Ohio Gov. John Kasich is out testing the presidential waters for 2016. While the governor may want people to believe he can walk on water, a report from the U.S. Department of Commerce shows he better take his water-wings with him because he might find himself treading water at best and submerged at worst, in light of earning reports on how the state stakes up to other states and the national average.
Ohio remains 37th in the national in job creation, as determined by the well-respected W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, and has consistently failed to break even with national job creation for 27 straight months. But when it comes to personal income in Ohio for 2014, it finally matches the nation at 3.9 percent. Ohio’s annual personal income on a per capita basis was $42,571, ranking the state in the bottom half of states at 29th. Per capita personal income in the United States was $46,129. The report ranked Connecticut first at $62,467 and Mississippi last at $34,333.
Forty-five states including Ohio experienced personal income growth in 2014 over 2013. That growth ranged from 0.5 percent in Nebraska to 5.7 percent in Alaska and Oregon. The report defined personal income including wages and other earnings from investments or Social Security payments, among other criteria. Again below the national average, net earnings grew by 3.5 in Ohio between 2013 and 2014 while during the same period 4 percent was the national average. And since inflation was way low at 1.3 percent in 2014, personal income growth in Ohio and other states exceeded that figure.
It’s no secret that workers’ wages have stagnated for decades, and net earnings in 2014 even though up don’t yet prove wages are growing again. In Ohio, the report said, personal income and net earnings growth are only slight better than over the past few years. Net earnings in Ohio grew by 3.6 percent in 2012 but slumped to only 1.6 percent in 2013, not a good benchmark to point to for Ohio’s governor who thinks his work in Ohio is a good model for the nation. Analysis of the report shows the health care and social assistance segment contributed the most to personal income growth in Ohio in 2014, while construction ranked second with manufacturing of durable goods in third place. Nationally, the report notes, professional, scientific and technical services were the largest contributing sectors.
Unfortunately for the Kasich Administration, Ohio experienced a decline in earnings in theses key sectors: farming, information, military and state and local government. In the U.S., by contrast, farming and military segments were the only areas to see earning declines. When Great Lake states were compared to each other, Ohio did perform better than its regional neighbors, which were pegged at 3.2 percent compared to 3.9 in the Buckeye State.
We began and ended this classy event with a nice catered spread in the rotunda.
In the Rotundra : Prof Singham,Matt Marshall, Elise Helgesen, and Mallory Ullman.
The premise of our Forum was that protecting the Establishment Clause means more than merely keeping sectarian prayer out of City Council meetings and nativity scenes off of city property: religion has been and is currently used against science, gay rights, contraception, and to impose religion in public schools.
Speakers included:
Prof. Mano Singham — Dept of Physics, CWRU – why actual science is important in legislation.
Piet van Lier — Policy Matters Ohio – impact of charter schools on educational funding.
Elise Helgesen Aguilar — Americans United DC Office – who we are, what we do, and why we are important.
Mallory McMaster Ullman — NARAL Pro Choice Ohio – the egregious anti-women legislation in Ohio.
Ms Ullman, Ms. Helgesen. Mr. van Lier, and Prof Singham
.
Ms. Helgesen spoke first, presenting on who AU is, what we do, what we have done, and what we aren’t – an anti-religious organization.
Mr. van Lier covered the aspects of education vouchers in Cleveland and in Ohio. He noted that test results do not show charter schools out performing public schools (in similar demographics).
Prof. Singham – demonstrated the egregious intrusion of dogma on legislation – played several clips from US House hearings in which several of our election officials asserted that the Bible was superior to science. E.G.: “No need to be concerned with Climate Change – the world will end when god decides so”.
Ms. Ullman detailed some of the recent legislation signed into law by Gov. Kasich impacts the availability of contraception and abortion availability, and legislates how physicians practice ob/gyn procedures.
Ms Helgesen then summarized the presentations, and a fruitful and informative question and answer session followed.
We then talked and finished the food: networking and noshing.
To demonstrate that we are not all dullards, some of us continued at NightTown.
A big thank you to all who attended, to all our speakers, to CWRU for making the room available, and to the AU National Office for making Elise available (we provided a lot of hospitality) – and to all of our speakers. Perhaps the weather kept attendance down, but for those who came, it was indeed ,an Evening to Remember.
(N.B.: Several of the photos are courtesy of the Cleveland Free Thinkers.)
Mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in print publications, web stories, and broadcast transcripts spiked from 91 times a week in early September to nearly 500 in late October, according to the website Politico — an increase of nearly 450%
(N.B.: We were also helped in Ohio by the Grandmother ad..)
(TomDispatch) “No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.
“Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists praised it or highlighted what they considered its bright side. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein wrote that Bloomberg had done Occupy Wall Street a favor. After all, he argued, something dangerous or deadly was bound to happen at OWS sooner or later, especially with winter soon to arrive. Zuccotti Park, Klein added, “was cleared… in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.”
The New York Times‘ Paul Krugmanwrote that OWS “should be grateful” for Bloomberg’s eviction decree: “By acting so badly, Bloomberg has made it easy to see who won’t be truthful and can’t handle open discourse. He’s also saved OWS from what was probably its greatest problem, the prospect that it would just fade away as time went on and the days grew colder.”
Read between the lines and what Klein, Krugman, and others are really saying is: you had your occupation; now, get real. Start organizing, meaningfully connect your many Occupy protests, build a real movement. As these columnists see it, that movement — whether you call it OccupyUSA, We Are the 99%, or the New Progressive Movement — should now turn its attention to policy changes like a millionaire’s tax, a financial transaction fee, or a constitutional amendment to nullify the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that loosed a torrent of cash into American elections. It should think about supporting political candidates. It should start making a nuts-and-bolts difference in American politics.
But such assessments miss an important truth: Occupy Wall Street has already won its first victory its own way — in Ohio, when voters repealedRepublican governor John Kasich’s law to slash bargaining rights for 350,000 public workers and gut what remained of organized labor’s political power.
Commandeering the Conversation
Don’t believe me? Then think back to this spring and summer, when Occupy Wall Street was just a glimmer in the imagination of a few activists, artists, and students. In Washington, the conversation, such as it was, concerned debt, deficit, and austerity. The discussion wasn’t about whether to slash spending, only about how much and how soon. The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent called it the “Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop” — and boy was he right.
A National Journal analysis in May found that the number of news articles in major newspapers mentioning “deficit” was climbing, while mentions of “unemployment” had plummeted. In the last week of July, the liberal blog ThinkProgress tallied 7,583 mentions of the word “debt” on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News alone. “Unemployment”? A measly 427.
This all-deficit, all-the-time debate shaped the final debt-ceiling deal, in which House Speaker John Boehner and his “cut-and-grow”-loving GOP allies got just about everything they wanted. So lopsided was the debate in Washington that President Obama himself hailed the deal’s bone-deep cuts to health research, public education, environmental protection, childcare, and infrastructure.
These cuts, the president explained, would bring the country to “the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.” After studying the deal, Ethan Pollock of the Economic Policy Institute told me, “There’s no way to square this plan with the president’s ‘Winning the Future’ agenda. That agenda ends.” Yet Obama said this as if it were a good thing.
Six weeks after Obama’s speech, protesters heard the call of Adbusters, the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine, and followed the lead of a small crew of activists, writers, and students to “occupy Wall Street.” A few hundred of them set up camp in Zuccotti Park, a small patch of concrete next door to Ground Zero. No one knew how long the occupation would last, or what its impact would be.
What a game-changing few months it’s been. Occupy Wall Street has inspired 750 events around the world, and hundreds of (semi-)permanent encampments around the United States. In so doing, the protests have wrestled the national discussion on the economy away from austerity and toward gaping income inequality (the 99% versus 1% theme), outsized executive compensation, and the plain buying and selling of American politicians by lobbyists and campaign donors.
Mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in print publications, web stories, and broadcast transcripts spiked from 91 times a week in early September to nearly 500 in late October, according to the website Politico — an increase of nearly 450%. In the second week of October, according to ThinkProgress, the words most uttered on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were “jobs” (2,738), “Wall Street” (2,387), and “Occupy” (1,278). (References to “debt” tumbled to 398.)
And here’s another sign of the way Occupy Wall Street has forced what it considers the most pressing economic issues for the country into the spotlight: conservatives have lately gone on the defensive by attacking the very existence of income inequality, even if to little effect. As AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put it, “Give credit to the Occupy Wall Street movement (and historic inequality) for redefining the political narrative.”
Wall Street in Ohio
The way Occupy Wall Street, with next to no direct access to the mainstream media, commandeered the national political narrative represents something of a stunning triumph. It also laid the groundwork for OWS’s first political win.
Just as OWS was grabbing that narrative, labor unions and Democrats headed into the final stretch of one of their biggest fights of 2011: an up-or-down referendum on the fate of Ohio governor John Kasich’s anti-union law, also known as SB 5.Passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature in March, it sought to curb the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 police, firefighters, teachers, snowplow drivers, and other public workers. It also gutted the political clout of unions by making it harder for them to collect dues and fund their political action committees. After failing to overturn similar laws in Wisconsin and Michigan, the SB 5 fight was labor’s last stand of 2011.
I spent a week in Ohio in early November interviewing dozens of people and reporting on the run-up to the SB 5 referendum. I visited heavily Democratic and Republican parts of the state, talking to liberals and conservatives, union leaders and activists. What struck me was how dramatically the debate had shifted in Ohio thanks in large part to the energy generated by Occupy Wall Street.
It was as if a great tide had lifted the pro-repeal forces in a way you only fully grasped if you were there. Organizers and volunteers had a spring in their step that hadn’t been evident in Wisconsin this summer during the recall elections of nine state senators targeted for their actions during the fight over Governor Scott Walker’s own anti-union law. Nearly everywhere I went in Ohio, people could be counted on to mention two things: the 99% — that is, the gap between the rich and poor — and the importance of protecting the rights of the cops and firefighters targeted by Kasich’s law.
And not just voters or local activists either. I heard it from union leaders as well. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told me that her union had recruited volunteers from 15 different states for the final get-out-the-vote effort in Ohio. That, she assured me, wouldn’t have happened without the energy generated by OWS. And when Henry herself went door-to-door in Ohio to drum up support for repealing SB 5, she said that she could feel its influence in home after home. “Every conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion sparked by Occupy Wall Street.”
This isn’t to take anything away from labor’s own accomplishments in Ohio. We Are Ohio, the labor-funded coalition that led the effort, collected nearly 1.3 million signatures this summer to put the repeal of SB 5 on the November ballot. (They needed just 230,000.) The group outspent its opponents $30 million to $8 million, a nearly four-to-one margin. And in the final days before the November 8th victory, We Are Ohio volunteers knocked on a million doors and made nearly a million phone calls. In the end, a stunning 2.14 million Ohioans voted to repeal SB 5 and only 1.35 million to keep it, a 61% to 39% margin. There were repeal majorities in 82 of Ohio’s 88 counties, support that cut across age, class, race, and political ideologies.
Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that a mood change had hit Ohio — and in a major way. Pro-worker organizers and volunteers benefited from something their peers in Wisconsin lacked: the wind of public opinion at their backs. Pollsconducted in the run-up to Ohio’s November 8th vote showed large majorities of Ohioans agreeing that income inequality was a problem. What’s more, 60% of respondents in a Washington Post-ABC poll said the federal government should act to close that gap. Behind those changing numbers was the influence of Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy protests.
So, as the debate rages over what will happen to Occupy Wall Street after its eviction from Zuccotti Park, and some “experts” sneer at OWS and tell it to get real, just direct their attention to Ohio. Kasich’s anti-union law might still be on the books if not for the force of OWS. And if the Occupy movement survives Mayor Bloomberg’s eviction order and the winter season, if it regroups and adapts to life beyond Zuccotti Park, you can bet it will notch more political victories in 2012.”
Bio: Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
The 99% versus the 1% frame is critical to making clear that the problem with our economy has nothing to do with how much teachers, or firefighters, or steel workers, or home care workers, or Social Security recipients make for a living. It has everything to do with growing economic inequality, the exploding financial sector, and an unproductive class of speculators and gamblers who don’t make anything of value but siphon off all of our increased productivity.
“A year ago the Empire struck back.Right Wing money capitalized on anger at the economic stagnation that their own policies caused just two years before. They brought a halt to the hard-won progressive victories that marked the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Last night the progressive forces tested some of the weapons and tactics they will use in next year’s full-blown counter offensive. They worked very, very well.
Progressives won key elections in Ohio, Maine, Mississippi, and Arizona.
The importance of yesterday’s labor victory in Ohio cannot be overstated. It could well mark a major turning point in the history of the American labor movement -and the future of the American middle class.
The people of Ohio rejected right wing attempts to destroy public sector unions by an astounding 61% to 39%. Progressives in Ohio won 82 out of 88 counties.
In his “concession,” the author of the union-stripping bill, Governor John Kasich, looked like a whipped dog. He was.”
from the Plain Dealer 9.11.11
“Last night’s victory will have a direct and immediate impact on the livelihoods of thousands of middle class state employees in Ohio. It will stall similar attempts to destroy unions in other states. It will turbo-charge the campaign to oust Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who jammed a union-stripping measure through his own legislature. And it will massively weaken Kasich and other Republicans in Ohio.
But last night’s victory also carried critical lessons for the progressive forces throughout America as we prepare for the crossroads, defining battle of 2012.
Lesson #1: Creating a Movement. The industrial state labor battles that culminated in last night’s overwhelming Ohio success transformed the image of unions from a large bureaucratic “special interest” that negotiates for workers and are part of the “establishment” — into a movement to protect the interests of the American Middle Class.
The Republican Governors who began these battles hoped to make a bold move to destroy union power. In fact, they have succeeded in creating their worst nightmare — the rebirth of a labor movement.
That is critically important for the future of unions – which by any measure provide the foundation of progressive political power in the United States. It also provides an important lesson for every element of the Progressive community.
These battles put the “movement” back in “labor movement.”
And the importance of “movement” can’t be overstated. Particularly at a time when people are unhappy with the direction of the country and desperately want change — they don’t want leaders who appear to be embedded parts of the status quo. They want to be part of movements for change.
Movements have three critical characteristics:
They make people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves.
They make people feel that they themselves can play a significant role in bringing about that larger goal.
They involve “chain reactions” –– they go viral. You don’t have to only engage people in movements one by one or one or group by group. They begin to engage each other.
Because they make people feel that they are part of something larger than themselves — and that they can personally be a part of achieving that larger goal — movements inspire and empower. And for that reason they give people hope.
To win, Progressives must turn the anger and dissatisfaction with the present into inspiration and hope for the future.
The labor movement turned the battle in Ohio into a fight for the future of America’s middle class. It turned the battle into a fight over the dignity of everyday working people — and their right to have a say in their future. Instead of being about “contracts,” it was about “freedom.”
Lesson #2: It’s much easier to mobilize people to protect what they have than to fight for something to which they aspire.
Every one of the big victories yesterday involved battles that had been framed as attempts by the Right — or their allies on Wall Street – to take away the rights of everyday Americans.
In Ohio, it was the right to collectively bargain about their future. In Maine, it was the right to same-day voter registration. In Mississippi it was the right to use contraceptives –– once it became clear that the so-called “personhood” amendment was not just about abortion, but ultimately about a woman’s right to use birth control. In Arizona, it was the rights of Latino Americans.
And of course, that’s why the Republicans’ plan to privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare are so toxic for them in the election next year.
Among referenda yesterday, the one progressive setback came in the largely symbolic vote — once again in Ohio — against the Health Care Reform Act’s mandate to buy insurance. The very same people who had voted against taking away the rights of their neighbors to join a union — also voted against being “forced” to buy health insurance.
The whole issue of the “mandate” is the major card the Right has played against the critically important Health Care Reform Act. Of course the whole issue could have been framed differently. The “mandate” to start paying Medicare premiums when you’re sixty-five isn’t framed as a “mandate.” People do it, both because they really want to get on Medicare, and because if they wait to pay premiums until they need it, their premiums go way up.
That’s why a Public Option was so popular with the voters. You got to choose to join something you wanted. But it’s also the way we should have framed the overall “mandate” to get insurance — with premium penalties if you fail to “opt in.”
Once the health care law becomes a fact on the ground that benefits ordinary people, every day, it will certainly become very popular. But that will wait until 2014 when most of its provisions go into effect. Once it does goes into effect, if they try to take away those benefits and the Right will run into a firestorm of opposition.
Of course if Romney is the Republican candidate next year, we don’t have to worry about the “mandate” issue at all. In fact, our attitude should be “go ahead, make my day.” It will be simple to neutralize any attack by Romney or Super-Pacs on Democrats about “mandates” by simply pointing out that the entire question is just one more example of how Romney has no core values — since he authored and passed the Massachusetts health care law built around “mandates.” In the end, Romney’s lack of core values is a much more powerful message than anything having to do with “mandates.”
Lesson #3: Framing the battle is key. In every one of these issue referenda, Progressives won the framing battle.
In Ohio, Progressives made the fight into a battle for the rights of the middle class — part of the overarching battle between the 99% and the 1%.
In Maine, Progressives made the battle into a fight over the right to register to vote. Of course the right wing frame was that eliminating same-day registration provided protection against “voter fraud.” That was pretty hard to sustain given the fact that there had been exactly two instances of “voter fraud” involving same-day registration in 28 years.
The Mississippi “personhood amendment” was framed as a battle over the rights of women to use birth control – not to make “miscarriage” a crime.
Lesson #4: Turnout is king. In Virginia, a Republican candidate leads his Democratic opponent by only 86 votes, so a recount will determine whether the Republicans there take control of the State Senate.
Turnout in the Virginia contests was low.
In Ohio, by contrast, 400,000 more voters went to the polls yesterday than in the elections in 2010. That’s one big reason why Progressives won.
And it wasn’t just inspiration and great messaging that turned them out. Rank and file union members and Progressives of all sorts conducted massive get out the vote efforts in every corner of the state.
After all, victory isn’t just about great strategy, mostly it’s about nuts and bolts — it’s about great execution. In Ohio they had both.
In Arizona, the Latino community mobilized to defeat the author of Arizona’s “papers please” law, State Senator Russell Pearce. He lost a recall election, by seven points, 52.4% to 45.4%. The Pearce defeat is just one more example of how the Republicans play the “immigration” card at their peril — and how important the Latino vote will be to the outcome next year in critical states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Florida — and Arizona.
Pearce didn’t count on Latinos going out to vote. They did.
Lesson #5: Progressives win when we stand up straight. We won last night where we stood proudly for progressive values — planted the flag — mobilized our forces and took the offensive.
People in America are not looking for leaders who apologize for their progressive beliefs or are willing to compromise those principles even before they enter the fight. They want leaders who will fight for the middle class, and fight for change; who stand up against the big Wall Street banks and the CEO class that they believe – correctly – have siphoned off the nation’s wealth, and whose greed has caused the economy to collapse.
People are willing to compromise when it seems to advance the common good — but only after their leaders have done everything in their power to defend their interests — and have mobilized them to defend theirown interests.
Lesson #6: The face of the battle in Ohio was your neighbor.
The Republicans bet that they could make public employees the “Welfare Queens” of our time. They bet that they could make public employees the scapegoats for all that has gone wrong with the American economy — that they could divide the middle class against itself.
They bet wrong.
Turned out to be impossible to convince everyday Americans that firefighters, cops, and teachers were greedy villains. Normal voters recognized them as their neighbors — as people just like themselves.
The 99% versus the 1% frame is critical to making clear that the problem with our economy has nothing to do with how much teachers, or firefighters, or steel workers, or home care workers, or Social Security recipients make for a living. It has everything to do with growing economic inequality, the exploding financial sector, and an unproductive class of speculators and gamblers who don’t make anything of value but siphon off all of our increased productivity.
Lesson #7: Progressives win when we frame the issue as a moral choice.
In Ohio, Progressives did not frame the debate as a choice between two sets of policies and programs. They posed the question as a choice between two different visions of the future.
It was a choice between an America with a strong, vibrant, empowered middle class, where every generation can look forward to more opportunity than the one that went before – or, a society with a tiny wealthy elite and a massive population of powerless workers who do their bidding.
It was posed as a choice between a society where we’re all in this together –– where we look out for each other and take responsibility for our future as a country — or as a society where we’re all in this alone — where only the strong, or the clever, or the ruthless can thrive.
If given a clear, compelling choice, Americans will chose a progressive vision of the future every time.”
Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partnersand a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.
N.B.: what we have not been able to achieve on our own – building class consciousness – gets a big assist from the tea party: Thanks.
By:E.J. Dionne
“This week’s elections around the country were brought to you by the word “overreach,” specifically conservative overreach. Given an opportunity in 2010 to build a long-term majority, Republicans instead pursued extreme and partisan measures. On Tuesday, they reaped angry voter rebellions.
The most important was in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly defeated Gov. John Kasich’s (R) bill to strip public-employee unions of essential bargaining rights. A year ago, who would have predicted that standing up for the interests of government workers would galvanize and mobilize voters on this scale? Anti- labor conservatives have brought class politics back to life, a major threat to a GOP that has long depended on the ballots of white working-class voters and offered them nothing in return.Mississippi votes on the “personhood” amendment, which would designate a fertilized egg as a person. In Maine, voters exercised what that state calls a “people’s veto” to undo a Republican-passed law that would have ended same-day voter registration, which served Maine well for almost four decades.
What’s often lost is that the conservative Republicans elected in 2010 aren’t simply pushing right-wing policies. Where they can, they are also using majorities won in a single election to manipulate future elections — by making it harder for young and minority voters to cast ballots, and by trying to break the political power of unions. The votes in Maine and Ohio were a rebuke to this strategy.In Mississippi, perhaps the most conservative state in the union, voters beat back a referendum to declare a fertilized human egg a person by a margin of roughly 3-to-2. Here was overreach by the right-to-life movement,which tried to get voters to endorse a measure that could have outlawed popular forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization.The war against overreach extended to the immigration issue, too. Russell Pearce became, as the Arizona Republic noted, the first sitting state Senate president in the nation as well as the first Arizona legislator ever to lose a recall election. Pearce, who spearheaded viciously anti-immigrant legislation, was defeated by Jerry Lewis, a conservative with a mild demeanor. Lewis correctly saw his as a victory for restoring “a civil tone to politics.” This was a case of old-fashioned conservatism beating the Tea Party variety.And in Iowa, Democrats held their state Senate majority by winning a special election that had been engineered by Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. Occupy Wall Street, notice that elections matter: A Republican victory over Democrat Liz Mathis would have opened the way for Branstad to push through a cut in corporate income taxes.
Mathis’s defeat could also have allowed conservatives to amend the Iowa Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Mathis prevailed despite robocalls from an obscure group instructing voters to ask Mathis which gay sex acts she endorsed. (It should be said, as the Des Moines Register reported, that better-known organizations opposed to gay marriage denounced the calls.)
The one potential bright spot for Republicans was not as bright as it was supposed to be. In Virginia, both sides had expected the GOP to take over the state Senate. But at best, the Republicans will achieve a 20-to-20 tie, giving Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R) a decisive role. And their chance of getting even to 20 hangs on the recount of an 86-vote margin in one district.
The split means Virginia has not reverted to its earlier status as a Republican bastion. It remains a purple state. Especially significant, Democratic consultant Mo Elleithee observed, were the party’s successes in the Washington suburbs and exurbs and in Hampton Roads, precisely the areas where President Obama needs to do well if he is to carry Virginia next year, as he did in 2008. Democrats also comfortably held the New Jersey Legislature, suggesting the limits of Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) much-touted political magic.
One of the only referendum results the GOP could cheer was a strong vote in Ohio against the health-insurance mandate. While health-reform supporters argued that the ballot question was misleading, the result spoke to the truly terrible job Democrats have done in defending what they enacted. They can’t let the health-care law remain a policy stepchild.
That useful warning aside, Tuesday’s results underscored the power of unions and populist politics, the danger to conservatives of social-issue extremism and the fact that 2010 was no mandate for right-wing policies. They also mean that if Republicans don’t back away from an agenda that makes middle-class, middle-of-the-road Americans deeply uncomfortable — and in some cases angry — they will lose the rather more important fight of 2012.
“Call it our curse. Apparently, living in Ohio means never being far from the next big election.”…How big will the race in 2010 be? It could be the most expensive Senate race in state history, with spending as high as $30 million. Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican Mike DeWine spent about $25 million in 2006.”
charles' log 