After the now infamous Jan. 3, 2023, Ottawa County Board of Commissioners meeting, several different groups opposing Ottawa Impact began to form or gain more recognition and followers.

Likewise, Ottawa Impact supporters became more vocal and in some cases, began creating “burner” accounts with which to engage those with whom they disagreed without fear of their far right-wing extremism being exposed.

The throughline of Ottawa Impact supporters’ responses to criticism of the new board was simply: “Elections have consequences” and “A majority of voters picked OI.” While those statements were true, or at least contained some truth, they unwittingly began highlighting the strategy Democrats and anti-OI Republicans would need to use in order to curb, if not completely get rid of Joe Moss’ and Ottawa Impact’s influence on the county board.

Despite his shortcomings as an elected official, Moss is undoubtedly an effective organizer. While he was eliminating county programs, installing loyalists, fighting off lawsuits, passing culture war resolutions, and trying to pay off our health officer, he was extending his influence over the Ottawa County GOP and even the state party.

Nevertheless, formerly OI-aligned commissioners Jacob Bonnema and Rebekah Curran publicly split from the group and Kyle Terpstra confirmed he was never part of the group, although that proved to be a minor setback for Moss.

When Terpstra resigned in 2023, Moss was able to appoint a loyalist, Kendra Wenzel, to finish Terpstra’s term. Perhaps the biggest sign that Ottawa Impact’s stranglehold on the county wasn’t as ironclad as Moss would have people believe came in May 2024 when District 2 Commissioner Lucy Ebel was recalled and replaced with Democrat Christian Kleinjans in a 20-point defeat.

This seems to have been the catalyst that Moss needed to fully remake the Ottawa County GOP in his image. He and others aligned with Ottawa Impact went out of their way to justify their decision to endorse candidates ahead of the 2024 primary instead of letting the voters decide. They explained who and what is a “real” conservative and have now gone a step further and passed a resolution condemning non-OI-endorsed candidates and calling on them to drop out of their races.

The entire resolution reads like Will McAvoy’s monologue in the HBO show “The Newsroom” about how the Tea Party defines conservatives and why he, a Republican, is now considered a Republican in Name Only (RINO), “... I have to have such a stunning inferiority complex that I fear education and intellect … most of all, the biggest new requirement is that I have to hate Democrats.”

Sarah Leach recently published a fantastic piece outlining exactly how rank-and-file conservatives in Ottawa County have seen Moss pervert the Ottawa County GOP. These lifelong Republicans, now RINOs may hold many conservative ideals but they committed the cardinal sin of daring to work with people to the left of Ottawa Impact, especially Democrats.

Democrats in Ottawa County aren’t oblivious to the reality of the county they live in. It’s rare that anyone with a “D” next to their name gets elected here. Ottawa County as a whole hasn’t voted for a Democrat since the Civil War — it voted for the antiabolitionist George McClellan over Abraham Lincoln — which should probably say something about the “conservative ideals Ottawa County was founded on,” but I digress.

Since 2000, the GOP presidential candidates on average carry the county by about 33%. It’s no secret that the primary election is essentially the general election for many local elections. Those candidates who win their GOP primary generally go on to win the general election, sometimes unopposed.

In 2022, when Ottawa Impact first blanketed the county with their matching signs and slick websites, they won eight of the nine districts in which they ran a candidate. I’m including former OI-aligned commissioners Bonnema and Curran in that figure.

Here are some quick numbers for the primary election:

• Registered voters in Ottawa County: 224,301
• Total ballots cast in OC: 76,838 (34.3% turnout)
• Total votes in the OC Board of Commissioners races: 62,929
• Total votes for OI candidates: 28,482

Given that the primary election is the real race in Ottawa County, this means that Ottawa Impact was swept into power with just 45.26% of the vote, or more startlingly, by only 12.7% of registered voters in Ottawa County.

In the official general election in 2022, Bonnema, Moss, Curran, Sylvia Rhodea, Roger Belknap and Allison Miedema ran unopposed, along with Terpstra.

What then, should Democrats do with this information? The answer is obvious. If we want to actively participate in our democracy and elect rational policymakers, we must vote for the non-OI candidates in the GOP primary on Aug. 6.

Does this mean we agree with everything these candidates say or believe in? Hardly. However, the partisan divide at the local level does not have to be that great, and good governance should be valued above partisan rhetoric. We should strive to make county politics boring again.

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Does this constitute Democratic interference or is it simply democracy? Clearly, I believe it’s the latter. Michigan has an open primary — this means we don’t register with a party and anyone can vote in whatever primary they choose so long as they only vote for one party. The only competitive race that Democrats in Ottawa County need to worry about is for U.S. Senate and that’s not even all that competitive — Elissa Slotkin will likely cruise to the nomination. The stakes are too high in Ottawa County to let 12% of the electorate install far-right Christian nationalists in positions of power again.

If Moss and his anonymous acolytes want to argue that RINOs and Democrats exercising their right to vote is election interference, then that would be incredibly on brand for this latest iteration of the Grand Old Party, where facts are made up, the press is the enemy of the people and participating in democracy itself is an act of corruption.

— Ryan King is a resident of Georgetown Township.

— To submit a guest column or letter to the editor, email sentinelleach@gmail.com.