an ice-cream vending machine for the campus. (The trash-­talking Eden insists that his real competition was Hannah Richman; Shapiro was merely “a third-party spoiler candidate. He basically carried the eighth-grade girls, the New Kids on the Block crowd.”)

Other than that blip, Shapiro has always been the Youngest Guy in the Room. In seventh grade, building on his mother’s involvement with the movement to help Soviet Jews emigrate, Shapiro founded an international pen-pal organization to connect young Americans with their refusenik peers. Shapiro’s own pen pal, Avi Goldstein (whose family were the most famous of the refuseniks), made it out just in time to attend Shapiro’s bar mitzvah, and the event was covered by local media. The Jewish Federation of Cleveland flew Shapiro out to speak about the cause. His freshman year at the University of Rochester, after a fateful day on which he was cut from the Division III basketball team and failed a calculus exam (a requirement for pre-med), Shapiro decided to run for student senate, then aimed higher. While still a freshman, he was elected president of the entire school. “I knocked on every single door on campus,” he recalls. After college, Shapiro moved to D.C. to work for a series of legislators, and by the time he was 24, after just a few months working for Representative Joe Hoeffel, he was running the Congressman’s office. “I’m pretty sure he was the youngest chief of staff on Capitol Hill,” Hoeffel says. “I was always in rooms with older people,” Shapiro says. “I learned how to be respectful yet assertive.”

Hoeffel sensed that his aide had higher aspirations, and in 2004, Shapiro ran for Pennsylvania state rep in the district he had grown up in. He was a Democratic unknown up against GOP candidate Jon Fox, who had something like 99 percent name-recognition in a district that was 50 percent Republican. Shapiro’s first campaign poll showed him down 40 points. Remembering his college strategy, Shapiro knocked on 18,000 doors, went to every community event, raised three-quarters of a million dollars, and eventually won by nine points — all without going negative against Fox. The key to victory was his ability to find common ground with people who might not normally have voted for him. Shapiro’s father is the chairman of pediatrics at Abington Memorial Hospital; Shapiro bridged the partisan divide by reaching out to doctors, backing stricter penalties for lawyers who file frivolous malpractice suits. In his campaign literature, Shapiro put it this way: “My plan is neither Democratic nor Republican — it’s common sense.” This same instinct for aisle-­spanning solutions would lead to the Shapiro-driven coup this past January.