HARRISBURG - 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.

“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.

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 shutdowns of schools and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 46,000 people in Pennsylvania.

Shapiro said that, as attorney general, his office is required to defend the state in court, and it did so numerous times in state and federal court during the pandemic.

A mainstay of Mastriano’s stump speeches is castigating Shapiro’s defense of Wolf’s policies and arguing that a Shapiro governorship would be the equivalent of a third term for Wolf.

“When the shutdown happened, Josh Shapiro sued to keep the businesses shut down,” Mastriano said on a conservative online broadcast show Thursday. “When the shutdown happened, he kept the kids masked up in a lawsuit.”

At a rally in Lancaster last Wednesday, Mastriano cast the November election as a choice between “tyranny and freedom” and said he was appalled that anyone would abide by the mantra “Stay home, stay calm and stay safe.”

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “We’re Americans. We don’t do that.”

Shapiro said that he didn’t require vaccines or masks in his offices, although he said that he tried to educate his workforce and foster an understanding culture.

Mastriano, a retired Army colonel who became a state senator in 2019, has opposed COVID-19 restrictions since the early weeks of the pandemic, leading anti-shutdown rallies, belittling masking and other containment measures.