It is a rare thing to see Josh Shapiro sweat. For all the grief the Pennsylvania governor gets for imitating Barack Obama—the staggered cadence, the side-of-the-mouth delivery for effect—their essential shared trait is self-possession. If Pennsylvania’s governor has a superpower, it is an unflappability that allows him to stay cool and composed and to communicate precisely what he wants to communicate.

Most of the time.

I sat down to talk with Shapiro earlier this fall, shortly after he held a tough-on-crime press conference near Philadelphia. By that point, I had interviewed him several times. His comments were always polished and predictable: More than once, I would return to variations of a question I’d already asked, hoping to penetrate his practiced commentary, only to get the same responses, word for word. This was especially the case when I raised the subject of Kamala Harris.

I knew, from speaking with people close to Shapiro, that he’d lost some respect for the former vice president during the 2024 campaign—and not simply because she chose someone else as her running mate. In Shapiro’s view, given the near-existential stakes for both the Democratic Party and American democracy, Harris’s lapses during the election—in particular, ignoring Joe Biden’s obvious decline—were unforgivable. But he had been careful not to say so publicly.

Shapiro knew that I would take one more run at his thoughts about Harris. What he didn’t know was that early copies of her book were then making the rounds among reporters. Having obtained the relevant sections of 107 Days that morning, I asked Shapiro if Harris had given him any heads-up about her book. She had not, he said. Then I told him that Harris had taken some shots at him.

Shapiro furrowed his brow and crossed his arms. “K,” he said.

The man I observed over the next several minutes was unrecognizable. Gone was his equilibrium. He moved between outrage and exasperation as I relayed the excerpts. Harris had accused him, in essence, of measuring the drapes, even inquiring about featuring Pennsylvania artists in the vice-presidential residence; of insisting “that he would want to be in the room for every decision” Harris might make; and, more generally, of hijacking the conversation when she interviewed him for the job, to the point where she reminded him that he would not be co-president.

“She wrote that in her book?” he said in response to the claim concerning the residence’s art. “That’s complete and utter bullshit.”

“I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies,” he added.

After reading Harris’s book and talking with people from both camps, I found descriptions of the meeting to be mostly consistent. Shapiro arrived in an edgy mood, chafing at efforts among fellow Democrats to sabotage his tryout. (Shapiro, who is Jewish, was especially irked by anti-Semitic innuendo from the left.) The two skipped past any semblance of small talk and Shapiro proceeded to interview Harris, rather than the other way around. “I did ask a bunch of questions,” Shapiro told me, sounding exasperated. “Wouldn’t you ask questions if someone was talking to you about forming a partnership and working together?”

What seemed to bother Shapiro, more than any one detail, was Harris portraying him in ways consistent with the whispers that had dogged him throughout the vetting process and throughout his career: that he was selfish, petty, and monomaniacally ambitious. Given that they’d known each other a long time—“20 years,” Shapiro said with a groan—I asked whether he felt betrayed.

“I mean, she’s trying to sell books and cover her ass,” Shapiro snapped. The governor stared past me now, shaking his head. As I began to ask a different question, he held up a hand. He looked disgusted. With me? With Harris? No, I began to realize: He was disgusted with himself.

“I shouldn’t say ‘cover her ass.’ I think that’s not appropriate,” Shapiro said. His tone was suddenly collected. “She’s trying to sell books. Period.”

One could understand why Shapiro’s facade had momentarily cracked. In the past year, he has feuded with a president who has unleashed the federal government on personal and political opponents; evacuated his wife and children from a residence set ablaze by a would-be assassin; confronted a surge of anti-Semitism from the far right and far left alike; and agonized over the direction of a Democratic Party that appears impotent in the face of an assault on the nation’s governing institutions.

The 52-year-old Shapiro has kept some distance from the fray. He doesn’t host a podcast or spend much time on cable news. Even as he engages in regular skirmishes with the White House over policy matters, the governor goes out of his way to not antagonize the MAGA base. Shapiro, who is expected to run for president in 2028, believes that his party’s prospects of regaining power depend less on combatting Donald Trump than on courting the president’s supporters. He may be onto something: Shapiro’s approval rating in Pennsylvania—the country’s premier battleground state, where he’s spent roughly half his life on the ballot and never lost a race—hovers around 60 percent.

If he does launch the presidential bid that some friends say, only half-jokingly, he’s been plotting for 30 years, it will rest on two basic theories. The first is that competence will soon be the hottest commodity in politics. The second is that exhaustion, more than anything else, will motivate voters in 2028. To take advantage of that—to chisel away at the MAGA coalition—will require more than generic, Biden-esque pledges to restore civility. Shapiro believes that it will demand humility on the part of Democrats, a sincere accounting of how they contributed to the electorate’s fracturing along lines of class and culture.

He knows this isn’t necessarily a popular thing to say. Shapiro’s methodical career climb has been built, to no small degree, on preparation and risk management. Even those who detest the governor acknowledge that he is a master operator, someone with an uncanny ability to diagnose threats and seize opportunities and say the right thing at the right time. In an era of populist disruption, however, it’s unclear whether Shapiro’s carefully calibrated approach to politics is still an advantage.

For a man with such an established public profile—years as a congressional aide, decades in various elected offices, a network as extensive as that of any Democrat in office today—Shapiro remains something of a mystery, a man whose real views and motives are widely debated but ill-defined. In conversations with dozens of people who know the governor, a certain irony is inescapable. Shapiro seems to believe that he is uniquely equipped to run for president and repair the Democratic Party’s deficit of trust and authenticity. Any such campaign, however, would expose deficits of his own.

The men leaned over the counters of their vendor booths, craning their necks to follow the sight of a VIP and his security entourage as they marched past and turned a corner. “Who was that?” one of them shouted.

A woman in her 50s, retreating in the direction of her mobile root-beer stand, yelled back: “The governor!”

Ann Phillips appeared irritated, even a bit upset. Most of the people I met at the York State Fair, an annual festival of deep-fried culture in South Central Pennsylvania, were Republicans. Phillips was too—a three-time Trump voter. In fact, Phillips told me, she’s never voted for a Democrat in her life. But she wasn’t upset with Shapiro because of his party identification. She was upset when Shapiro passed by her without stopping. She wanted to shake his hand, take a photograph, and tell the governor that he should run for president in 2028.

“I actually respect him. He’s not full of shit,” Phillips said. “Unlike most Democrats, he seems to actually care about regular people.”

Consider this an early prototype of forthcoming “Elect Shapiro” ads: a hardworking white woman against a backdrop of snow cones and saucer-cup rides, in a county Trump carried by 25 points, praising the Democratic governor for defying the pompous stereotypes of his party.