Everyone recognizes that politics is a swinging pendulum, but this time the pendulum was a wrecking ball, leaving Pennsylvania Republicans with considerably more rubble to clean up than a few roadside campaign signs.

Before we commission a dozen panels of “experts” and a 143-page Republican autopsy report, consider the explanation I frequently hear from my teenage daughter on a wide variety of topics: “it’s not that deep, Dad.” Voters were unhappy with Donald Trump, and Democrats offered an outlet to register the complaint. That’s as deep as it needed to be to win – and win big.

Josh Shapiro has spent four years telling Pennsylvanians he would get stuff done if only the always-divided legislature let him. On Tuesday, the voters went to the polls and awarded him both chambers. Shapiro beat overmatched Stacy Garrity 60.1% to 38.6%, a 21.5-point margin and nearly seven points wider than his 2022 win over the even more hapless Doug Mastriano. This time, the rest of the Democratic ticket rode in behind him, as the Republicans had in neighboring Ohio in 2022 when fellow process-focused politician Mike DeWine steamrolled to a second term.

Democrats won "bigly" on Tuesday because Republicans broke the first rule of Rust Belt patronage politics, which is that you have to give to get. Shapiro rewrote his data center policy in February to placate voters strained by rising electricity costs and promised that the first bill to reach his desk will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour — which admittedly won’t help inflation one bit, but may allow a few more families to make ends meet. Meanwhile, Trump gave his voters costly tariffs and an even costlier war, but with no offsetting patronage (his promise of a $5,000 credit for voting the Republicans back in won’t be materializing).