Michael Hiltzik: Voters, like investors, have had it with GOP extremism

Political observers searching for clues to how Tuesday's state and local elections would turn out could have found them in another category of voting: shareholder votes on corporate culture issues.

Had they done so, they would have detected a distinct backlash against efforts to force corporations to neglect environmental, social and governance issues, or ESG.

Think of it as a strong anti-anti-woke movement among a class somewhat more conservative in social and fiscal matters than the average American.

That movement was validated across the board in Tuesday's votes in states as politically diverse as Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia. In those states, the Republican Party's culture war was repudiated.

Voters wrote abortion rights into the Ohio state Constitution. Kentucky's Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, won reelection in part by tying his Republican opponent to a harsh antiabortion position. (That's a state Trump won in 2020 by 26 percentage points.)

Voters in Virginia, an increasingly blue