Political gaslighting is having a banner election year. State and federal campaigns are ramping up their strategic and targeted manipulation of voters. They will peddle demonstrably false information to disorient and destabilize public opinion. Make voters believe night is day and question their perception of reality.
The tactic works to undermine truth with lies and distortions on a mass scale and create enough confusion, uncertainty, paranoia and pain among the public to sway elections. It’s what convicted felon Donald Trump is doing when he salutes convicted Jan. 6 thugs who savagely beat police and stormed the U.S. Capitol as “great patriots.”
He’s created an alternate narrative not based in reality. We all witnessed, with horrific clarity, the real time siege of the Capitol to forcibly upend the peaceful transfer of power. But Trump gaslit his followers into believing the armed and violent mob of his supporters who threatened to hang his vice-president are heroes. To doubt what they saw with their own eyes.
The same manipulative techniques are utilized to downplay Trump’s corruption and convince rally goers that wrong is right. The Republican presidential nominee has persuaded his devotees to celebrate his criminality with T-shirts sporting his mugshot. On Earth One, the police photo of a scowling ex-president — being booked on felony charges alleging criminal conspiracy to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia — represents abject disgrace.
In reality, the criminal defendant running for president, who faces sentencing and possible jail time for conviction on 34 felony counts — as well as pending state and federal trials for crimes to subvert the will of American voters in 2020 and for pilfering and hiding classified government documents — is as dishonorable as it gets. But Trump is also masterful at gaslighting dishonorable as noble, due process as political persecution, revenge as redemption, fiction as fact.
Still, the adjudicated rapist and business fraudster is no outlier in manipulating voters with convincing lies. Trump has plenty of competition from established gaslighters in state politics. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine just inaugurated an audacious gaslighting campaign to sabotage a statewide citizens’ initiative to cut politicians out of the redistricting process and finally end the intentional partisan manipulation of district boundaries to lock in power.
Ohio Republicans have their marching orders. Derail the redistricting reform amendment on the November ballot by any means necessary to keep the GOP’s outsized share of legislative seats intact — courtesy of extreme gerrymandering for an entire decade. The party’s campaign to torpedo the anti-gerrymandering referendum resembles similar game play launched by Republicans last year to thwart (unsuccessfully) another citizens’ initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution.
Both grassroots efforts — to ensure abortion access and produce fair voting districts — were mobilized by frustrated citizens to bypass unresponsive lawmakers and appeal to an actual majority of the voting public for change. But the direct democracy power of Ohio voters to circumvent unpopular, out-of-touch minority rule in state government is a grave threat to state Republicans, from the governor on down, who crave absolute power and will stop at nothing to keep it.
Last year they tried to scare and confuse Ohioans into first giving up their century-old majority voting rights to (here’s the gaslighting part) “protect” the state constitution from a flood of “trivial” citizen-led amendments approved by “only” a simple majority vote instead of a more prudent “super-majority” to preserve constitutional integrity. Truth is, Republicans knew a majority of Ohioans were likely to support an abortion rights amendment but maybe not by the 60% requirement they tried to sneak through in a special August election — after outlawing special August elections for statewide referendums.
Then Ohio Republicans tried to scare and confuse Ohioans with disinformation about the abortion rights amendment in November they gaslit as “too extreme.” Shamelessly deceptive ads by DeWine and wife attempted to frighten parents of minors into believing (falsely) that constitutionally protected abortion rights in Ohio would somehow rope minors into abortions or gender-affirming care without parental knowledge or consent.
It was a devious GOP subversion of reality orchestrated with prominent anti-abortion lobbyists to twist facts, fearmonger, control women and ultimately ban abortion in the state. Thankfully Ohioans across the political spectrum were not duped into denying constitutionally protected abortion rights to Ohio women (after the U.S. Supreme Court repealed 50 years of reproductive freedom) or relinquishing their majority voting rights.
But Republican gaslighters are at it again in 2024. The partisan operators who ignored the letter and spirit of the redistricting reform amendments Ohioans overwhelming passed in 2015 and 2018 now want voters to reject a politician-free remedy for their cavalier lawlessness. The Republican majority on the redistricting commission that defied repeated orders from the Ohio Supreme Court to comply with constitutional mandates for fair voting districts now suggests voters trust the GOP juggernaut to comply in the future.
The same Republicans who ran out the clock to fix their unconstitutional voting maps (that unfairly advantaged Republican incumbents) now expect voters to believe the governor’s assertion that the anti-gerrymandering amendment will make the gerrymandered districts he approved on a party line redistricting vote worse. But Ohioans aren’t stupid.
They know what DeWine & Co. pulled last year just like very American knows what Trump incited with his stolen election lies on Jan. 6. Gaslighting rejects truth. But seeing is believing.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: [email protected]. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and X.
