GOP OVERREACH DEFINES 2011 ELECTION RESULTS

Rochester, N.Y. -- 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 and got their butt kicked. On Tuesday, right wing ideologues reaped angry voter rebellions all across the nation.

Here in Rochester, N.Y., Democrats won two out of three county-wide races despite the local GOP spending millions of dollars to push their anti-worker and anti-equality agenda.

For the labor movement, the most important happenstance was in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly defeated Gov. John Kasich's 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.

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. The GOP-lead legislatures are trying 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 another example of excessive 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 Iowa, Democrats held their state Senate majority by winning a special election that had been engineered by Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. A Republican victory over Democrat Liz Mathis would have opened the way for Branstad to push through a cut in corporate income taxes.

Mathis' defeat could also have allowed conservatives to amend the Iowa Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Mathis prevailed with 56 percent despite robocalls from an obscure group instructing voters to ask Mathis which gay sex acts she endorsed. And who says the GOP has put the culture war behind them?

Tuesday's results underscored a momentum behind 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. The Tea Party is over. The 2011 elections 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 no doubt feel the wrath of an angry populace.


-Commentary by Ove Overmyer