One Last Final update for the Dem-VP betting odds. It's roughly 2/3 for Shapiro, 1/3 for Walz. Will the money be right?

I mean, there was a lot of negative news articles surrounding Shapiro that came out in the past few weeks. It’s not clear if those skeletons were really Shapiro’s, or if they were just made to look that way by a sudden deluge of hit pieces.

1. The sexual harassment case wasn’t covered up, and the perpetrator wasn’t even Shapiro but actually a republican aide.

2. Some of it was criticizing his views from when he was a twenty-year-old college student, which I thought was a bad-faith argument.

3. Other criticisms were regarding his support for Israel, which was valid but also misrepresented and cherry-picked.

4. Senator Fetterman did warn Harris against Shapiro (apparently he thinks Shapiro has too much personal ambition).

5. As for the Ellen Greenberg case and Shapiro’s involvement with it, I did find this article. It looks like his involvement with it is limited to his office declining to reopen the case in 2019. The article says the following:

His office stood by the city’s 2011 suicide ruling in 2019 and continued to do so through 2022, when it referred the case to another office after critics claimed Shapiro had connections to Greenberg’s fiancé's family. While the AG’s Office insisted there was no conflict of interest, a spokesperson said at the time they referred it due to “the appearance of a conflict.”

Shapiro himself has never publicly spoken about the case or his office’s investigation into it.

[…]

As the case gained attention in online forums and true crime podcasts over the years, various conspiracy theories started to swirl, including one which alleged Shapiro was familiar with family members of Goldberg, Greenberg’s fiancé.

So, the AG’s Office has declined any conflict of interest (a relationship between Shapiro and Goldberg) and Shapiro has never publicly commented on the case.

Personally, I don’t think we can allow conspiracy theories to create a connection between Shapiro and Goldberg. A similar tactic was used to muddy the waters surrounding Hillary Clinton (for example) to the point where many believed she had someone on her staff murdered. No offense to True Crime folks, but they get things wrong more often than they get things right. We will need to wait for this to play out as the investigation continues or in court later.

(To be clear, I do agree this case should have never been ruled a suicide. People do not commit suicide by stabbing themselves in the back of the head. But not reopening a case eight years after it was closed by someone else does not automatically mean Shapiro is guilty of a coverup, or that he has connections to Goldberg. The sad reality is there are many, many murder cases that never get reopened for a variety of reasons.)

At the end of the day, I think he has a lot of things people can pick apart and dissect but I also think there were people and groups with a lot of money digging up his past and plastering it everywhere. Not saying some of them weren’t valid, but I think the campaign to discredit him was so aggressive that it actually made me wonder, “Who, with that much money and influence, doesn’t want Josh Shapiro?”

In the end, Harris chose Walz. I don’t know if we will ever know what really happened behind closed doors, but the narrative is Harris and Shapiro didn’t really vibe together while she and Walz did. Shapiro is now publicly campaigning for Harris.

Not that I have any objections - I do like Walz’s energy, and Shapiro was never my first choice anyway (I liked Mark Kelly).