Shapiro breaks with Dems on COVID policies in Pa. gov race

HARRISBURG, Pa. — As attorney general, Josh Shapiro went to court repeatedly to defend Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration against legal challenges to his pandemic-era mandates and shutdowns.

Now, as he’s running to succeed Wolf as governor, Shapiro says he is against some of the same COVID-19 containment measures that his fellow Democrat used to help manage the nation’s worst pandemic in over a century.

On the campaign trail in the presidential battleground state, Shapiro’s Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, makes Wolf’s COVID-19 policies — and Shapiro’s defense of them in court — a source of derision.

But disavowing Wolf’s COVID-19 policies while facing headwinds for his party may be a politically painless way for Shapiro to tack to the middle against Mastriano, who even some top Republicans say is too far to the right to win the November general election.

“This is an area where I think folks got it wrong,” Shapiro said of school and business shutdowns. On mask and vaccine mandates, Shapiro said he opposed them and instead talked about a need to “educate and empower” the public, business owners, school leaders and others to protect themselves and others.

“And to me, that’s the approach we need to take more broadly as a public, which is to educate, empower and respect people’s personal decisions and respect their personal freedom to make those choices,” Shapiro told The Associated Press in an interview.

It is unusual, if not unprecedented, for a Democrat to go against some of the core measures that Democratic governors — and some Republican governors — used to contain COVID-19.

And Shapiro is doing it as incumbent Democratic governors in other presidential battleground states, such as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, are defending their records as they run for reelection this year.

It follows Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory last year in the Virginia governor’s race as he differentiated himself from his Democratic opponent by pledging to end vaccine and mask mandates and vowing to keep schools open.

Shapiro, the state’s two-term elected attorney general, is also running against decades of precedent: If he wins, he would be the first governor to succeed a two-term governor of the same party in Pennsylvania.

Since the pandemic began, Wolf has battled Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature over his orders requiring masks and…