One reason Kamala Harris is on the Democratic ticket is because of her identity. One reason Josh Shapiro isn’t on the ticket is because of his.

In March 2020, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden declared that he would choose a woman as his running mate. The following month, after Mr. Biden became the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, multiple news outlets started reporting on the “pressure” influential Democrats were applying to ensure that the woman he chose would be Black.

Ms. Harris’s race and gender were not the only reasons Mr. Biden chose her. She served as attorney general of the country’s most populous state and had been a senator for four years.

But it’s disingenuous to argue that race and gender played no role in her advancement.

The matter of identity arose again in this year’s Democratic veep stakes, but in a subtler, more insidious way. In this case, the candidate in question doesn’t possess an identity trait preferred by the left, but one the left increasingly views with suspicion.

Among the possible reasons Ms. Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, according to a report in The Times, was that Mr. Shapiro’s selection could “inflame the left.” And chief among the reasons given for this potential inferno was Mr. Shapiro’s allegedly extreme pro-Israel views. An article in The New Republic called Mr. Shapiro “the one vice-presidential pick who could ruin Democratic unity” and claimed that he “stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine.” A writer for Jacobin, a socialist magazine, labeled him a “genocide apologist.” A group of far-left congressional staffers and the Democratic Socialists of America teamed up to produce an open letter demanding that Ms. Harris “say no to Genocide Josh Shapiro for vice president.”

The examples marshaled as evidence of Mr. Shapiro’s “egregiously bad” views on the Middle East were specious. Mr. Shapiro, it was alleged, likened all pro-Palestinian demonstrators to the Ku Klux Klan. In actuality, he singled out extremists who called for Israel’s destruction and threatened violence, and he has stated clearly that “we should be universal in our condemnation of antisemitism, Islamophobia and all forms of hate.” More absurd was the digging up of a column Mr. Shapiro wrote for his college newspaper over 30 years ago arguing that the Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to co-exist with Israel. Mr. Shapiro, who has long supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, appropriately brushed off the column as something he “wrote when I was 20.”