In the long days between Election Day 2020 and the moment Joe Biden was declared the victor four days later, Pennsylvania became ground zero for, as attorney general Josh Shapiro called it, “the big lie” — the falsehood that Republicans were the rightful winners of the election. As the state’s top law enforcement officer, Shapiro was in charge of fighting back. He is now running to be governor of Pennsylvania, the state that he says is at the “epicenter” of the national battle over voting. The 15 Republicans vying to take him on “peddle the big lie every day. They didn’t acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election, and they will appoint secretaries of state who I believe will undermine our democracy in the 2024 presidential election,” Shapiro told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch in a recent interview. “I think that is critical.”

Keystone contention: Pennsylvania will be one of the most closely watched states in this year’s election cycle. With Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf term-limited and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) opting not to run for a third term, the state has the rare combination of wide-open fields in both the Senate and gubernatorial races. While 2022 appears set to be a difficult year for Democrats nationwide, Shapiro raised $6.3 million in the fourth quarter of last year alone. ”He’s doing wonderfully because so far he’s preempted a primary, which is very unusual,” said Neil Oxman, a Democratic political consultant based in Philadelphia.

Starting young: Shapiro has held elected office since 2005, first as a state representative, then as a county commissioner in suburban Montgomery County and finally as attorney general. His passion for politics began as a middle schooler, when he launched an international pen-pal movement to connect young Americans with Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union. Shapiro’s pen pal, Avi Goldstein, and his family left the USSR in time to make it to Shapiro’s bar mitzvah in Pennsylvania. He later ran for student body president at Akiba Hebrew Academy (now Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy) in Merion Station, Pa. — the only election Shapiro ever lost.

Where they are: “We’re running a campaign that’s focused on meeting people where they are and meeting their needs,” Shapiro told JI. This philosophy is exemplified in Shapiro’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. When it comes to vaccination, he emphasizes education and outreach over mandates. His goal is ”educating and empowering the public, giving them facts, as opposed to dictates, [and] making sure that they understand the power of what a vaccine can do to save their lives, and in the case of schools, save children’s lives,” noted Shapiro, whose platform does not include vaccine mandates.

Challah-burg: If he makes it to the governor’s mansion, Shapiro will keep up weekly Shabbat dinners with his wife and four children. “There’s a strong and vibrant Jewish community,” said Shapiro of Harrisburg. “We’ll have lots of Shabbat dinners at the governor’s residence that bring a lot of people from all different walks of life together for good food, good conversation and good challah.”

Read the full interview here.

Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC)

The North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision this past Friday to throw out the state’s new congressional and General Assembly maps gives Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC), whose district was eliminated during the redistricting process, new hope that she may see a second term in Congress, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

You’re out: According to the high court, the maps, drawn by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly, violated multiple clauses of the state’s constitution. The map, which would have given Republicans the advantage in an additional two districts, cleaved Manning’s home county and current district into three GOP-friendly seats, functionally eliminating it.

Race to the finish: The state Supreme Court’s decision sets up a scramble to finalize the state’s maps. The General Assembly and the plaintiff groups that challenged the maps have until Feb. 18 to file their own proposals. At that point, the trial court that initially heard the case — and sided with the General Assembly  — will have until Feb. 23 to make a final decision, ahead of the start date for candidate filing on Feb. 24. “We’re going to know something, we’re going to know it relatively soon, but we don’t know what we’re going to know,” Christopher Cooper, director of the public policy institute at Western Carolina University told JI, summing up the current state of affairs.

Questions abound: The court has several options for deciding on the final map: It can adopt the General Assembly’s new map, it can accept a map submitted by one of the plaintiffs or it can appoint an independent expert, known as a special master, to draw yet another map, Cooper said. The General Assembly said on Monday it would submit new maps by the deadline, but what those maps might look like is unknown. In its brief to the state Supreme Court, the General Assembly also hinted at plans to potentially appeal the ruling on the congressional map to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Changes likely: J. Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, said he expects that the new General Assembly maps will likely be substantively different from and less skewed toward Republicans than the ones being challenged — although Republicans would likely keep their majority status.“I think they would have to change things because… the current maps, the ones that were struck down, would have had the potential of electing supermajorities to the General Assembly and would have probably elected at least 10 Republicans — if it was a good Republican year maybe 11 — to the U.S. House of Representatives,” he said. “That outcome, I think, is what the court was saying, ‘Try again.’”

Read the full story here.

New York Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, D-Bronx, celebrates after her legislation to change state legal standards on sexual harassment to help victims prove harassment cases as members discuss the Bill in the Senate Chamber at the state Capitol Wednesday, June 19, 2019, in Albany, N.Y.

Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive state senator and Democratic political scion representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester, announced her bid for the open House seat in New York’s redrawn 3rd Congressional District on Monday, setting the stage for what is likely to be a competitive primary battle in a swing district that includes large portions of Long Island, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. “Our country doesn’t just need more Democrats in Washington, we need bolder ones,” Biaggi said in a statement. “I am running for Congress in NY-3 to bring progressive and honest leadership to the front lines of our country’s most important fights.”

New opportunity: Biaggi, 35, joins a crowded field of Democratic primary candidates now vying to succeed moderate three-term Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), who is running for governor. In an interview with JI last May, Biaggi said she had no immediate plans to run for Congress but suggested she was keeping her options open. The two-term state legislator appears to have pivoted after Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a new redistricting plan into law last week. The updated 3rd District map now includes segments of the Bronx and Westchester County in addition to a large swath of northwestern Nassau and northern Suffolk Counties along the Long Island Sound.

Familiar surname: If elected to the House, Biaggi would follow the path of her late grandfather, the former longtime Bronx Rep. Mario Biaggi (D-NY), who resigned from office in 1988 amid a corruption scandal but whose name remains familiar to a certain subset of traditional Democratic voters in New York. “That helps her and may put her in the top of the contenders,” said Leslie Feldman, a professor of political science at Hofstra University. “But to the extent that she is left of Suozzi, that may hurt her, as Nassau County went Republican in November.”

Striking a balance: Jeffrey Dinowitz, a Democratic New York state assemblyman in Riverdale whose district overlaps with Biaggi’s, echoed that view, speculating that some of her more polarizing past comments, including those in support of defunding the police, “might not play well in large areas of the district.” Biaggi makes no mention of defunding the police on her campaign website, arguing instead for a need to “focus our police forces on reducing gun violence, domestic violence and other violent crimes.”

‘Willing to listen’: “While she is unflinching in her morals and values, she is also always willing to listen with an open mind and is virtually without peer on true constituent engagement,” Michael Davis, a Jewish community leader in Riverdale and the founding partner of The Plymouth Group, a New York City-based real estate investment firm, said of Biaggi. “She will be a successful and productive leader in Congress if we are all fortunate enough to have her representing New Yorkers on Capitol Hill.”

Read the full story here.