Editorial: The lessons of the 2022 election

So what did we learn?

The 2022 election was not just a survey of what people want and don’t want. Those are the polls that have been going on for months. You know, the ones assessing what the most important issues would be, allowing candidates to make subtle — or not so subtle — course corrections to get them just a little closer to that sweet spot of attractive to their party but not offending to the broad constituency.

Despite the blitz of television commercials, it was not a reality show. It wasn’t a dramatic pro wrestling fight with a hero and a villain and someone being smacked with a folding chair.

The bold strokes are obvious. We come out of the election with winners and losers, as always. A new governor-elect in Josh Shapiro. A new U.S. Senator-elect in John Fetterman. There are races decided, such as Summer Lee’s victory, that will send her to Congress as the first Black woman from Pennsylvania. There are those still up in the air as more than a dozen state House seats still are uncertain. Then there’s the issue of the late Tony DeLuca’s 32nd District seat, won by a man who died a month before the election.

But between all those lines are the lessons. Where do we go from here?

Pennsylvania has been a swing state for ages, pulled back and forth between the Democratic strongholds of its urban centers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and the Republican stretches that makes up most of the ample rural real estate. It frequently has traded the Governor’s Mansion from party to party and for years had U.S. Senate representation from both sides of the aisle.

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But, on Tuesday, Shapiro became the first Democrat to follow another Democrat into the governorship since David Lawrence followed George Leader in 1959. Shapiro did the same when he was elected Attorney General in 2016, becoming the state’s second Democrat in that office ever, immediately following Kathleen Kane.

Fetterman is the first Democrat elected to the Senate while the senior senator is a Democrat since 1944. Before then, the last time was 1856.

Individually, all of these are like sports statistics — interesting bits of trivia that may or may not matter much.

Taken together, it leads to questions about whether Pennsylvania is becoming less of a checkerboard of red and blue and something a little more homogeneously purple.

It is probably a bit of both — maybe a bit of a marbling, with veins of deep partisan strongholds that matter a lot when voting for regional and local offices and a more subtle blending of goals and objectives when it comes to statewide races.

But the parties need to look at where those wants and needs are less sharply defined and realize the one thing this election teaches.

Most Pennsylvanians are not as tied to the darkly shaded edges of either party’s politics as they are to the more nuanced magentas and lavenders in the middle. For every hardliner, there are more people willing to split a ticket or cross a line for the promise of things that matter, such as jobs, taxes and education.

The party that succeeds will be the one that studies up on that and advances candidates that reflect it.