HARRISBURG — The 2026 election for Pennsylvania governor is fast approaching.
Voters will decide whether Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro should spend another four years as the state’s chief executive or grant his Republican competitor, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, a turn at overseeing a vast state bureaucracy that implements programs and policies ranging from elections to environmental policy.
Shapiro, 53, is hoping his years of executive experience will convince voters that he deserves a second term fulfilling his long-held pledge (one that has morphed into an oft-repeated slogan) to “GSD,” or Get Stuff Done. Also considered a 2028 presidential contender, Shapiro has raised tens of millions in campaign contributions to bolster his reelection, and recent polling shows him with a commanding lead in the race.
Garrity, 62, also boasts a resume that includes years of executive leadership. But from the start, she has been the underdog — viewed that way even by her own party. She has aligned herself closely with President Donald Trump, telling Spotlight PA, “Who doesn't want to make America great again?” But she has also tried to temper certain MAGA positions, waving away previous comments questioning election results and saying she would handle tariffs differently than Trump has.
She has trailed Shapiro in both the polls and fundraising. Her criticism that Shapiro is using Pennsylvania as a stepping stone for a rumored 2028 presidential run does not appear to have resonated strongly with voters — at least based on polls showing her trailing the governor by double digits.
Whoever wins will land a job that comes with vast powers. Pennsylvania’s governor sets policy priorities, helps steer a more than $50 billion budget through the state legislature, makes appointments to state agencies, boards, and commissions, and grants pardons (or commutes sentences) that are recommended by a state board.
The candidates for Pennsylvania governor
Democrat Josh Shapiro
Shapiro, who is from Montgomery County, has spent the majority of his career in public service, including three two-year terms in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly and six years as Pennsylvania’s attorney general.
Throughout his first term as governor, the Democrat has prioritized boosting funding for public education, increasing government efficiency, jumpstarting the state’s agricultural sector, and bolstering economic development and job creation in the state.
Despite his willingness to strike deals with Republicans on historically difficult or complex issues, he’s struggled to secure approval from a divided state legislature for some of his top priorities. Republicans who control the Senate have blocked raising the minimum wage, enacting stricter gun laws, and passing nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people.
The legislature has also rejected Shapiro’s repeated calls for raising new revenue, including legalizing recreational marijuana, and creating a new regulatory and tax framework for skill games.
Finding compromise with GOP lawmakers on the state budget has also been a fraught process all four years Shapiro has been in office, with budget deals landing past the June 30 deadline — and in some years, creating major hardship for nonprofit organizations that rely on timely state funding.
As a result, Shapiro has used executive orders in his first term to enact certain policies without legislative approval. On his first day in office, for instance, the governor signed an executive order to remove the four-year college degree requirement for thousands of state government jobs.
Since then, he’s also signed executive orders to speed up the process for obtaining occupational licenses; develop a master plan for improving access to services for older Pennsylvanians; and create a new office to redesign state websites to make them more user-friendly.
Beyond executive orders, Shapiro has used his executive powers to usher in portions of his agenda, including his administration’s 2023 decision to implement automatic voter registration.
Still, the Democratic governor has managed to find common ground with the legislature on certain priorities, namely, increased funding in the state budget for public schools.
Recent polling shows Shapiro with strong approval numbers, and he is the clear favorite to win in November. A poll commissioned by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, and Siena University in late August found 60% of Pennsylvania voters have a favorable opinion of him. The poll also showed the Democratic governor held a 16-point lead over Garrity among likely Pennsylvania voters.
His popularity, in part, can be explained by how visible Shapiro has made himself throughout his first term. He has a near-constant presence on social media and has shown a penchant for taking his message — and, as the case may be, his brand — directly to voters, and often in non-political settings.
He’s a frequent guest on sports talk radio, and regularly attends high-profile sporting events (from football to NASCAR to the Special Olympics). He’s also been a cheerleader for the state to play host to major events (think this past summer’s World Cup games).
But given his rumored presidential aspirations, he’s never far from politics: He’s a frequent guest on national television, appearing more often than not to criticize President Donald Trump’s policies and actions in office.
In fact, the governor has made pushback against Trump a cornerstone of his first term, touting among other things the number of times he’s sued the president and won. Many of those suits have challenged the loss of federal funding, while others have targeted the Trump administration’s requests for personal data on Pennsylvania residents.
Shapiro has also turned his opposition to Trump — and Garrity’s alignment with the president on certain issues — into a campaign platform. Democrats supportive of the governor have attempted to paint her as a threat to elections and reproductive rights, among other areas, highlighting past statements disputing the results of the 2020 election and celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The Democratic governor’s campaign has also tried to portray Garrity as a proponent of little to no regulation for data centers (though both Shapiro and Garrity’s positions on the issue are far more nuanced).
>> READ MORE: Josh Shapiro built national fame on getting things done, but his full record is complex
His running mate is Democratic Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, a former state lawmaker from Allegheny County.
His top donors include billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Philadelphia-based Local Union #98 IBEW Committee on Political Education; the Greater PA Carpenters PAC; Democracy PAC II, which was started by Democratic megadonor George Soros; and Silicon Valley executive Christian Larsen.
Republican Stacy Garrity
Garrity, of rural Bradford County, spent the bulk of her career in the private sector, working her way up the ranks from cost accountant to vice president of government affairs at Pennsylvania-based Global Tungsten & Powders, which makes powders used in electronics and tools.
She is also a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel who deployed three times, in Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom. Garrity received two Bronze Stars and the Legion of Merit award for her service.
Garrity’s first venture into politics was an unsuccessful bid for the GOP nomination for a 2019 congressional special election. Party officials subsequently asked her to run for state treasurer, and in 2020 she took the office in a major upset, beating the incumbent Democrat by less than a percentage point.
From that first campaign, Garrity has framed herself as a committed conservative and loyal ally of Donald Trump. She went on to win her 2024 reelection campaign easily, racking up the largest vote total of any statewide candidate (and beating a record previously set by Shapiro).
Pennsylvania’s treasurer is responsible for stewarding state dollars, which means both making sure bills are paid and investing savings. The office reported last year that it is overseeing $180 billion in state coffers and directly managing more than $55 billion overall. The treasurer also sits on the boards of Pennsylvania’s public pension funds.
During her time in office, Garrity has balanced nonpartisan priorities, like cutting program fees, with partisan ones like supporting the Israeli government.
An early priority was getting Treasury’s 529 college and career savings program upgraded to a coveted gold rating. The office succeeded — Pennsylvania became one of just five states with gold-rated 529 plans. Treasury also eliminated the minimum deposit to open a 529 account, lowered minimum contribution amounts, and reduced fees.
As many treasurers do, Garrity has also championed returning unclaimed property to Pennsylvanians, proposing legislation to allow the office to return unclaimed money under $500 without requiring a claim to be filed with the agency. The bill became law in 2024. Her campaign estimates that all told, Treasury has returned more than $1 billion in unclaimed property during her tenure.
From the beginning of her first term, Garrity was an active member of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a national conservative nonprofit that works with treasurers and other public officials. Its priorities include support for the Israeli government and opposition to environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, initiatives — investment strategies in which the goal is to push corporations to change their behavior.
Garrity pursued both of those priorities. After boosting the state’s Israel Bonds investments by $45 million, she campaigned at an Israel Bonds gala. She told Spotlight PA the investments, which came after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, were simply a sound financial decision.
“They've never defaulted, they pay an above-market rate of return, and … if you can get a good return on your investment, and at the same time support our biggest ally, our only ally in the Middle East, then why not do it? It's a win-win,” she said. (In 2021, Garrity’s then-chief investment officer warned her that Israel Bonds could actually be risky.)
During last year’s extended state budget impasse, Garrity inserted herself into the proceedings, an unusual step for a treasurer. She used unallocated state dollars to set up a $500 million program that offered loans to counties, nonprofits, and some other state-funded entities that had their usual payments frozen.
The program was widely seen as a political gesture meant to offer a contrast to Shapiro, who at the time was negotiating to end the budget impasse — something Garrity denies. “It was absolutely not political,” she told Spotlight PA.
In her biggest race yet, Garrity is leaning into a message that Shapiro is untrustworthy. She’s also focusing heavily on Pennsylvania’s rural areas — speeding up permitting for farmers and increasing natural gas production.
Both she and Shapiro have made recent turns against data centers, even though they were both initially supportive of the economic activity the projects could bring.
But with little money on hand, it has been difficult for Garrity to communicate her message to voters. As of June, Shapiro had more than 34 times the cash on hand Garrity did.
>> READ MORE: Stacy Garrity is ambitious, Trump-endorsed, and experienced. Is that enough to beat Josh Shapiro?
Her running mate is Jason Richey, a longtime construction, real estate, and commercial law attorney at Pittsburgh-based multinational law firm K&L Gates.
Her top donors include University City Housing Co., a real estate firm owned by charter school founder Michael Karp; Pittsburgh-based PAC Keystone Honor, which is funded by manufacturing and construction interests; longtime GOP power broker Bob Asher and his PAC, PA Future Fund; and skill games company founder Michael Pace, from whom Garrity reported accepting a flight worth $33,500.
Her biggest donations are orders of magnitude smaller than Shapiro’s. The single biggest, from University City Housing late last year, was $250,000.
Libertarian Ken Krawchuk
Krawchuk, based in Abington, the same town Shapiro lives in, is the only third-party candidate for governor on the ballot this November.
His campaign website describes him as having founded an IT consulting firm, and says he currently works as a “business architect for the pharmaceutical, insurance, and financial markets.”
He is running, he wrote on Facebook, to give Pennsylvania voters “more than the same two old stale choices.” He appeared somewhat surprised that Garrity’s campaign didn’t challenge his spot on the ballot in August, writing that “the silence was deafening,” and that he and his running mate “are now solidly, irrevocably ON the ballot.”
Krawchuk says he favors completely privatizing schools and eliminating school property taxes; getting rid of the state’s personal income tax over the course of a term; getting rid of mail ballots and expanding voter ID requirements; eliminating parole for “violent criminals”; and decriminalizing drugs.
His running mate is John Thomas of Somerset County, who describes himself as a career educator “in traditional public schools, a private school, and cyber charter schools.”
It’s unclear who his top donors are. As of Sept. 4, Krawchuk had not filed a campaign finance report or campaign finance statement (a document that campaigns must file if they don’t raise or spend money over $250).
On the issues
This section will be updated as Spotlight PA publishes more guides to the issues ahead of Nov. 3.
Abortion
Garrity says she is “pro-life, with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.” She sold “Defund Planned Parenthood” T-shirts during her initial run for office, and posted on Facebook in 2022 that the end of Roe v. Wade would be “a great day for the sanctity of life.”
Shapiro supports using “his office to keep abortion safe, legal, and accessible in Pennsylvania.”
>> READ MORE: Where governor candidates Garrity and Shapiro stand on abortion
Data centers
Although he championed Amazon’s investment of millions of dollars for a data center buildout in Pennsylvania, Shapiro recently toughened his stance on data centers, setting stricter environmental and transparency standards for new developments in the state.
Garrity hasn't released a detailed plan, but says she favors mandatory rules not tied to climate and a pause on data center development.
>> READ MORE: Where governor candidates Garrity and Shapiro stand on data centers
Economy
Garrity says she would call a “Special Session on Energy Affordability” and ask the legislature to “cut taxes and eliminate hidden costs on electric bills, roll back or eliminate the gross receipts tax on utilities, end tax stacking on energy bills, require full transparency of all taxes and surcharges, and fast-track bringing new power plants online to meet demand and keep costs low.” She also says she would launch an initiative that “will redirect existing state spending, investment accounts, and interest earnings toward property tax rebates for homeowners.”
Shapiro has touted his administration's ability to attract private sector projects to the state, including an Eli Lilly GLP-1 factory, an Urban Outfitters distributorship, and Amazon data centers. Earlier this month, he announced that Greek yogurt-maker Chobani is planning to invest $1.2 billion to open its first dairy manufacturing operation in the state in the Lehigh Valley, and will use nearly a third of all milk produced in-state for its products.
In all, according to a news release, his administration said it has attracted over $43 billion in private-sector investment and created more than 29,000 jobs across the commonwealth.
Elections
Shapiro has staked many of his policy stances on elections in opposition to President Donald Trump, while struggling to pass new election laws through the divided state legislature.
Garrity has indicated she would defer to Trump’s election priorities, but her state-level legislative priorities are less clear. She questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election on multiple occasions, saying at one 2022 political rally that Trump defeated Biden.
>> READ MORE: Where governor candidates Garrity and Shapiro stand on elections
Energy and environment
Garrity says that the free market should solve environmental issues and that “of course there's climate change, but I'm not sure as to what extent.”
Shapiro has made energy and the environment a key platform, although his actions on some of those issues have not always aligned neatly with members of his party. He’s lobbied for and received federal funding for hydrogen production, and clawed back a program put in place by his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wolf, that limited carbon emissions from power plants.
Garrity and Shapiro primarily diverge on what kind of energy they want the state to produce: Shapiro supports an “all of the above” approach that includes clean energy like solar and wind alongside oil and gas, while Garrity wants to dramatically increase natural gas production.
>> READ MORE: Where governor candidates Garrity and Shapiro stand on energy costs, the environment, and more
LGBTQ rights
It’s unclear where Garrity stands on many LGBTQ issues. Her campaign would not answer questions from Spotlight PA. She has, however, been outspoken that transgender girls shouldn’t participate in women’s sports.
Shapiro has vocally supported LGBTQ rights throughout his career.
>> READ MORE: Where governor candidates Garrity and Shapiro stand on LGBTQ rights
Recreational marijuana legalization
Garrity does not support legalizing recreational marijuana and says she would veto any such bill.
Shapiro supports legalizing recreational marijuana and has asked the General Assembly to create a program run by the state Department of Agriculture in each of his yearly budget proposals. The tax revenue would help the state pay for rising healthcare and education costs.
>> READ MORE: Where governor candidates Garrity and Shapiro stand on marijuana, hemp, and more