US President Barack Obama’s Republican foes have suffered a significant defeat in the key swing state of Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly overturned an unpopular anti-union law in a referendum.
Democrats also scored a win in the Republican-leaning Bible Belt state of Kentucky, where Governor Steve Beshear handily won re-election with a 20-point margin over his Republican challenger.
The results could help reverse the momentum of Republicans who used last year’s huge electoral gains to pass extreme measures favored by the party’s right wing, said Paul Beck, a political science professor at Ohio University.
“Republicans are going to be attacked all over the country in state races as well as the [2012] presidential race as having been taken over by these extreme elements,” Beck said.
“Whether it will help an unpopular president saddled with a poor economy, we’ll see, but it may be the main theme,” he said.
Unions and their supporters took to the streets in mass protests earlier this year when Republican-dominated legislatures in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and other states pushed through bills aimed at busting public sector unions.
Republicans insisted the restrictions were the only way to close gaping budget deficits and tried to paint public workers as greedy, lazy and living large off gold-plated pension and healthcare benefits.
However, the attacks on teachers, firefighters, police and nurses backfired, creating an alternative outlet for middle-class economic angst that had at that point only been channeled to the right by the Tea Party movement.
Democrats worked to harness the frustration, just as they have been trying to benefit from the anti-corporate greed activists who have been flooding Occupy Wall Street protests across the nation.
Ohio activists collected 900,000 signatures — nearly three times what was needed to get the measure on the off-year election ballot — in support of overturning the bill, which stripped the state’s 360,000 public workers of most of their bargaining rights.
Millions of dollars poured into the state as airways were filled with competing ads ahead of the bellwether vote.
US Vice President Joe Biden hailed the results, saying Ohio voters had “delivered a gigantic victory for the middle class.”
“By standing with teachers and firefighters and cops, Ohio has sent a loud and clear message that will be heard all across the country: The middle class will no longer be trampled on,” he said in a statement.
The Democratic National Committee praised Ohio’s rejection of a “blatantly partisan attempt to lay the blame for our economy on middle class Americans, while letting the wealthiest and special interests off the hook and not asking them to pay their fair share.”
The vote was also seen as a referendum on Republican Governor John Kasich, who is suffering from one of the lowest gubernatorial approval ratings in the country — at about 33 percent — and became the face of the fight to keep the law.
The bill was overturned by a margin of 62 to 38, elections officials reported in preliminary results.
“It’s clear that the people have spoken,” Kasich told reporters.
“I’ve heard their voices, I understand their decision and frankly I respect what people have to say in an effort like this ... It requires me to take a deep breath and to spend some time reflecting on what happened here,” he said.
The head of the AFL-CIO union’s Ohio branch called Tuesday’s victory “only the beginning.”
“Working people are coming together to call for an economy and an Ohio that fights for workers’ rights and an economy that works for everyone in all occupations and trades,” Tim Burga said in a statement.
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