Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro knows how to win elections, run elections, and keep them safe and fair. In his home state, he set a record for the most votes ever in the history of Pennsylvania for any office at any time.
He also told Molly Jong-Fast in the latest episode of The New Abnormal that he oversaw—and won—at least 40 cases of alleged voter fraud brought against the state after President Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election and former President Trump didn’t.
Shapiro says the success rate is due to the prep he and his fellow Democrats did the minute they noticed Trump making Big Lie mutterings.
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“When the former president began talking about how vote by mail was not OK and that the Democrats were going to try and steal the election, all of his greatest hits, I immediately put together a team in my office made up of lawyers from both our criminal division and our civil division,” he says. “We basically had three focuses that we were trying to deal with first.”
One was making sure people had access to the polls, the second was making sure voting was safe, and the third: “How could we deal with the inevitable legal challenges that would come after the election, trying to deny people's votes from being counted?”
It also helped that, according to Shapiro, the rare cases of any type of voter wrongdoing were committed by people trying to vote for Trump. The irony! So what does he think of the Republicans trying to come for the purple state? Bring it.
“I’m staying in this game. I’m not going to be deterred. I am unafraid of what they’re putting forward,” he says.
Elsewhere in the episode, former Stockton, California, mayor Michael Tubbs, author of The Deeper the Roots: A Memoir of Hope and Home, tells Molly about the fatal flaw that cost him his seat in office. “For three years, I did not respond to [mis]information because it was so stupid. And so ridiculous,” he says. “I thought it was beneath the title of the mayor to respond to some Facebook blog who said I was stealing money. But that’s just not the terrain we’re in.” Tubbs also talks about what Dems should be focusing on that Republicans are really good at: emotions.
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