Why Pennsylvania’s Governor Now Matters More to Europe Than Most Prime Ministers
A Governor in Harrisburg, a President in Budapest, and the World in the Cheap Seats
By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged from three connecting flights and one regrettable pierogi in Warsaw.
It is 3 a.m. in Kyiv when Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania tweets a photo of himself ladling chipped-ham sandwiches at a Pittsburgh fire station. In Seoul, a semiconductor analyst wonders whether the next round of CHIPS Act subsidies will pass the Pennsylvania legislature or die quietly in a committee chaired by someone whose last brush with technology was a Betamax. Meanwhile, in Davos, a European energy minister asks, over €17 sparkling water, whether the governor can actually keep the lights on at the LNG export terminal on the Delaware—because if not, the continent may have to keep cozying up to certain pipeline-owning autocrats who look better shirtless than they have any right to.
Welcome to the paradox of Pennsylvania’s governorship: a job once coveted mainly by people who could name every Sheetz and Wawa in the state without looking at GPS, but which now sits at the junction of global supply chains, nuclear codes (hello, Naval Yard), and whatever fresh hell Elon Musk is cooking up next. The office sounds parochial—until you realize that the Susquehanna River cools enough data centers to swing Bitcoin prices in Singapore. Suddenly, the man in Harrisburg matters more to a hedge-fund quant in Mayfair than the mayor of Manchester ever will.
Shapiro, 51, wears the obligatory charcoal suit but speaks in caffeinated paragraphs designed for TikTok attention spans. Abroad, he is read as either the Great American Moderate or a guy who discovered foreign policy sometime between the first and second Taylor Swift albums, depending on which embassy bar you’re drinking in. He has visited Israel so often the duty-free cashiers know his coffee order; he has also toured German battery plants with the enthusiasm of a teenager who just discovered Rammstein. Each trip prompts the same international whisper: is this the audition reel for 2028, or merely an elaborate excuse to escape budget negotiations with people who still think TikTok is a clock sound?
The stakes, naturally, are larger than any one man’s White House daydreams. Pennsylvania sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a geological layer cake of natural gas that Europe now treats like a strategic reserve and Pennsylvania landowners treat like a scratch-off lottery ticket. When the governor tweaks severance taxes by half a percentage point, German factory owners feel the hiccup before the ink dries. Likewise, when Philadelphia’s refinery row belches a little too much benzene, commodity traders in Zug recalibrate the price of cancer risk like it’s pork bellies.
Then there is the democracy question—always fashionable in election years. Pennsylvania is the swing state other swing states call “extra.” Its 19 electoral votes are the geopolitical equivalent of a loaded dice cup. One sloppy voting-machine memo in Altoona and the next thing you know, the peso crashes, the Swiss franc spikes, and a Brazilian diplomat is asking why Luzerne County can’t just use paper ballots like 1832. The governor, nominally in charge of certifying results, therefore becomes a geopolitical choke point: half referee, half hostage negotiator, half late-night Twitter reply guy. (Yes, that’s three halves—math is optional in modern politics.)
And yet, for all the global ribbon-cuttings and Zoom calls with Japanese investors who pronounce “Yuengling” like a sneeze, Shapiro’s daily grind remains stubbornly terrestrial: potholes, opioid settlements, and the eternal debate over whether state stores should sell tequila on Sundays. The world watches because it must; the governor governs because someone has to pretend the center still holds.
So when the next shipment of fracked ethane sails out of Marcus Hook for some Scottish plastics plant, raising both GDP and eyebrows, remember the man who signed the permit while eating a cheesesteak that could stop a pacemaker. He may look like just another mid-size-state executive in a landlocked capital, but to the rest of the planet he is the un-elected middle manager of modernity’s chaos—proof that in our interconnected age, even the parochial is planetary, and every chipped-ham sandwich has a carbon footprint visible from orbit.
Sleep tight, Earth.
