WASHINGTON — Spurred by interest groups with an ax to grind, voters this week pushed aside sharply partisan laws or the legislators identified with them — charting a rebellious, if centrist, course heading into next year’s election.
In some cases, the Tuesday results flowed from the voter purges well-known in California and now apparently spreading to other states. Several of the targets were politicians who had ridden into office on a similar tide of dissatisfaction just a year ago.
“The voters have been sending a message, time after time after time, and that is, ‘Look, we want you to listen to us and not to the powerful elite,’ ” said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster. “This is a passionately unhappy electorate.”
Russell Pearce, the influential Arizona state senator who pushed the state’s stringent anti-immigrant measure, was tossed from office in a recall. In Michigan, the state teachers union, enraged by Republican moves to cut school spending and weaken tenure for teachers, engineered the ouster of state Rep. Paul Scott, the GOP chairman of the state’s House Education Committee.
Bernie Porn, a consultant to the teachers union, predicted that the recall would trigger a cycle of retaliation by Republicans. He described the political environment in the state, a major battleground in next year’s election, as “toxic.”
Strategists in other states have privately expressed fears about a populist revolt against government — in the form of targeted strikes outside the normal election cycle, against key elected officials, and expensive contests to roll back unpopular laws.
This trend is “a logical extension of the degree of disgust with politicians and politics as it’s currently practiced in a great many places,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.
“Our politics have become so polarized that both parties seem to be getting pushed farther and farther from the center, which means farther and farther from where most voters reside,” he added, inevitably prompting a voter backlash.
Driving much of this activity are the dollars and desires of groups such as organized labor, which primarily financed the successful rollback of a GOP assault on the power of public-employee unions in Ohio, or the anti-abortion activists who promoted a “personhood” amendment that even devoutly conservative Mississippians couldn’t support.
Privately, GOP strategists blamed overreach by their party’s elected officials for setbacks Tuesday in places like Maine, where voters threw out a new law that would have ended the state’s tradition of same-day voter registration. There, as well as in Michigan and Ohio, a Republican governor had replaced a Democratic incumbent in the big GOP sweep of 2010.
“They might’ve said it was too much too soon,” Republican Gov. John Kasich confessed on election night, after Ohioans struck down the law he signed last spring that sharply curbed collective bargaining for government workers.
