Apparently, at least some of them were also on the side of electing Phil Bryant, since he got 61 percent of the vote last night. Awkward.

So what happened? Personhood looked like it had everything on its side: years of organizing and petition drives, early internal numbers showing massive support for the basic language of the amendment, resources from both Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association and Colorado’s Personhood USA. (The latter group broadly failed to pass Personhood back home but clearly hoped Mississippi would be easier prey.) And Bryant wasn’t alone: Every single statewide official supported Personhood — including his Democratic opponent — and you could count the local representatives who opposed it on one hand. Meanwhile, the official opposition, led by the much-maligned Planned Parenthood and ACLU, got a late start after squandering time on a failed court bid to get it off the ballot.

Then doctors, clergy and average Mississippians started voicing their opposition and even forming their own opposition groups. There were plenty of out-of-state organizers and professional strategists on board, especially in the last few weeks, but no one could call the conservative Mississippi State Medical Association, the Episcopal and Catholic bishops, and a Southern Baptist minister in the Delta tools of Planned Parenthood. The two most visible activists against 26 were rape survivor and mother of three Cristen Hemmins, who put her name to the original ACLU lawsuit and starred in commercials raising concerns about the lack of rape exceptions; and Atlee Breland, who started Parents Against 26 to focus on concerns about Personhood’s effective banning of in vitro fertilization. Women like them made their own signs and YouTube videos, wrote lucid FAQs and argued with their Facebook friends who called them baby killers, in addition to canvassing and phone banking.

It helped that it was true to say, as they did over and over again, that it wasn’t “just about abortion”; Initiative 26, at least judging by the intentions of its supporters, was also about banning common forms of birth control, making IVF impossible, and hampering doctors trying to save women with life-threatening pregnancies. But it was also manifestly about abortion. Initiative 26 may have gone down, but Mississippi is still a state with a single abortion clinic, staffed with a doctor flown in from out of state a couple of days a week, and with abysmal rates of teen pregnancy and infant mortality. Will any of that change now that even “pro-lifers” have made common cause with the state’s small pro-choice contingent? Or is this just a temporary redrawing of the lines around the reproductive rights most palatable to conservatives, like rape exceptions, just to play defense against increasingly audacious Republican threats?

At the very least, we know that there is such a thing as conservative overreaching — even in Mississippi. And maybe this victory will embolden that new coalition. On the No on 26 Facebook page, people who seem to have been previously unengaged have been excitedly talking for days about continuing their work after the election.

“It’s so helpful to know that you’re not alone,” Hemmins told me just before the election. “There’s been some talk of staying together after the vote as a group, I’m not sure for what purpose or to what extent … The religious right seems to be coming at women from so many different directions. Unfortunately, I can see us needing to rally the forces in the future.”

Indeed. On the Personhood Mississippi page, they’re already talking about taking the cause to the Legislature.

“Nothing’s fair,” Prewitt replied, according to a recording, and walked away.

Prewitt (who didn’t respond to my request for an interview yesterday) had reason to be testy. Initiative 26, until recently considered an easy sell in a fiercely antiabortion state, had just been declared a tossup in a reliable poll. Support for the amendment has dropped 17 points in just two weeks, his anti-26 counterpart, Stan Flint, told me, as the public debate shifted to what it would actually mean to declare fertilized eggs people. It would affect not only IVF, but also ban abortion and many common forms of birth control, open the door to prosecuting women who suffer suspicious miscarriages, and tie the hands of doctors trying to save women’s lives.

Prewitt’s compatriots sounded worried from the stage of the Tupelo, Miss., press conference. “I thought we would have won easily two months ago, but there’s been so much distortion, lies told, and some people believe them,” said Donald Wildmon, whose American Family Association helped take Initiative 26 (relatively) mainstream. “We’ll wait and see and we’ll pray that tomorrow will be a good day.”

No one was as upset as Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, despite the fact that the same polling that found Personhood too close to call also predicted he would be elected governor of Mississippi today. ”You’ve heard some very complex television and radio ads lately that say that these men here and many of the women that join us … somehow want to do harm to women,” he fumed. “Let’s just call it what it is, it’s wild and crazy. But that’s what the other side must do whenever we stand up for life and say, it’s simple, that child in the womb after conception has the same basic human rights as you and I.”

Bryant went so far as to compare the issue to the Holocaust and the Jews of Nazi Germany “being marched into the oven,” because of “the people who were in charge of the government at that time.” He described the ballot measure as “a battle of good or evil,” and warned, “the evil dark side that exists in this world is taking hold. And they’re saying, what we want you to be able to do is continue to extinguish innocent life. You see, if we could do that, Satan wins.”

Presumably referring to Christian leaders who have opposed or declined to support the measure, including the state’s Catholic and Episcopal bishops and a Baptist pastor in Greenville, Miss., who wrote a letter saying, “I’m a Christian and I love Jesus … I’m pro-life and against abortion … and I love Mississippi … but I’ll be voting NO on Initiative 26,” Bryant finished, ”Those who are out there and say, ‘I don’t know, it just seems too complex for me,’ remember this: You’re on the side of the lie. You’re on the side of taking the lives of innocent children. It is no more complex than that.”

Notably absent from the event was Haley Barbour, the current Mississippi governor, who last week inexplicably gambled some of his massive popularity in the state by first expressing doubts on Initiative 26, then saying he’d voted for it anyway by absentee ballot. In the interim, he was blasted by Personhood USA for being in the pocket of abortion-pill makers and turned into a robocall for the anti-26 side (which he later demanded, successfully, that they stop running).

Though a press release had been sent out for yesterday’s event, and the lineup included U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker and Rep. Alan Nunnelee, there also seemed to be no reporters present. The only questions were asked by Alan-Michael White, a smart-ass student at the University of Mississippi who recorded the media availability, and Hemmins, who asked Bryant how he could deny her, a rape survivor, autonomy over her body. “What I could never understand, because this is so personal to me, is why can’t you men have any sympathy for me as a rape victim?” she said. “All your sympathy goes to a fertilized egg. You can’t even see it yet … But we’re here and we’re real people and we deserve to make decisions with our own bodies.”

Strangely, this is where Bryant eventually yielded some ground. “To believe that somehow a judge would say, ‘I’m going to prosecute this rape victim,’ I think is beyond anyone’s reasonable ability in a real world instance to say that that’s going to happen,” he said, declining to elaborate how judges might decide to give one-time passes to “murders.”

The press conference came to a close with Hemmins’ friend Elizabeth Feder Hosey objecting, emotionally, to being “likened to Satan,” and how her “daughter is going to grow up in a state that doesn’t value her.” She shouted, “Mississippi mothers are not evil, we are not Hitler. You look me in the eye, Phil Bryant, you tell me I’m evil! You never carried a child.”

Meanwhile, Personhood USA, which made a significant investment in trying to get Mississippi to pass the first ever such amendment to try to flout Roe v. Wade, was trying to use similar rhetoric. “Increasingly, the American people are being treated paternalistically by a government, media and public sector elite that stands in direct opposition to our traditional American values,” wrote Gualberto Garcia Jones in USA Today. He continued, “Using the courts as its instrument, this American elite has emasculated a once independent America.”