Nov 1, 2014 4 min read

If, as is widely forecast, Pennsylvania voters on Tuesday elect Tom Wolf as the 47th governor of the commonwealth, it will be history-making and reflect broader changes in the way we select our leaders.

Since the 1960s, when Pennsylvania changed its constitution to allow its chief executives to serve two terms, voters have routinely re-elected them (though it was a little close for Dick Thornburgh in 1986), and the Governor’s Mansion has predictably switched between eight years of Republican control and eight years of Democratic control. With Wolf’s presumed election, voters will be tossing out Gov. Tom Corbett just four years after they elected the Republican with a decisive 54 percent of the vote.

And Wolf’s ascension to the state’s highest office will demonstrate the more pivotal roles that the media and cold, hard cash now have in the political process. A successful, moneyed businessman with an impressive background but relatively little political experience, Wolf catapulted over a Democratic primary field in the spring that included better-known quantities, such as Philadelphia-area Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz and Rob McCord, the state’s treasurer. Despite having only served for 19 months as revenue secretary in the administration of Gov. Ed Rendell, Wolf was able to convince a majority of Democratic primary voters that he should be their standard-bearer through a largely self-financed advertising blitz. Assuming he becomes governor, Wolf will be no David L. Lawrence or Raymond P. Shafer, both of whom were political creatures who rose up through the ranks.

Wolf will be an unknown quantity. But we believe voters should take a chance on him.

Pennsylvania has, it seems, been dissatisfied with Corbett since shortly after he took the oath in January 2011, and among those who have been most discontented are state lawmakers. Even with Republicans controlling the Legislature, Corbett has been stubbornly unable to move several of his key agenda items forward, such as the privatization of the state’s wine and liquor outlets and reform of the pension system. Some GOP colleagues point to communication skills or a lack thereof. They contend he is still unable to break out of the prosecutorial style that served him so well when he was U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania and the commonwealth’s attorney general. If he has had no success in rallying his troops in his first term, it’s improbable that he would fare much better in a second.

Perhaps the most persistent criticism of Corbett is that education funding has been allowed to plummet on his watch. While he and his supporters counter that was the result of federal stimulus dollars being withdrawn, other programs that received stimulus funding received fresh infusions of state dollars after the stimulus program ended. Homeowners across the commonwealth were left to make up the difference in education funding with property tax increases, larger class sizes and program cuts.

Corbett has also been too eager to sign on with the tea party faction of his party. He gave his approval to a voter I.D. law that is, let’s be honest, designed to place hurdles in front of voters who aren’t inclined to vote for the GOP, and had to be dragged kicking and clawing into accepting marriage equality after previously likening same-sex nuptials to incest. His efforts to privatize the Pennsylvania Lottery were rooted in free-market dogma, and residents rightly rebelled against a state asset being off-shored to a British concern.

The governor has also resisted a modest severance tax on natural gas extraction, something that Wolf has vowed to fix. We worry, though, that he has overpromised how much revenue it could generate and the number of areas such a tax could be used for, from education to pensions. And if a severance tax is imposed, it should also continue to help pay for the impact drilling has on the environment and infrastructure in the communities where it is taking place, something that is important in Washington and Greene counties.

Clearly, Pennsylvania needs a change in direction. While the governor is neither a monarch nor a dictator, he does help set the commonwealth’s agenda and drive it forward. We are cautiously optimistic that Tom Wolf is the candidate best suited to that role.