Big win for Democrats in Ohio and an abortion surprise in Mississippi

The outcomes Tuesday in balloting from Maine to Mississippi included enough wins for Democrats, abortion rights advocates, and labor unions to give a bit of a lift to President Obama and his allies as they look toward the 2012 elections, 12 months from tonight.

In Ohio, voters overwhelmingly rejected the law enacted last spring by Gov. John Kasich and the Republican-controlled legislature that limited the ability of public employee unions to collectively bargain.

The law also would have required performance-based pay for most public employees and required them to pay 15 percent of the cost of their health care benefits.

Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz cheered the outcome in Ohio calling the law “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. Voters in Ohio know that targeting public employees for political reasons will do nothing to create jobs or boost Ohio’s economy.”

Yet at the same time that Ohio voters were boosting labor unions, they also delivered at least a symbolic rebuff to Obama’s health care reform law by overwhelmingly approving a ballot measure saying that no federal, state, or local law or rule could compel any person or employer to participate in a health care system. The practical effect of that Ohio measure hinges on the outcome of legal challenges in federal courts to Obama’s health care law.

In the Mississippi, abortion rights advocates scored a somewhat surprising victory as the Associated Press projected that voters would defeat Initiative 26, a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution that would have defined the word “person” to include every human being “from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.”

With nearly 60 percent of the precincts reporting results, 57 percent of voters were voting “no” on the ballot measure.

A statement from Planned Parenthood cheered the victory, saying “Mississippi voters rejected the so-called ‘personhood’ amendment because they understood it is government gone too far, and would have allowed government to have control over personal decisions that should be left up to a woman, her family, her doctor and her faith….”

Both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor had backed the measure.

Proponents of Initiative 26 said its passage would be a historic triumph for anti-abortion forces, but Republican Gov. Haley Barbour indicated he had misgivings about its effect on in vitro fertilization and ectopic pregnancies, even as he said he had voted for it.

Veteran conservative lawyer and anti-abortion activist James Bopp had criticized the ballot measure, saying it might open the way to a new Supreme Court ruling strengthening abortion rights.

Msnbc