Josh Shapiro has built a social media machine. Can he ride TikTok to the vice presidency?

After fending off vice presidential speculation at a Friday news conference at Cheyney University, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro hustled from the reception area to a basement library to film a video touting his education initiatives. His cameras were already waiting.

Unfortunately for Shapiro, there was a drumline playing upstairs that the school had invited. His aides dispatched someone to shut it down, but time was running short. A call was made to move the production outside before the aide even returned.

As soon as the cameras were hot, Shapiro rattled off his lines, no notes. Filming was done within a minute.

“He’s a well-oiled machine,” State Sen. John Kane (D., Delaware) said. “The man is an awesome public speaker, loves being in front of a microphone and a camera.”

Of the top contenders for the Democratic vice presidential nomination, only Shapiro is trying to cash in on the memes and trends that are fueling the campaign of his would-be running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It’s not their job to figure out how to find me,” Shapiro said of his constituents in a brief interview. “It’s my job to figure out how to find them.”

Shapiro’s “meet the people where they are” sentiment is uncommon among fellow governors. Roughly a half dozen of his colleagues, all Democrats, have TikTok accounts run by their offices despite two-thirds of Americans between 18 and 29 being on the platform.

Shapiro, unlike many of his peers, gets in front of the camera and participates in the trends, which can lead to a unique dichotomy between substance and setting.

In a May video on Shapiro’s official TikTok account, filmed in his oak-paneled office as most are, the governor reacts to a 26-year-old influencer who says she doesn’t like store-bought pesto by clapping back that he doesn’t like Pennsylvania’s $7.25 minimum wage. Out of frame in the video are the portraits of mostly long-dead former governors hanging above him.

But the comment section is full of praise, typical for Shapiro’s TikToks.

“I think that he’s super woke because he’s surrounded by people who keep him in the know,” said Lindsay Anderson, 28, a cohost of the Philadelphia-based “Between Us Girlies” podcast. Shapiro joined the podcast as a guest in March and proclaimed himself “a creator, not a scroller.”

The team supporting Shapiro is mostly 20-somethings dedicated to “digital strategy,” unique among governor’s offices, he said. The team is well-paid — Shapiro’s director of digital strategy, Annie Newman, collects a $187,000 salary, more than the leaders of the Pennsylvania House or Senate.

“The investment is critical because you gotta find Pennsylvanians where they are,” Shapiro said.

Many Americans are leaving behind legacy media in favor of social media, so politicians like Shapiro have used social media as a gateway to the larger point they want to get across, once only possible in print or on television.

“The press release doesn’t talk back,” said Drew Henderson, 27, Kane’s communications director. Kane is the state Senate’s most popular TikTok user.

Shapiro inherited a relatively small digital operation from his predecessor, former Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat who seldom posted anything other than official photographs or screenshots of his tweets. When Wolf did forgo the formalities of being governor, it was usually to opine on something like hot dogs.

Any vertical videos Wolf posted often had an amateurish quality: think an unsteady hand, no cuts or audio issues.

Not so with Shapiro.

After a visit to Philadelphia Youth Basketball on Tuesday, Shapiro’s social media team produced two slick videos showing the shot he sank just right of the foul line. What the team did not show were the three shots he missed.

When he served as attorney general from 2017 to 2023, back when he wore a tie, Shapiro’s social media presence was a low-budget affair. He would stand in front of a white board or, during the COVID-19 pandemic, hop on a live stream with COVID beard stubble to explain the happenings of his office.

Today, Shapiro has not only his dedicated digital team, but a small army of influencers to spread his message across the commonwealth. He even has a liaison to the influencer community on payroll, salary $97,467.

“Content creation is about hope,” said the liaison, Gavin Lichtenstein, before a crowd of about 50 influencers at a “Democracy Summer Camp” sponsored by Shapiro’s office in July. Lichtenstein implored the influencers to educate their audiences about elections and combat misinformation.

Anderson, the “Between Us Girlies” cohost and an attendee of the summer camp, said that content creators love Shapiro.

“We think you’re really candid and really cool, honestly,” Anderson told Shapiro at the end of the podcast episode he joined.

“Really?” Shapiro responded. “I hope someone recorded that part.”

Trebor Maitin is an intern with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents Association. He can be reached at trebormmaitin@gmail.com.