Hey, Josh Shapiro, thanks for saving democracy. Now, ditch your bad campaign promises.

If you were walking down a sidewalk in downtown Harrisburg or certain neighborhoods in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh this fall and happened to notice a drop of blood on the cement, it might have come from progressive political activists biting their tongues with all their might.

In arguably the most consequential election in modern Pennsylvania history, voters on the political left showed a remarkable degree of unity in agreeing on what mattered most on Nov. 8: making sure that the GOP’s right-wing extremist gubernatorial candidate, state Sen. Doug Mastriano — who threatened to place Big Lie enthusiasts in charge of elections, slash school funding and govern on Christian nationalist principles — didn’t get within a country mile of the governor’s mansion.

That meant unqualified support for the only vehicle for stopping Mastriano’s authoritarianism: Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee who raised a boatload of money by spotlighting Republican extremism and playing up his defense of abortion rights, while wowing the Beltway pundit crowd by delivering some Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-caliber speeches defending democracy and the American Way.

“My name may be on the ballot,” Shapiro told a final-weekend rally at Temple University, as two presidents — Joe Biden and Barack Obama — looked on approvingly. “But it’s your rights, it’s your future that’s on the line.” It was a moment that so moved the cable-TV punditocracy that some of them — in the wake of the Democrat’s landslide victory — are now shortlisting the governor-elect for a future run for national office.

Whoa, let’s slow down here.

Before battling the snows of Iowa or New Hampshire, Shapiro is going to have to prove he can handle Harrisburg — an even chillier climate, politically, where the headaches of governing will surely make Shapiro miss the flowery speechifying of the campaign trail. This is where those tongue-biting progressives enter this picture.

During the long 2022 campaign, a lot of liberal activists and voters watched with dismay but — fighting every instinct in their body — stayed quiet as Shapiro didn’t just move to the political center in the general election campaign, but voiced some policy objectives that some progressives saw as Republican-lite.

The threat of far more destructive policies from Mastriano motivated would-be critics of Shapiro from the left to keep silent. But many were alarmed by the Democrat’s embrace of a school-voucher program that sounded like a Mastriano campaign plank, his support for Pennsylvania natural gas in a moment of climate crisis, a Republican-style embrace of corporate tax cuts, and a criminal-justice agenda that stresses hiring more cops.

“He didn’t have to do these things,” Eric Rosso, a veteran activist who currently heads the progressive Pa. Spotlight journalism project, told me, pointing out that Shapiro had built up a double-digit lead over Mastriano and had state teachers’ unions bludgeoning the Republican for cuts in public-school funding when he came out with his surprise support for vouchers.

Indeed, in his first week as governor-elect, Shapiro sent a new worrisome signal to voters on the left when he refused to criticize state House Republicans’ impeachment of Philadelphia progressive district attorney Larry Krasner, who was overwhelmingly reelected in 2021 — based on policy disagreements, not any misconduct. So is Shapiro done with defending democracy now that his own votes have been counted?

Ironically, those comments came at virtually the same moment that Rosso was telling me that Shapiro will need continued support from pro-Krasner Democrats if he wants to govern successfully in a fractured Harrisburg. “As leader of the Democratic Party,” he said, Shapiro “has to show there is some space in his party for progressives — the people who organize, and who elected Krasner.”

Indeed, the most surprising Pennsylvania election outcome — the blue wave that has apparently allowed Democrats to regain control of the state House for the first time in a dozen years, albeit by a one-vote margin — now poses both an opportunity and a challenge for the incoming governor. As much as Shapiro might feel compelled both by his ideology and the practicalities of a capital where the GOP still rules the Senate to focus on deals with Republicans, the caucus of progressive Democrats could curtail any moves too far to the right.

The surprisingly conservative campaign that Shapiro mounted in defeating Mastriano might have seemed like clever politics for the fall, but it could mean a winter of bad government by prescribing the wrong cures for the actual problems that Pennsylvania faces, including income inequality, inadequate public schools, and greenhouse-gas pollution.

A look at some of the issues before the new governor:

Like most issues, Shapiro will clearly mark an improvement from the GOP’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. As AG, he showed a willingness in a 2020 grand jury report to at least go after the worst polluters and call for tighter state regulation. But like his fellow Democrat, Gov. Tom Wolf, Shapiro seems more tuned in to the pipe dream of natural-gas jobs than the urgent need to curb fossil-fuel emissions as rapidly as possible. Shapiro has claimed that choosing between jobs and the environment is “a false choice” and hasn’t even said if he’ll seek to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which was one of Wolf’s goals.

Shapiro — again, sharply different from Mastriano and other Republicans — has supported increasing state funding for public schools, and sided with reformers in the pending landmark lawsuit over how those funds are distributed. However, he shocked some supporters by endorsing “the concept” of a Lifeline Scholarship program that would take away dollars from underperforming public schools, including an estimated 150 in Philadelphia, and give that money to parents in the form of vouchers.

Shapiro was hardly alone among 2022 Democrats in promising to throw more taxpayer dollars at police departments, including a proposal for $6,000 hiring bonuses for new recruits. But the candidate’s “fund the police” mindset added to the suspicions among activists wary of his longtime support from the reactionary Fraternal Order of Police, his clashes over reform with now-Sen.-elect John Fetterman on the Board of Pardons, and his open feuding with Krasner. That Pennsylvania has one of the highest U.S. rates of mass incarceration did not appear to be on his campaign’s radar screen.

» READ MORE: Hey Biden, Shapiro: Stop pandering on cops | Will Bunch Newsletter

In the campaign, both Shapiro and Mastriano supported cutting the state’s corporate tax rate deeper and more quickly than the current timetable approved by Wolf and lawmakers. The Democrat’s current proposal to cut Pennsylvania’s corporate tax rate to 4% ignores the loopholes that allow many large businesses to pay no tax at all, as well as the lack of evidence that reducing this tax creates new jobs. What a corporate tax cut would mean is even fewer dollars for public schools or social programs that have been slashed in recent years.

Rosso noted that activists have already begun the conversations that were put on hold while the threat of Mastriano loomed, about a strategy for pushing Shapiro to embrace some of the progressive policy ideas he shunned as a candidate. He recalled how attendees at the left-wing Netroots Nation confab in Philadelphia in 2019 protested Shapiro for failing to embrace justice reforms, and it wouldn’t be surprising now to see similar pressure around the Krasner impeachment.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen some candidates for national office — including President Biden in 2020 — move to the left on issues in making their pitch to Democratic base primary voters. Higher ambition could make Shapiro listen to more progressive ideas, but the real argument for doing so is not what’s politically expedient, but what’s morally right.

The truth is that counting all the votes — which might not have happened in 2024 if Mastriano had won — is just the bare minimum for keeping a functioning democracy. A democracy that truly flourishes is one in which workers can earn a living wage and thriving public schools lift up young people, where the air is breathable, and injustice is stamped out.

If Josh Shapiro wants to be remembered for saving the commonwealth, his work is just beginning.