OPINION:
National Democrats are embarrassing themselves on social media.
Look no further than the awkward lip-syncing and “Mortal Kombat” spoofs from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow liberals in Congress over the past few weeks. It’s not just them. One of the Democratic governors most touted as a possible presidential contender in 2028, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, is doing the same cringey thing.
Yet, unlike Democrats in Congress, Mr. Shapiro is building a social media empire to promote himself on the taxpayer dime. He spends more than $1 million of Pennsylvanians’ money annually to post embarrassing videos in a blatant attempt to boost his image outside the state. Given Mr. Shapiro’s likely national ambitions, Americans need to know what he is doing and how much it costs. It should worry taxpayers from coast to coast.
Since his election in 2022, Mr. Shapiro has turned to TikTok and other social media platforms to circulate his message, which is frankly bizarre. He routinely posts videos where he rides jet skis, declares that he is a “Barbie guy” and makes awkward statements such as “in da clerb, we all fam.” He has even posted Mortal Kombat-like videos depicting himself as a video game hero. His tagline, “fighting against inflation,” is something he hasn’t done. AOC, move over!
As bad as Mr. Shapiro’s social media strategy is, what’s worse is how he funds it with taxpayer money.
Through Pennsylvania’s transparency laws, my organization has the receipts. Within months of taking office, Mr. Shapiro did something no Keystone State governor has done before: create a “digital strategy department.” All told, he has hired nine people whose sole job is apparently to promote Mr. Shapiro online. Their annual salaries alone cost about $900,000. With the average state employee receiving benefits of $53,000 on average, the real cost of Mr. Shapiro’s self-serving digital promotion team is likely well over $1 million a year.
There is no justification for this waste of money. Governors have limited resources, which they are supposed to spend on governing and delivering for citizens, but Mr. Shapiro is spending precious taxpayer dollars building his brand.
The unfortunate fact is that Mr. Shapiro is more focused on promoting himself than improving the lives of Pennsylvanians. Despite presenting himself as a moderate, and despite the red wave that swept the state and the country in November, Mr. Shapiro is governing as a hard-left tax-and-spend liberal. He even brags about it on social media. See his recent taxpayer-funded TikTok video in which he boasts about ignoring Pennsylvanians who don’t share his policies.
Mr. Shapiro is also more interested in self-promotion than enacting laws, including the commonsense Lifeline Scholarships he promised. The scholarships would give low-income students in failing public schools the funding for private schools. A disproportionate number of those students are Black and Hispanic.
Instead of signing his signature promise, Mr. Shapiro vetoed Lifeline Scholarships when the legislation came to his desk. Apparently, making awkward TikTok videos is a higher priority than empowering minority students to succeed in life.
Mr. Shapiro’s self-promotion is unprecedented. Although he has hired a social media team of eight people, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, no stranger to self-promotion, has hired only four. California has three times as many people as Pennsylvania, so why does Pennsylvania’s governor need more than twice as many “digital strategists”? When Mr. Newsom launched his podcast this year, he didn’t use taxpayer money. Why does Mr. Shapiro need to boost his brand on the taxpayer dime?
He doesn’t, but that thought never seems to have crossed the governor’s mind as he builds a national profile in preparation for a possible White House run. Pennsylvanians are increasingly aware that Mr. Shapiro has put style over substance and getting likes ahead of governing. In that sense, he is little different from AOC and so many other Democratic attention-seekers in Congress. He shares their love of strange, self-referential videos that cause everyday people to shake their heads in shame.
Given his ambition, Mr. Shapiro’s frivolous antics arguably deserve even greater attention. The issue isn’t merely that he is wasting people’s time with a nonstop stream of bizarre videos on TikTok; it’s that he is wasting more than 1 million taxpayer dollars annually.
This isn’t the leadership that Pennsylvanians or Americans need. It’s not leadership at all. It’s shameless political self-promotion that costs regular people a pretty penny. It’s cringey enough to hear Josh Shapiro say “in da clerb” to anyone with a smartphone, but it’s far more cringey for a presidential hopeful to charge the taxpayer to embarrass himself.
• Erik Telford is senior vice president of public affairs at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free market think tank.
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