THE ONE THING that all four House members who were defeated at the polls this year had in common was that they had signed the pledge to never vote to raise taxes, no matter what the situation. One of the three losers in the Senate — where the pledge has been less of a driver of public policy — was also a pledge signer. And only two of the seven non-incumbents who signed the pledge went on to be elected.

For those of you keeping score at home, this marks a notable shift from what had heretofore seemed like an inevitable march to dominance of the ideology if not the organization of a Washington group that has a goal of slashing government spending by half (as a start). The losses cap an election season in which a remarkably small number of new candidates had decided that signing the group’s pledge was essential to winning election.

The group, Americans for Tax Reform, which gets anti-tax groups in South Carolina to gather up its pledges, had convinced 67 of the 170 members of the 2004 General Assembly to sign its no-taxes pledge. Thanks to voluntary and involuntary retirements, that number will be down to 60 in the 2005 General Assembly. And that number is exaggerated. Three legislators have gone out of their way to tell me that they have repudiated their pledge from earlier years, but that Americans for Tax Reform has refused their repeated demands to be removed from its list. I have no doubt there are others.

We still have a disturbingly high number of people who have abdicated their sacred duty to consider the facts before them and make the best decision about every issue that comes up, rather than being so bound by a philosophy that they refuse to be bothered by facts. And one of the two new pledgers elected this year, Richland Rep. Joan Brady, made her pledge the centerpiece of her crucial primary run-off campaign.

But it’s possible that, once the dust settles, we’ll find that South Carolina no longer holds the distinction of being the state with the highest percentage of legislators who have signed the pledge.

More significantly, the shift seems to indicate that candidates and voters alike are beginning to understand that the opposite of pledge signers are not those legislators who support every tax increase they see, regardless of the situation; those two groups are quite similar: Members of neither are meeting their responsibility to be deliberative.

The opposite of the pledge signers is more typically people such as House Ways and Means Chairman Bobby Harrell, who hasn’t voted for a tax increase in his 12 years in the Legislature, who can’t foresee doing so, and who has done more than nearly any other member of the Legislature to cut taxes. Mr. Harrell, though, refuses to sign the pledge — a position that resulted in an ad campaign attacking him this spring — because he correctly believes that he owes a responsibility to his voters to think on every issue that comes before him.

Americans for Tax Reform’s losses alone are significant. But after a strong showing in the primaries, fellow traveler All Children Matter also suffered a notable defeat in the fall. Its poster boy, Republican Ken Wingate, lost his bid for the Senate in a Republican-leaning district. The Michigan group, along with its local affiliate, spent at least six figures on TV and direct mail for Mr. Wingate, in what apparently was its biggest effort in the latest state it has targeted to push toward giving tax money to parents to take their children out of the public schools.

Democrats and Republicans alike are taking Mr. Wingate’s defeat by Rep. Joel Lourie — who hit hard on Mr. Wingate’s support for removing public money from the public schools, and his own opposition to that — as a strong sign that voters don’t like Gov. Mark Sanford’s tuition tax credit plan.

I don’t know whether that’s fair or not; Mr. Lourie was an incredibly attractive candidate, and he was running in what may be one of the most pro-public-education districts in the state. But it’s clear that a Wingate win would have been perceived in the State House as a mandate for All Children Matter and its agenda.

The setbacks for these two groups are significant because this year marked the first time out-of-state groups have played such a huge role in how South Carolinians choose to govern themselves. But they’re more significant because the two groups support agendas that will hinder, rather than help, our state’s attempts to improve itself.

There’s no reason to think that either All Children Matter or Americans for Tax Reform is going to close up shop and leave South Carolina; pledge signing remains popular here, and Mr. Sanford has made getting public money into private schools a top priority for next session. But for that very reason, it’s gratifying to see the deceptively named “school choice” movement and the idea of signing away your responsibility to think suffer at least a setback.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.