Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Mary Cheney leads stealth pro-SB5 group



Here's the brand new "No on Issue 2" television ad that We Are Ohio will air tomorrow. A "no" vote on Issue 2 in November is a vote against SB5, the anti-union bill psased by the Legislature earlier this year.

A Quinnipiac poll reports that most Ohioans are against SB5, though opposition is weakening. Reports the Toledo Blade,
The contest has tightened, but if the election was held today, Ohio voters would still reject the state’s controversial new law restricting public-employee collective bargaining, according to a poll released Tuesday.
The latest Quinnipiac Poll revealed a 13-point gap between support and opposition for Senate Bill 5, down from a 24-point gap in late July. Fifty-one percent of registered voters questioned said they’d vote to kill the law while 38 percent said they want to keep it.

The poll is the first to be released since both sides went on the air in the battle for the hearts and minds of Ohio voters with competing ads that argue that the law is a deliberate attempt to demonize public workers or that the law is necessary to reset a system that now weighs too heavily in favor of unions.
“Backers of SB 5 have only six weeks to make up the difference, although public opinion appears to be moving in their direction,’’ said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
SB5 opponents would be wise to be nervous. A great deal of corporate money will be spent to change Ohioans' minds. Mary Cheney, the former vice president's daughter, is leading the Virginia-based "Alliance for America's Future" group. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports,
A conservative group headed by Barry Bennett, Rep. Jean Schmidt’s former chief of staff and Mary Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, has started flooding Ohio voters’ mailboxes this weekend with flyers urging a “yes” vote on Issue 2, which would keep Senatae Bill 5 in place.
The group, based in Alexandria, Va., is called the Alliance for America’s Future, and plans to make several mailings into Ohio to help the campaign to preserve Senate Bill 5, which would limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees. Bennett, who left as Schmidt’s chief of staff early last year to head the group, said “millions” of Ohio voters will see the mail pieces which are being sent out independently of the official “Yes on 2″ committte, Building a Better Ohio.
 Be very, very afraid.