Analysts trying to gauge the mood of voters heading into 2012 based on the results of contentious ballot issues in yesterday’s low turnout off-year elections should be forgiven if they awoke this morning with hangovers because from all appearances the Democrats defied expectations in beating back a Republican agenda that only one year ago had helped return control of the House of Representatives to the GOP.

The biggest victory came in Ohio where a law that restricted the right of public workers to bargain collectively was defeated by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin. But does the landslide victory — a slap in the face to anti-union Governor John Kasich — auger victories by President Obama and other Democrats in Ohio next year? Although Obama comfortably leads all Republican challengers in polls at this juncture, with unemployment at 9.1 percent in Ohio and few jobs on offer, his again taking the Buckeye State is by no means a certainty.

In Mississippi, voters defied expectations and rejected a so-called personhood amendment to the state Constitution by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin. The amendment would have banned virtually all abortions and some forms of birth control by declaring a fertilized human egg to be a legal person. This was another setback for the Republican agenda but it is unlikely to have any impact in 2012 considering that Mississippi is among the reddest of red states.

In Maine, where Republicans had ended same-day registration at polling places as part of a nationwide effort to suppress voter turnout, voters voted to restore the practice by a 59 percent to 40 percent margin, while in conservative Arizona voters appeared close to turning out of office state Senator Russell Pearce, a Tea Party darling and the chief architect of the state’s controversial anti-immigration law.

There were few surprises in big city mayoral races despite the anger at Washington.

Democrats Michael Nutter in Philadelphia, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in Baltimore and Greg Stanton in Phoenix were re-elected, while in San Francisco, Edwin M. Lee, the interim mayor, was in a close race to become the city’s first mayor of Chinese descent.

Meanwhile, in Montgomery County, a Philadelphia suburb crucial to Obama’s victory in Pennsylvania in 2008, Democrats took control of the county commission for the first time in its history.

It is tempting to say that the great pendulum of American politics has against swept away from the right and back toward the center and beyond as it did in 2008, but a small handful of ballot issues do not a trend make. What the results of these ballot issues do emphatically show is that the Republican view that the party’s 2010 mid-term election gains represented a mandate is delusional.

All you need to do to confirm that is check out the looks on the faces of Kasich, Pearsce and other Republican stalwarts as the results came in last night.