President-elect Donald Trump’s success despite constantly saying the quiet part out loud seems to have spread among other Republicans.
The most recent example is Ohio GOP Chair Alex Triantafilou, who made an appalling admission last week when he claimed the GOP’s “strategy” of “confusing Ohioans” had succeeded in thwarting an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative that would have created an independent, citizen-led commission to draw the state’s electoral maps.
Triantafilou’s statement during a meeting with Republicans in Fremont was the kind of thing you’re not supposed to admit, at least in public. But it was hardly surprising to supporters of the ballot measure, who complained after Republican officials wrote a summary to be placed on ballots that indicated a “yes” vote would enable — not stop — gerrymandering. A number of voters said the confusing language tricked them into voting against a measure they supported.
That didn’t bother Triantafilou.
“A lot of people were saying, ‘We’re confused! We’re confused by Issue 1.’ Did you all hear that? Confusion means we don’t know, so we did our job,” Triantafilou said, according to the Fremont News Messenger. “Confusing Ohioans was not such a bad strategy.”
Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters responded in a statement, saying she’d never heard such a brag and that it’s “the oldest trick in the book to not tell voters the truth to get what you want.”
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Triantafilou did not respond to a request for comment.
The failure of Issue One left Republicans in control of the redistricting process, which they have used to gerrymander the state’s districts in ways that benefit Republicans and disadvantage Black voters. It’s reminiscent of the old tricks used during the Jim Crow era to maintain power, as elections officials would do things like ask impossible questions as part of a “literacy test” of Black voters.
Triantafilou and other Republicans didn’t go that far, but their dubious “strategy” of confusing voters will nonetheless fortify a system that serves the GOP and white conservatives in particular.
This is the kind of trickery we can expect from Republicans in the months and years ahead as they look to shore up their power. In recent years, the convictions of far-right activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman for attempting to confuse voters about their voting rights, and of activist Douglass Mackey for his plot to misinform voters about how they could cast their votes, have revealed a certain desperation among some conservatives to gain a political advantage through any means at their disposal.
It’s almost like some of these Republicans don’t believe they could win a fair fight.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.