The two front-runners to be Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, may have had differences on some issues. But the teachers’ unions that are some of the Democratic Party’s most powerful influence groups would have been satisfied with either option.
Shapiro backed down from his previous support for school choice after teachers’-union pressure in 2023. Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled senate passed a budget that included funding for a school-choice program for low-income students that Shapiro had said repeatedly that he supported. The program also attracted support from one Philadelphia Democratic senator. But the budget was held up in the house of representatives, where a one-seat Democratic majority took the teachers’ unions’ line against school choice.
Shapiro had a choice: Try to exert some of his influence as a popular governor to flip at least one Democrat in the house, or cave to teachers’-union pressure. He caved, predictably, as unions hold tremendous power in Democratic politics in Pennsylvania. Rather than stand for his stated convictions on the issue, he adopted the views of the teachers’ unions that could spend millions to primary him in 2026.
More recently, the Freedom Foundation, a union-watchdog group, alleged that the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, had participated in an illegal scheme to donate $1.5 million to Shapiro in 2022. Pennsylvania law prohibits unions and corporations from contributing from their general treasuries to candidates, so the PSEA passed the money through intermediaries and the Democratic Governors Association to get it to Shapiro, then misreported the contributions to state and federal authorities, the Freedom Foundation alleged. The $1.5 million is on top of the $800,000 the PSEA’s political committee legally contributed to Shapiro.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz has been just as obedient to the demands of the teachers’ unions. He’s a former member of one, and National Education Association president Becky Pringle and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten were quick to praise his selection as Harris’s running mate.
Walz has said that political campaigning is similar to teaching, giving you an idea of what progressives believe the purpose of education is. “The biggest thing is communicating an idea,” Walz said. “It’s trying to get people to be involved and to look at the facts. . . . Teaching is the same way. You’re trying to present a system of facts; you’re trying to teach students what’s the best way to think about problems to solve them in a rational way.”
As governor, he enacted a series of policies supported by teachers’ unions, such as:
Walz was able to finance a lot of this spending with federal aid from the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act, which gave $2.8 billion to the state government and another $1.8 billion to local governments in Minnesota. States must obligate all ARPA spending by the end of 2024 and spend it by the end of 2026 — at which point states like Minnesota will be left asking for more federal aid to keep these programs funded. Having Walz in the federal government at that time would certainly be beneficial to Democrats and the teachers’ unions that support them.
Walz at the very least never even said he supported school choice, so teachers’ unions probably prefer him to Shapiro, helping to explain why Democrats made the pick. But when push came to shove, Shapiro did the bidding of teachers’ unions, just as Walz has as governor. Despite the backlash against public schools since Covid and the rapid expansion of school choice around the country, Democrats and teachers’ unions are still co-dependent.