As Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum fought to win Ohio’s Republican presidential primary yesterday, Republican hopes of victory in the key state in November might be jeopardized by lingering fallout over a labor rights dispute that left blue-collar voters cold.
A failed attempt by the state’s Republican governor to limit collective bargaining rights for public unions last year altered the political landscape in this battleground state.
Ohio Democrats are enjoying greater fundraising and the unlikely return of middle class “Reagan Democrats” to the party, after voters repealed a law championed by Ohio Governor John Kasich to limit collective bargaining rights for fire fighters, police officers and other state workers.
“We had some of the best fundraising months in our state’s history in an odd year and those dollars came from ... low dollar donors that had not participated in the party, but were drawn to it because of the attacks on collective bargaining,” said Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.
Online donations alone for the party quadrupled last year.
“It’s indicative of a pendulum swinging in our direction, taking advantage of what occurred at the state level and now going into 2012 with a full head of steam,” Redfern said.
An average of polls by RealClearPolitics showed US President Barack Obama ahead of Romney by 1.7 points and Santorum by 2.3 points in the state.
That is a turnaround in sentiment from 2010 when the state swung Republican, putting Kasich in the governor’s office two years after the state sided with Obama over then-Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain.
Perhaps most worrisome to Republicans looking toward the next presidential election: The controversy upset members of their party, too.
“I am socially conservative, I am a registered Republican voter and voted a strict Republican ticket in 2010 — but I am voting with Democrats in ’12,” said Brian Barnhart, 33, a lieutenant with the Columbus fire department.
“The main reason is the attacks on workers that I have been seeing with the Republican Party,” he said.
Barnhart voted for Obama in 2008, but favors the social policies espoused by Republicans — much like so-called Reagan Democrats, many of whom left the party for the social and economic positions put forward by former US president Ronald Reagan, the popular Republican leader in the 1980s.
Redfern said he is working to keep those transient Democrats “home.”
The labor issue has cast a shadow over yesterday’s primary.
No Republican made it to the White House in the past century without winning Ohio and its rich cache of electoral college votes in the general election. The state holds 18 electoral college votes this year; 270 are needed to win the White House.
Victory in Ohio would give Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, or Santorum, the former US senator from Pennsylvania, momentum and a claim to say he can win it again in November.
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