Tom Wolf trounced Gov. Tom Corbett Tuesday after a campaign in which the Democrat promised to restore funding to public education, extract more revenue from the state's natural gas fields and restructure the state's personal income tax.
Mr. Wolf will be challenged in reaching those goals after an election in which Republicans appeared to be in position to retain or even expand their majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. Mr. Corbett often had a tough time pushing his agenda through a General Assembly controlled by his own party. Mr. Wolf, a first-time office-seeker, will soon discover whether he can do any better working across the partisan aisles of Harrisburg.
"This is a place that deserves to have a great future,'' Mr. Wolf said of the state he will lead in the new year. "We need to expect a lot of ourselves, and if we do, if we do, we can do great things,'' he told cheering supporters at a York arena. "So here's my lesson: Let's make this the time. Lets make this the place, Pennsylvania. ... Let's make this the time. Let's get started."
The Wolf victory was sweeping on its own terms, but it failed to produce a coattail effect in either legislative or Congressional races across the state. Republicans held onto their 13-5 dominance of the state's U.S. House delegation as every incumbent on the ballot was re-elected and the GOP kept control of a suburban Philadelphia seat opened with the retirement of a GOP veteran, while Democrats retained another seat vacated by one of their members.
Mr. Corbett's loss gave him the unwelcome distinction of being the first Pennsylvania governor defeated in a bid for re-election.
"I said I may be a one-term governor, and I am, but I am proud of what we did,'' ' Mr. Corbett told supporters at the Omni William Penn after a ritual phone call to congratulate his opponent.
The former prosecutor had been swept into office in the Republican tide of 2010, as voters vented their frustrations with a lagging economy by electing GOP governors in a list of states that had given their electoral votes to President Barack Obama two years earlier. Mr. Corbett easily defeated former Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato in that contest, but that proved to be the high-water mark for his popularity.
He managed to stand against one political wave when he won re-election as attorney general in 2008 at the same time that President Barack Obama was carrying the state by a landslide. As the voters rebuffed him Tuesday, he was an outlier in the opposite direction -- a GOP casualty on a good night for Republicans across the country.
For Mr. Corbett, a rocky national economy proved an albatross as well as an opportunity. While it paved the way for his 2010 election, its persistent effects forced him into difficult budget decisions that reverberated throughout this campaign. In particular, the cuts to state education funding that came on his watch provided a club for his opponents. Mr. Corbett protested that the education cuts should be blamed on the expiration of federal stimulus funding. But that explanation didn't gain traction with voters who, as Tuesday's results suggested, continued to blame the Republican for budget cuts and tax increases in cash-strapped school districts.
A sour public mood proved a hurdle for the re-election prospects of incumbent governors across the country this year, but Mr. Corbett faced additional headwinds in his quest for a second term. He had difficulty forging a working relationship with GOP lawmakers. He managed some legislative successes, in areas such as a reform of the state's unemployment compensation system and the enactment of a significant transportation funding bill. But his party’s majorities balked at lining up behind other initiatives including pension reform and attempts to privatize the liquor sales.
Mr. Corbett also carried a unique political burden spawned by the prosecution of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant later convicted of molesting a series of young men. A special counsel appointed by Kathleen Kane, the Democratic attorney general, absolved him of any impropriety or unwarranted delay in the case, which began when he was still attorney general, but the case remained a magnet for criticism -- both from those who contended that the prosecution had been too slow and Penn State partisans who thought the prosecution had been too tough on the school and the late Joe Paterno, the iconic forced out in the wake of the scandal.
For those and other reasons, this campaign, in the view of most analysts, remained a referendum on the incumbent. Beyond his proposal for a 5 percent extraction tax on the state's burgeoning natural gas industry, Mr. Wolf was able to cruise to victory on a platform of very general promises to boost school funding and revamp the state's personal income tax with unspecified changes in its exemption and rate.
Through the summer and fall, serial distraction frustrated the Corbett campaign's effort to switch the spotlight to its challenger. They were forced to defend the status of an education adviser with few visible duties, a very public exchange of recriminations with GOP legislative leaders, repeated credit agency downgrades and the fallout over former Corbett aides enmeshed in a controversy over the exchange of pornographic emails.
Mr. Wolf had an easier road. Jump-starting his campaign with more than $10 million of his own money, the businessman's early advertising campaign allowed him to surge to the front of the polls over other Democratic contenders with longer political resumes. He won the right to take on Corbett in a primary landslide that climaxed a campaign marked by near unanimity on the issues among the candidates. They all promised to tax natural gas and restore education funding.
Many political races see a shift in issues or emphasis between the primary and general elections. Not this one. The Democratic field started hammering Mr. Corbett on education and other issues last winter and spring and Mr. Wolf carried the message through to Tuesday's comfortable victory.
Every other Democrat elected governor in the past half century came from one of the Democratic Party's traditional bastions of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the Scranton region. Mr. Wolf is the first Democrat to claim the governor's mansion from a political base in the heavily Republican center of the state since the 1954 election of George Leader, another York Democrat. He is the first to be elected governor without having previously held office since the late Milton Shapp in 1970.
While a first-time candidate, however, he is hardly a political neophyte. Mr. Wolf, 65, is a Dartmouth graduate who received a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. Rather than continue in academe he returned to his home in Mt. Wolf, Pa., a town named for his family, and found a career in the family's building and kitchen supply business. Along the way, he was deeply active in multiple civic and charitable institutions in the York region. He was also assumed an increasing profile as a political contributor, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates including former Gov. Ed Rendell, who would later appoint him secretary of revenue in his second administration.
Mr. Wolf now has a few short months to assemble his own Cabinet, and not much more time to craft his first budget proposal. In the latter task, he will be forced to flesh out the details of the broad campaign promises that carried him to victory. In particular, that budget message will scrutinized for the specifics of a tax plan that he insisted throughout the campaign he could not supply until he had access to the most current information from the department he once led.
Elected lieutenant governor alongside Mr. Wolf was state Sen. Mike Stack of Philadelphia. In Pennsylvania, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor are elected separately in the primary, but share a ticket in the general election. Mr. Stack raised eyebrows when he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he would consider holding onto his Senate seat temporarily while also serving as lieutenant governor. Mr. Wolf said he wasn't in favor of the plan.
In response, Mr. Stack issued a statement that had a deferential tone toward his senior partner, but stopped short of ruling out the novel plan altogether.
Post-Gazette writers Karen Langley and Chris Potter contributed to the report.
First Published: November 5, 2014, 1:35 a.m.
Updated: November 5, 2014, 5:12 a.m.
