Josh Shapiro ran like a moderate. He should govern like one, too.

It’s hard to construct one overarching theme from the results of the midterms, with Republicans underperforming in many areas but overperforming in a few. But one takeaway is that voters shied away from extremists while supporting moderate candidates with a record of competence in office.

The Pennsylvania governor’s race exemplified that trend.

Doug Mastriano ran to the far-right in the GOP primary and stayed there through the general election. Josh Shapiro cleared the field early in his primary and probably could have taken up the more extreme liberal positions of his party, too. Instead, he pursued the same center-left course he has throughout his career: a Democrat who is tough on crime and reasonable on taxation and spending.

To this, Shapiro added even more to entice moderates and conservatives who couldn’t stomach voting for Mastriano. Listening to parents across the state who lamented the learning loss that followed public school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, Shapiro announced that he favored giving parents choices and “funding lifeline scholarships like those approved in other states and introduced in Pennsylvania.”

Supporting increased school choice is a popular position, but still represents a significant break from Democratic Party orthodoxy.

» READ MORE: More Philadelphia voters support than oppose charter schools, Inquirer poll finds

Shapiro also refused to commit to keeping the commonwealth in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a carbon-pricing program that his soon-to-be predecessor, Gov. Tom Wolf, signed onto earlier this year. The initiative is opposed by Republicans, and the state’s participation is stuck in litigation.

Of course, Shapiro did not become an actual conservative over the course of the campaign — his defense of abortion, for example, is as full-throated as that of any other Democrat — but the general impression he gave was of a moderate who would not be held captive to his party’s ideological extremes.

Meanwhile, Mastriano played to the far reaches of the Republican Party, most prominently by denying the results of the 2020 vote despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The result was a thumping — a 14-point victory for the Democrat.

But the ballots were barely counted when some progressives began to call for Shapiro to abandon these big-tent positions and govern exclusively from the left. The Inquirer’s own Will Bunch, for example, suggested that having won, Shapiro should “listen to more progressive ideas,” noting that it is not only politically expedient for someone who may seek the presidency someday, but also that it is “morally right.”

» READ MORE: Hey, Josh Shapiro, thanks for saving democracy. Now, ditch your bad campaign promises.

I would argue that the most “morally right” thing for Shapiro to do is to honor his campaign promises.

That is true for a lot of reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that politicians — like everyone else — should do what they promise to do. The reason journalists cover these campaigns and analyze the candidates’ platforms is that we expect people to govern the way they campaigned.

It’s the whole point of the system. While we have become sadly used to the idea of politicians breaking campaign promises once they reach office, we should not be so cynical as to treat that failure as the standard. If platforms are all fake and promises are made to be broken, then why do we even vote?

If platforms are all fake and promises are made to be broken, then why do we even vote?

Beyond wanting individual candidates to be moral, we also should want the system to be moral. We talk all the time about the declining trust in institutions, especially the government. People increasingly expect politicians to lie to them and to pursue their own interests rather than those of the voters. Those who hope for something better are called naive or foolish, suckers who expect the trust they put in politicians to be repaid.

Progressives would love for Shapiro to abandon his promises on school choice and tax cuts. Conservatives would love him to suddenly become pro-life or commit to expanding fracking. But radical shifts in either direction are not what the people voted for and would only further degrade confidence.

Trust is hard to build up and easy to knock down. Building it up requires good faith on both sides. It means putting aside cynicism and trusting elected officials to do what they say they would do, knowing all the while that they might very well let us down.

It’s fine to think pessimistically, but we must act optimistically. And when, for a wonder, some politician does uphold his end of the bargain, we can start to feel that trust return and begin to build back what has been lost through bad faith and constant lies from both sides of the aisle.

Preserving democracy was a theme on the left this year, and the people responded. They rejected those who questioned the 2020 election results despite overwhelming proof that Joe Biden won. That is, as Bunch wrote, “the bare minimum for keeping a functioning democracy.”

Fair elections mean that our leaders are chosen through democratic methods, but having those leaders keep their promises means that the vote is something real and meaningful. The “functioning” part of a functioning democracy requires that our government reflect the results of the election.

Pennsylvanians overwhelmingly elected Josh Shapiro based on campaign promises that held broad appeal. To preserve that functioning democracy, he should keep them.