What was the deal with Pa. Gov. Tom Corbett?

Until yesterday, we’ve always re-elected governors here in Pennsylvania. But — as everyone has been predicting for more than a year — Tom Corbett proved the exception to that pattern, losing big in yesterday’s vote to challenger Tom Wolf.

By the time election day arrived, that outcome was so expected and predictable that most outlets called it for Wolf as soon as the polls closed. Many reports on the election didn’t even include final vote tallies and percentages (Wolf 55 percent, Corbett 45 percent — a difference of about 330,000 votes), running stories that seemed to have been written very early on election day, or maybe even earlier.

You didn’t even need to keep track of opinion polls here in Pennsylvania to know that this was how the election was going to turn out. You could tell just from talking to die-hard Corbett supporters — most of whom took the initiative to explain that supporting the governor felt like dying hard. They’d use a lot of words like “despite” or “but still.” And you could see the same thing in political ads for other Pa. races. Republicans were running away from Corbett as though he were contagious, while every Democratic candidate in every down-ballot race seemed eager to link their opponent to the unpopular governor.

Tom Wolf seems like a nice, competent fellow and he ran a smart, charming campaign, but the outcome of this election seemed predetermined long before Wolf was nominated in his party’s primary. Whatever his merits or demerits, this vote didn’t seem to be about putting Tom Wolf into office as much as about kicking Tom Corbett out of office.

But why? Nobody likes Tom Corbett. Why not?

Personal charisma, or a lack thereof, might play a part. But look at Congress. Congress is filled with members from both parties who make Corbett seem dynamic, telegenic and warm by comparison, yet they enjoy almost complete job security while Corbett is being sent home after a single term.

So maybe it’s because of Corbett’s policies. Slashing education funding to cut taxes for the wealthy, for example, might reasonably be expected to be unpopular with families that include students. My daughters voted yesterday while wearing their Temple and West Chester University hoodies. I doubt anyone who saw them at the polling place was guessing they were there to re-elect the guy who wanted to reduce the quality of their schools while increasing the cost.

Opinion polls have, indeed, shown that many of the policies that have made up Gov. Corbett’s agenda during the past four years lack public support. When Pennsylvanians are asked about those policies individually, they don’t like them.

But if Corbett’s historic unpopularity is due to the public’s dislike for those policies, then how do we explain everything else that happened yesterday in the Pennsylvania elections? In the state legislature, Corbett’s fellow Republicans picked up eight seats — going from a 111-92 majority in the current session to a 119-84 majority in the next one. And: “The GOP also gained in the Senate, from 27-23 to 30-20, winning two open seats and defeating incumbent Sen. Tim Solobay.”

How do we account for this? How does it make sense to say Corbett was punished by voters for signing into law the very same agenda those very same voters rewarded state lawmakers for passing?

I think it has to do with the different way voters perceive executives and legislators. Right or wrong (and I think it’s wrong), voters seem to hold a governor personally accountable for the outcome of the policies he or she supports in a way that they don’t hold lawmakers accountable for supporting those very same policies.

The governor’s race was about Tom Corbett’s policies — education, regressive taxation, fracking give-aways, etc. The lawmakers who sided with Corbett on all of those things weren’t re-elected on the basis of those policies. Their campaigns were about … well, about whatever it is that campaigns are about when they’re not about policies. Flags, tribal identity, inchoate fears, ominous music playing under grainy black-and-white video, Satanic baby-killers, gays, guns, God, that guy in Texas who died from ebola, Benghazi!, etc.

Pennsylvania’s electorate contradicted itself yesterday. If it was right to reject Tom Corbett, then it was wrong to reinforce the Corbett agenda by increasing the Corbett majority in the state legislature. If it was right to strengthen the Republican hold on the state legislature, then it was wrong to vilify Tom Corbett.