Voters in Pennsylvania helped send Republican Donald Trump to the White House on Tuesday, giving a GOP presidential nominee our state’s 20 electoral votes for the first time since 1988.

Voters did something else noteworthy and not seen for generations: They ratcheted up Republican holds on both chambers of the General Assembly.

In the state House, Republicans, who already held a commanding 119-84 majority, now own 122 seats in the 203-member chamber. That’s the largest conservative majority since 1957, according to Republican leaders. One of the House Democrats to fall Tuesday was Rep. Jaret Gibbons, D-10.

In the state Senate, where Republicans also had a decisive pre-election-night majority (31-19), the party picked up three additional seats. The 34-16 majority for Senate Republicans is the largest since 1949.

As U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (who also won reelection Tuesday) said when he visited Butler last week, this is what “running up the score” looks like. That’s what Toomey said needed to happen if he was to outlast Democratic challenger Katie McGinty on Tuesday, and voters in Butler County — who broke for the Republican at a rate of more than 2-to-1 — and across the state delivered, and not just for him.

The drubbing sets up big questions going forward:

- What will Pennsylvania Republicans do with their historic majorities?

- What will Pennsylvania Democrats do with legislative ranks that were already threadbare and now are essentially decimated?

- What will Gov. Tom Wolf, a fiery Democrat who has not shrunk from protracted budget clashes with Republicans during his first two years in office, be able to do at all?

With a new, two-year legislative session before us, the state of affairs in Pennsylvania is open to a variety of possibilities.

The good: We believe divided government is, in general, the best kind of government. It’s not easy or pretty, but it can force people on both sides of the aisle to have conversations and come to middle-of-the-road agreements that otherwise would never occur.

Voters, who on Tuesday pushed Democrats to a sweep of Pennsylvania’s three row offices (attorney general, treasurer and auditor general), seem to agree. The wins were an important accomplishment for the party, given the stains left by former Attorney General Kathleen Kane and former Treasurer Rob McCord, both of whom were forced to resign mid-term after criminal convictions.

The bad: Those same difficult conversations and middle-of-the-road agreements that divided government can engender can also degenerate into destructive gridlock. For evidence of that look no further than the crippling budget impasse Pennsylvania suffered in Wolf’s first year on the job.

Republicans’ veto-proof majority in the state Senate could be an antidote. Or it could create a wholey-new-yet-still-destructive dynamic: a headstrong legislature in headlong pursuit of its unilateral agenda.

The ugly: Republicans’ historic General Assembly majorities likely mean redistricting reform — something Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s worst offenders when it comes to gerrymandering, sorely needs — won’t be on the agenda this legislative session. That’s too bad, because the necessary changes require a constitutional amendment, and the next round of redistricting will occur in 2020-21. So the time is ripe.

We hope the caucus proves us wrong in this, and tackles the issue for what it is: a grievous perversion of democracy that promotes government gridlock and voter apathy. But if you were on the winning end of historic majorities, the temptation to ignore it is mighty.