Shapiro, Whitmer Tell Harris Supporters Trump is ‘So Scared of Her’

AMBLER, Pa. — Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan rallied supporters behind Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday in the critical suburbs of Philadelphia, making a boisterous case that the likely Democratic nominee was going to take the fight to former President Donald Trump in the next 100 days — and win.

“I want a future that is cleaner and greener,” Shapiro bellowed to about 1,000 cheering supporters. “I want a future with better schools and safer streets, and I want a future full of freedom. I want to look the 47th president of the United States in the eye and say, ‘Madam President.’”

The rally at Wissahickon High School in Ambler, Pennsylvania, was something of a tryout for the governor who looks like he wants to be on the Democratic ticket, Shapiro, and the governor who has said she doesn’t, Whitmer. Both lead states in the so-called blue wall — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — that former Trump broke through in 2016, then President Joe Biden won back four years later.

All three states have been seen as easier targets for Democrats than the Sun Belt swing states that Biden won in 2020: Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Those states had been trending toward Trump before the president dropped his reelection bid. Now, that could change.

“The energy, people coming out of the woodwork to volunteer, it’s been amazing,” said Jason Salus, the treasurer of Montgomery County, one of the counties bordering Philadelphia that have made or broken Democratic victories in the state.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in Montgomery, Bucks, Chester and Delaware counties by 188,353 votes. Four years later, Biden won them by 287,740. In Montgomery County, Biden collected 57,000 more votes than Clinton did in 2016. Harris will most likely have to run up the score in the suburban counties again.

In Ambler, both governors were joyfully vulgar. Both weighed in on what Whitmer called “our three-part strategy: Get Shit Done.” (Shapiro called it GSD.)

But their main job was to attest that Harris could beat Trump, and indeed that she already has him running scared.

“As attorney general, she put crooks and sex offenders behind bars,” Whitmer said of Harris’ days as California’s top law enforcement officer. “And it makes me think maybe that’s why Donald Trump’s so scared of her.”

Shapiro tried to remind the audience of “the chaos” of the years when Trump was in office, when “you didn’t want to pick up your phone and look because you didn’t want to know what he had done that day.”

He also appropriated some of the toughest lines that Trump and his supporters have leveled at Democrats, saying it is the former president “who doesn’t love this country.”

“This is the greatest country on the face of the earth. Let’s start acting like it,” he added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.