The voters’ mood: A hint for 2012

Voters have sent Republicans a very distinct message, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. They’ve had enough of “conservative overreach.” In last week’s off-year elections, voters in Ohio repealed Gov. John Kasich’s anti-labor bill to strip public-sector unions of their collective bargaining rights. Mississippi voted down a “personhood” amendment that would have given fertilized human eggs the same rights as people. And in Arizona, a state Senate president who “spearheaded viciously anti-immigrant legislation” was successfully recalled. Clearly, “middle-class, middle-of-the-road Americans” think the GOP has swung way too far to the right. What conservative activists don’t understand, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com, is that even mainstream Republican voters don’t share their disdain for government. Voters are only opposed to “government programs that seem to benefit people other than themselves.” That’s why Ohio voters stood up for the bargaining rights for “people like us”—the cops, firefighters, and nurses who live alongside them and provide them services.

But the election also produced some good signs for conservatives, said John Hood in Nationalâ€‹Review.com. Republicans gained control of the Senate in Virginia, a key battleground state in next year’s presidential elections, and successfully passed voter ID laws in Mississippi. And in a serious blow to President Obama, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a symbolic measure opposing the mandates of his Affordable Care Act. That suggests it’s not just conservative overreach that voters are unhappy with, said Danny Yadron in The Wall Street Journal. It’s overreach in general. The message to both parties is unmistakable: “Government needs to back off.”

And so we have “equipoise,” said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. The great “pendulum swing” of the 2010 midterm elections is now reversing itself, and with a year to go before the presidential election, “things can break either way.” The wildly varied results of these elections serve as a reminder that American voters are “thoughtful and discriminating,” and not mindlessly partisan. “For Republicans, this means there is no coasting to victory, 9 percent unemployment or not.” Their presidential candidate had better be a serious candidate with a command of the issues, not “a demagogic populist.” If the GOP doesn’t heed that warning, “2012 will be a struggle.”