Ohio Voters Take Back the Country - from Extremist Conservatives

Ohio Senate Bill 5 Overwhelmingly Repealed 

"Conservative Overreach" Undone
Moderate Republicans Join Democrats to Push Back the Extremists

Republican Governor John Kasich had his butt handed to him on Tuesday.

Republicans overreach, they do it every time they win majorities in elections that they believe give them mandates, mandates which they mistake for support for right wing extremists.  But after the 2010 elections, they outdid themselves.

Kasich, along with Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, were in the front of the right wing Union Busting, in the false name of making a friendly business climate in their states.  Their careers and their 'centerpiece' legislation was heavily funded by the right, notably in some instances by the Koch Brothers directly and indirectly.  Kasich is consistently noted along with Wisconsin Governor Walker (who has a 47% disapproval rating) and Florida Governor Rick Scott as the most unpopular governors in the nation.  Walker faces a possible recall after only a year in office, despite attempts to change the recall process to save his job.

The numbers appear to indicate that more people voted to repeal Senate bill 5 than voted to elect Governor Kasich.

The legislation was repealed by a vote of 61% to 39%, by one report, while an AP source in Cleveland puts it at 63%.  This is a landslide, this is overwhelming, in the face of yet more attempts at voter suppression by the right, and is more noteworthy than ever that this occurred in an off-year election, and was distinguished by unprecedented numbers of petition signatures to initiate the ballot initiative.

Along with this signal repeal were other significant elections rejecting the extremists on the right.

Remember all those claims by the right to justify their voter ID measures that they were only supporting fair and honest elections?  In Ohio, as has been the case in other locations, the Right - funded apparently by the Koch Brothers - have engaged in dirty tricks in an attempt to cheat to win elections.   If they can't buy elections outright, they will try to buy elections through dirty tricks.

In Ohio, it failed. In Ohio, people won and big money lost.  But in Ohio, despite the overwhelming numbers, the right wing extremists are staying bought by their wealthy would-be union-busting wealthy interests; they are going to attempt to RE-pass the same provisions of the legislation that was repealed as separate bills.

Just a hunch, but I'm betting that won't be a successful re-election strategy.

According to Politico (bold emphasis mine - DG)

COLUMBUS - Republican Gov. John Kasich warned Democrats that they needed to support a hard-edged anti-union law or get run over by “the bus” — but on Tuesday Ohio voters left serious tread marks on Kasich and, quite possibly, the national GOP.
Unions hung a humbling defeat on Kasich, who has fast become his party’s poster boy for conservative overreach, by rolling back Senate Bill 5, a new collective bargaining law that bars public sector strikes, curtails bargaining rights for 360,000 public employees and scraps binding arbitration of management-labor disputes.

and this summed up the rejection by the center of the extremist right:

“Hey, I’m a Republican, but I’m telling you, Republican firefighters and police officers aren’t going to be voting Republican around here for a while,” said Doug Stern, a 15-year veteran of the Cincinnati fire department who joined the non-partisan “We are Ohio” coalition that helped repeal the bill.
“We’ll see what happens in 2012, but our guys have a long memory. We’re angry and disgusted.”

and Politco further wrote:

...one senior state Republican blamed the governor, whose approval rating languishes in the low 30s, for “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” by alienating labor-friendly independents in the state.

Look for more posts later today about the dirty right wing political tricks of voter suppression.  Look for more posts about OTHER elections, including unprecedented numbers of successful recall elections, notably the Republican President of the Arizona senate Russell Pearce and in Michigan, also in a recall election, Michigan State Representative Paul Scott was removed from office. In Virginia a recount will determine if their state senate will change to a Democratic majority; and in Iowa, the election of an Independent keeps their state senate in the hands of Democrats.

In an equally important rejection of an extremist right wing position, extremely conservative, extremely anti-abortion Mississippi overwhelmingly rejected the attempts to change the fundamental definition of personhood to conception, a position which has no scientific justification but is promoted by the extremists on the religious right.  If this doesn't fly in Mississippi, where it appears to have been rejected by 55% of voters, it is not going to succeed ANYWHERE.  This is going to pose a problem for many of the current crop of GOP Presidential candidate wannabees, who in an attempt to move further right in order to win primary support, have embraced that position. Look for a separate post on that in the near future.