This past November, Gov. Tom Corbett became the first standing governor in the last 40 years in Pennsylvania to lose a second term reelection. As the GOP scored overwhelming victories nationally that November night, incumbent Gov. Corbett lost by more than 325,000 votes to Democrat Tom Wolf. Corbett was a powerful first term governor who oversaw the huge shale gas industry drilling boom in the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale formation which vaulted the state into the middle of a unexpected U.S. energy boom. By the time Corbett took office for his first term, Pennsylvania’s shale gas industry was creating jobs in several of the depressed regions of the state and had created an opportunity for a tax revenue base which would have been the envy of virtually all mid-Atlantic and northeast region states. Yet these facts did not translate into success for […]