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Macomb, IL – It's received little attention, but voters last month seemed to send a message to right-wing extremists: Stop! In Arizona, Mississippi and Ohio, voters slowed or stopped intolerant anti-immigration moves, on overturning women controlling their own bodies, and on union suppression.
In the last major balloting of 2011, results could point to prospects for next year, when 10 governorships are at stake, plus the US House, a third of the US Senate, and the White House.
Author Jeffrey D. Sachs recently wrote, "Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. The new progressive age has begun."
In the first legislative recall in Arizona history, Republican State Sen. Russell Pearce, architect of Arizona's harsh immigration law, was ousted despite a three-to-one fund-raising advantage.
Newly elected president of what he called Arizona's "Tea Party Senate," Pearce pushed through the anti-immigrant law and cut jobless benefits and social services. He lost to moderate Republican Jerry Lewis, who was backed by civil rights and labor groups. Lewis beat Pearce 10,800 to 9,100 in conservative Mesa.
Arizona activist Amy McMullen said, "People from all walks of life - Republicans, Democrats and independents, whites, Latinos, indigenous and African Americans - joined [the recall effort]. Party affiliation or race didn't matter; all that was important was a shared conviction that Pearce was bad for our state and that together we could remove him."
In Ohio, voters resoundingly overturned the anti-worker agenda pushed by Republican Governor John Kasich, GOP lawmakers and outside interest groups. The vote was 61% to 39%. Kasich's law was a big part of the right-wing attack on workers launched by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the billionaire Koch brothers.
Ohio's version killed union rights for 350,000 public employees, banned strikes, raised health-insurance premiums and pension contributions, and ordered local governments that wanted to raise pay to put wage increases to a vote. Calling the Ohio repeal "a turning point," AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said, "From the very beginning of our jobs crisis, anti-worker politicians like Kasich have used our poor economy to push a cynical political agenda that favors the richest 1% at the expense of the 99%. Ohio voters rejected that agenda.
"During this campaign, firefighters, nurses, teachers and other public employees were joined by construction workers, bakery workers and all kinds of private-sector workers," Trumka continued. "They came together to ensure the survival of the middle class. Politicians who side with the richest 1% will find their radical efforts stopped by working people who want America to work for everyone."
In Mississippi, voters defeated an initiative that would have defined a person "to include every human being from the moment of fertilization," an amendment rejected by more than 55% of voters.
If voters had approved Mississippi's amendment - actually part of a national "personhood" push to make abortion illegal - a fertilized human egg would have been considered a legal person there, so any action destroying an egg could've been prosecuted as murder: birth-control methods such as IUDs and morning-after pills as well as abortion, and even in vitro fertilization.
Since Mississippi is one of the most conservative states in the nation (its state legislature didn't ratify the 13th Amendment overturning slavery until 1995), the amendment was predicted to pass.
But people are more thoughtful than lawmakers. For instance, although criticized as an attempt to impose religious beliefs on everyone and backed by the state Baptist convention, the measure was opposed by state Methodist and Episcopal groups and, surprisingly, the Catholic Diocese of Jackson remained neutral.
Elsewhere, Maine voters repealed a new law pushed by Republicans to make voter registration more difficult, and with a 60% vote restored a decades-old practice of Election Day registration.
Another author, Robert Reich - former Labor Secretary and a University of California/Berkeley professor - said, "Look at the progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s. In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform."
Reich added, "Perhaps this is what's beginning to happen again across America."
Bill Knight is a freelance writer who teaches at Western Illinois University. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of WIU or Tri States Public Radio.