People close to Josh Shapiro saw at an early age that ‘his career would catch fire’

Josh Shapiro was under pressure to run for reelection.

It was 1993 and, at 19 years old, Shapiro was one of the youngest-ever student body presidents at the University of Rochester.

One dean of students at the upstate New York school told the student newspaper, the Campus Times, that Shapiro was the “most effective student leader” he’d ever worked with. Another said Shapiro “set a new standard.”

Shapiro decided against running again, saying that he’d accomplished what he set out to do and that it was time to look toward the future. His decision, one of his fellow student leaders said at the time, dispelled any notion that the young Shapiro was “power hungry.”

Instead, he spent part of the following year interning on Capitol Hill, kicking off a career in public life that — 30 years later — has Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, in contention to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

Throughout his early life, beginning in the Philadelphia suburb where he was raised, Shapiro showed flashes of leadership capabilities and political skill, according to interviews with a dozen friends, classmates, and colleagues. Those who know him best said he’s driven in part by a desire to lead — but also by his commitment to his family, his Jewish faith, and the community that raised him.

As a high school senior, he helped lead his basketball team to a championship and brought a level of decorum to the squad that few other teenagers could. In college, he spoke about his status as student body president in weighty terms, urging his classmates “to dare to dream dreams.” Some said Shapiro was a uniquely mature young person, and often seemed to take his endeavors more seriously than did his peers.

“It does not surprise me at all that he finds himself being considered for a national position today,” said Leslie Anne Miller, a prominent Democratic fundraiser in Southeastern Pennsylvania and a longtime friend of Shapiro’s. “Those of us who knew him knew he had bold thoughts wherever he found himself.”

Even this week, as Shapiro found himself in the brightest spotlight of his career, he pointed to his young life as his “why.”

“I’ve always tried to be true to myself and my commitment to public service,” he said, “something that my faith calls me to do, my upbringing has called me to do.”

Born in Kansas City, Mo., Shapiro was raised in Upper Dublin Township in Montgomery County by a pediatrician and a public schoolteacher. He went to high school at Akiba Hebrew Academy, a day school now known as Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy.

In ninth grade, he met Lori Ferrara, a girl from Bucks County whom he dated throughout high school. Save for a break while they were both in college, they have been together ever since.

As a junior, Shapiro ran for class president and lost — his only electoral loss to this day — and when he was a senior point guard, he helped lead the basketball team to the 1991 tri-county championship. He scored 16 points in that game, and his teammates called him “the general” because of the way he managed it.

“Josh was a natural leader on the court who always showed up with incredible energy and a relentlessly positive attitude,” said Marc Yoskowitz, who played with Shapiro for a year in the backcourt.

One sign of Shapiro’s leadership, he said, was that the senior guard welcomed Yoskowitz as a newcomer to the school and the starting lineup.

Shapiro speaks often about the role basketball played in his life, saying it’s on the court where he learned about teamwork and the virtue of passing the ball. He remains an avid Sixers fan to this day and does not miss an opportunity to trash-talk the Celtics.

Marcel Groen, the former chair of the state Democratic Party, has known Shapiro since he was 5 because his daughter attended school with him. He said the young Shapiro was “always proper, but he wasn’t one of those goody-two-shoes.”

Groen said it was his sense that Shapiro flourished as a leader at the University of Rochester.

“When he came back from university,” Groen said, “I could just see his career would catch fire.”

As a college freshman, Shapiro expected to play on the Rochester varsity basketball team. He was taking premed courses with the goal of following his father and becoming a doctor.

It didn’t work out. Shapiro nearly failed organic chemistry, and he got cut from the basketball team.

“I thought my life was over,” he said in a recent interview on the Breakfast Club podcast.

That night, someone knocked on his dorm room door and said he should consider running for student government. He went on to win election as a freshman student senator, advocate for more school support for club sports, and switch his major to political science.

“As I looked back on that pivotal day which sort of set me on this path,” he said on the podcast, “I realized the truth is: Service was always there for me. I just didn’t exactly know how I was going to do that.”

By the end of his freshman year, he was a school leader in the making, taking the gutsy step of running for student body president against five juniors. He ran on a platform of expanding club sports offerings and improving faculty-to-student ratios.

In asking his classmates for their vote, Shapiro quoted the late Robert Kennedy in the Campus Times: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘why.’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘why not.”

Shapiro won, and it wasn’t close. At the time, he was the only first-year student to win an election for student body president at the school.

In that position, he worked to improve communication between the student body and the administration, according to the Campus Times, and his fellow students said they believed that he was advocating for their wishes.

In 1993, Shapiro opposed a ban on smoking in public school buildings, saying the school should consider limiting vehicular traffic and laboratory emissions before limiting smokers’ freedoms, according to the Democrat and Chronicle, the local newspaper in Rochester.

The same year, he opposed a proposal to give campus security officers the power to make arrests, saying he didn’t see it as “an answer to campus crime.”

Josh Bregman, who was a student senator when Shapiro was the president, said that for the more “casual” members of the student government, service was mostly about getting involved or joining a club.

“But for him, my recollection is that this was something important to him,” Bregman said. “No one who went to school with him is surprised to see how well he’s done.”

After college, Shapiro landed a job as a congressional aide in Washington and took night classes at Georgetown, where he earned a law degree.

He reconnected with Lori, who was working in the White House, and in 1997, he proposed to her under a landmark windmill in Jerusalem. They got married on a rainy day that year in a Bucks County wedding hall.

Shapiro moved back to Abington to raise his family, and in 2004, he ran his first campaign for public office, winning a seat in the state House. Over the next two decades, he won elections for Montgomery County commissioner, attorney general, and then governor.

Those close to him say Shapiro has always been most motivated by his family and his faith. He and Lori have one daughter and three sons, who now range in age from 13 to 22.

Miller, a longtime friend, recalled texting Shapiro after he won the governor’s race in 2022 to compliment a photo of him and his wife. She recalled that he responded: “I just love her so much.”

“A lot of what I really admire is how he surrounds himself with faith and family,” said U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, who took over Shapiro’s state House seat after he ran for higher office. “He just shows his love for his wife, his high school sweetheart, in such a beautiful way and the way I watched him raise those children while juggling so much.”

Despite keeping a brisk schedule for his day jobs in office and political functions, he maintains personal priorities, friends said.

Democratic fundraiser Alan Kessler recalled meeting with Shapiro for a late lunch to talk about fundraising during Shapiro’s first campaign for attorney general in 2016, when he faced a competitive primary race.

Toward the middle of the lunch, Shapiro apologized. He had to leave to go coach his son’s basketball team.

“It struck a chord with me because what he’s saying is, ‘I’m in a position where I gotta sit down with people, get them to support me financially and otherwise, but I’m not gonna miss my kids’ games,’” Kessler said.

As a statewide elected official since 2017, Shapiro is often on the road crisscrossing Pennsylvania. But the Shapiro family has dinner at home on Friday nights for Shabbat, a ritual well-known to many in Pennsylvania’s political world.

“It is known you don’t interfere with his faith and family when it is Friday evening and Sabbath,” Dean said.

Rabbi David Glanzberg-Krainin of Beth Sholom in Elkins Park, the governor’s childhood synagogue, said he’s known Shapiro for two decades. He called him a mensch — a term for a person of honor — and said he’s dedicated to connecting with people in the synagogue, including bringing a group of students to the governor’s mansion for Shabbat.

“His Jewish tradition is very much part of who he is,” Glanzberg-Krainin said. While Shapiro has personal ambition, his rabbi said, that drive “is fueled much more by a desire to serve and do good and make positive change.”

If Shapiro’s early life centered on teamwork and unity, he’s built on that brand as a political figure who can strike bipartisan deals and connect with voters from different backgrounds.

But as he grows his national profile, he’s also demonstrated that he is not afraid to throw a punch. “Stop s— talking America,” he says of former President Donald Trump’s portrayal of a country in decline.

He brought that energy home to Montgomery County this week, headlining a rally in Ambler on Monday alongside Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He criticized Trump and framed the election as a fight for fundamental freedoms.

Shapiro also acknowledged at the top of his remarks: “It is so good to be home.”

“This is the community that raised me,” he told a crowd of about 1,000 supporters. “This is the community that taught me so much.”

Among the throngs of supporters was his wife, sitting toward the front, and Groen, who said he felt a deep sense of pride as the child he watched grow up contends for the vice presidential nomination.

Groen joked that his children sometimes rib him, saying Shapiro was the son he always wanted. Asked whether they are correct, Groen replied sheepishly: “Yes.”

“He has ‘it’ unlike anybody I’ve known,” Groen said.

The following day, Shapiro was in North Philadelphia, meeting with young basketball players enrolled in a program meant to break cycles of poverty through sports. He talked to the kids about the virtues of passing the ball — a skill he learned as a player himself, decades earlier.

The governor walked alongside a boy who wanted to talk about why the late Kobe Bryant was the greatest basketball player of all time. Shapiro said Bryant — also a product of Montgomery County — is at least in the top five.

“He wanted to win,” Shapiro said. “He had that instinct to win.”

Inquirer staff writer Gillian McGoldrick contributed to this article.