In her VP selection, Harris may have listened to women. Now Harrisburg must, too.

Good news, everyone: the Democratic vice presidential nominee is officially Tim Walz.

For a while, it didn’t look like it would go this way. Pennsylvania is a swing state (according to a few analyses, the swing state), and some pundits believed that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s popularity with white rural voters here might have translated into a marginal boost with that demographic come November if he had been chosen as Kamala Harris’ running mate.

Gratifyingly, the Harris campaign has apparently listened to women and survivors, who over the weekend pushed back as forcefully as possible against the notion of a Harris-Shapiro ticket because of the governor’s shoddy handling of an allegation of sexual misconduct.

As speculation about Shapiro’s chances mounted, critics of the governor’s tepid responses to Pennsylvania’s political culture of toxic sexism raged over the possibility that the Harris campaign might ignore Shapiro’s troubling history.

It’s a fury that is well-founded. Shapiro’s office dawdled in its handling of a complaint against Mike Vereb, one of the governor’s closest advisers who was accused in March 2023 of sexually harassing a woman who worked for him in the governor’s office. The Shapiro administration agreed to pay Vereb’s accuser $295,000 to settle the complaint, and then tried to keep her from telling her story by way of a nondisclosure agreement.

Shapiro defended his office’s handling of the complaint and said in October that an investigation into the allegations was “grounded in integrity,” although he declined to provide specifics.

The National Women’s Defense League, a nonpartisan advocacy group for survivors of sexual harassment, released a report last year that found that harassment is “pervasive” in state governments across the country.

The report identified more than 350 allegations of sexual harassment against lawmakers in state governments nationwide since 2013, including allegations against five legislators in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly.

“Sexual harassment in state politics is not a case of a few bad actors committing one-time transgressions,” the report noted, “but rather a systemic, ongoing, self-reinforcing failure of laws and policies to set workplace standards, protect employees and hold perpetrators accountable.”

Even before Shapiro’s governorship had officially begun, however, it seemed like he, too, was continuing to reinforce that failure.

Barely a month after winning the office, Shapiro appointed former Democratic Party chair Marcel Groen to his transition team. Groen, who had presided over the party during the peak of the #metoo movement, was forced to resign by then-Gov. Tom Wolf for his stubborn refusal to address sexual abuse allegations roiling the party.

As his parting shot, Groen sent Democratic leaders a furious letter, in which he railed against feminist activists (including me), who he blamed for his descent into ignominy.

Shapiro’s more distant past conduct raises troubling questions about his commitment to combating domestic violence against women, as well.

In 2011, Ellen Greenberg died after suffering 20 stab wounds, including several to the back of her neck. Her body showed signs of bruises at various stages of healing, a sign of possible ongoing domestic abuse. Nevertheless, her death was ruled a suicide — a ruling that Shapiro’s office supported when he was attorney general.

In 2022, Shapiro’s office referred the case to another office to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest; Shapiro had a personal connection to Greenberg’s fiance, who discovered her body.

Greenberg’s family, who filed a lawsuit against the city in 2019 urging them to reopen the investigation into their daughter’s death, has questioned whether that relationship affected Shapiro’s decision-making in the case.

» READ MORE: Shapiro’s transition team sends a bad message to women | Opinion

We may never know with certainty whether any of this played a role in the Harris campaign’s decision to bypass Shapiro, but I choose to see it as a strong message to survivors: good things come to those who organize.

In a matter of days, Shapiro went from clear favorite to also-ran. Women came together to force the Harris campaign to confront the fact that Shapiro’s feeble handling of sexual misconduct allegations made him more of a liability than an asset, and there’s a good chance that the campaign responded to that pressure.

In private and in public, many of us worked to make evident the problems a Shapiro pick would pose to Harris’ ability to credibly — and uncompromisingly — go after Trump for his outrageous history of misogynistic behavior.

We refused to accept the elevation of a leader who had failed us.

I choose to see the decision to bypass Shapiro as a strong message to survivors: good things come to those who organize.

Now, for the next few months, our attention must turn to electing Harris. As her selection of Walz shows, Harris is a savvy politician. She is not a savior; her first impulse may not always align with progressive values. With enough organized pressure, though, there is a chance that she can be moved. As progressives and organizers, we have a vested interest in electing a president we can push to act in the interests of justice.

The work won’t end there, though. To win what we in the liberatory movement want — worker justice, protections for women and trans folks against harassment, cease-fire in Gaza, an end to racist policing, and so much more — we will need to be organized and strategic, and ready to fight hard.

The work doesn’t end on Election Day; it begins in earnest.

In the meantime, the political establishment in Pennsylvania would do well to treat Shapiro’s inability to secure the vice presidential nomination as a clear lesson that they ignore women and survivors at their own peril. Political stars in our commonwealth who aspire to the national stage must realize just how retrograde state government’s culture of harassment appears to the rest of the country — and they must actively work to fix it.

Gwen Snyder is a writer, researcher, and longtime Philadelphia organizer.