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After two years of far-right rule in a Michigan county, one chance to change it
#Rachel #Atwood corralled voters outside her polling place.
She was part of the slate of hard-line Republicans trying to keep control of the board.
Her group,
#Ottawa #Impact, dominated the county GOP.
“Do you need a Republican voter guide?” she asked as people passed by.
Atwood, 43, got involved in county politics because she believed that
mask requirements were hurting her autistic son
at a critical moment in his development.
The mandates were over,
but Atwood thought that the threats to her children’s well-being
from the government and pro-LGBTQ+ liberals
remained as real as ever.
“What makes me a little different in this race is that my experience is much more geared toward the current #culture #war,”
she told a local television station.
She was running in the Republican primary against #John #Teeples,
a retired attorney, who described himself as a “#fiscal #conservative”
intent on restoring
“#kindness” to the county’s politics.
The night before the primary, Atwood and the other Ottawa Impact candidates
each occupied one of the four geographic corners of the county
and prayed for the protection of their community.
Her skin was deeply tanned, the product of knocking on more than 2,000 doors
— an experience that she described as transformative.
“God has been sending people to me through door-knocking
to say things to me that are supernatural,
that are God-briefed,”
Atwood said in a recent Facebook live video from the campaign trail.
She prayed with dozens of people who had autistic children
or close relatives with the condition,
she said,
and promised them she would fight for more county services for their loved ones.
On their first day in office, the Ottawa Impact commissioners had fired the county’s administrator,
canned its lawyer of 40 years,
closed its diversity office
and dumped its motto “Where you Belong” in favor of
“Where Freedom Rings.”
More change
— which Ottawa Impact opponents called chaos
— followed.
The new commissioners forced the county’s longtime sex educator,
who had developed successful programs to lower teen pregnancy and curb the spread of sexually transmitted infections,
into an administrative job.
When their efforts to remove the county’s public health director were blocked by the courts,
they cut the health department’s budget,
eliminating a program that helped feed 22,000 low-income residents each year.
They turned down millions of dollars in federal and state grants
because they came with conditions that the commissioners said
were unconstitutional or immoral,
and they became embroiled in a spate of lawsuits alleging discrimination.
Joe Moss,
who co-founded Ottawa Impact and chairs the county board,
didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In an interview with a local television station, he described the new board members as regular people
— teachers, entrepreneurs, nurses, social workers
— who were acting as “guardrails”
to defend the county’s children from
“dangerous and harmful” forces.
Atwood disagreed with those who insisted that Ottawa Impact had hurt the community
by introducing anger and division into the otherwise mundane world of county government.
“I’m happy people have become so engaged,” she said.
Outside her polling place a couple of supporters approached her
and asked for a selfie.
Atwood smiled and posed alongside them.
“We’re praying for you,” they told her.
That evening, candidates and their backers gathered at election night parties
where they compulsively checked the county’s website for early returns.
Barry waited for the results with Rep. Bill Huizenga (R),
the local congressman and his half brother,
who had rented an event space at an upscale waterfront restaurant.
The siblings stood together near the restaurant’s deck as the sun set over Lake Michigan,
smartphones in hand.
Just after 9:30 p.m. the county clerk sent a text alert that early results were in,
prompting nearly 4,000 people to ping the county’s website
within 30 seconds.
The flood of traffic crashed the site.
“We are aware of the website issues,” the county clerk posted on his social media pages.
“A lot of folks interested in our results!”
The primary’s unusually high stakes made for unusual alliances.
An older man in a red
“Make America Great Again” hat
sat with friends at an election night pizza party
for Mark Northrup, a small-town mayor
challenging Moss in the Republican primary.
A few feet away, Jacqui Poehlman,
one of Northrup’s volunteers,
hunched over a computer with a
“Bans off our bodies” sticker on it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/11/michigan-county-far-right-commission-election/
Northrup, 66, described himself as a “pro-life” Republican
who planned to support Trump,
his party’s candidate for the presidency.
Poehlman, 43, described herself as “very liberal.”
But they shared views on the value of well-funded public schools,
the need for more affordable housing
and the necessity of preventing Ottawa Impact from retaining its majority on the board.
Both fervently believed that scorched-earth political warfare,
which had become the standard at the national level,
was causing irreparable harm
when injected into their otherwise peaceful and prosperous community.
“Trump is his guy in the fight,” Poehlman said of Northrup.
“But we’re not voting for Trump at the county level.”
At the Ottawa Impact party, Atwood sat at a table with her friends
in a rustic banquet hall,
with strings of white lights hanging from the rafters.
At the front of the room, Moss introduced
a video of Ottawa Impact candidates on the campaign trail.
There were pictures of smiling children,
pickup trucks and
American flags flapping in the breeze.
In the background a Christian contemporary music star sang:
“We’re the generation that has to make a choice/
Will we push against this evil or will we watch while it destroys?”
Most of the parties began to break up around 11 p.m.,
before all the precincts had reported.
Barry headed home with a comfortable lead over Gretchen Cosby,
a 60-year-old former nurse who had been inspired to get into politics
by her false belief that Democrats had stolen the 2020 election.
Around midnight the results posted online.
Barry won with 63 percent of the vote.
The three Ottawa Impact candidates running for countywide office
— prosecutor, sheriff and treasurer
— lost to more moderate Republicans
by about 20 percentage points each.
Moss, Ottawa Impact’s co-founder,
easily defeated his primary opponent by 14 points.
But his movement,
which in January 2023 controlled eight of the 11 board seats,
had suffered a devastating blow.
After Tuesday’s results, they would,
at best, retain just four.
“Their majority is gone,” said a relieved Poehlman
a little after midnight.
Her preferred candidate lost to Moss,
but she and her friends didn’t let the defeat dampen their late-night celebration.
“That’s awesome,” said Janet Martin, a Democrat sitting next to her.
“It’s good for our county,” added Judy Bergman, a former Republican.
The next morning the people of Ottawa County awoke
and started trying to make sense of what had happened the previous night.
Atwood didn’t see the results, which included her own loss,
as proof that Republicans had grown weary of Ottawa Impact’s hard-line politics.
Instead, she blamed Democrats who crossed over and voted in the Republican primary for her group’s defeat. “My Republican election was taken from me by Democrats” and wealthy donors, Atwood said.
“Not every best candidate wins.
That’s just how it is.”
Moss vowed that despite the results, he would never moderate his message.
“The majority does not dictate morality,”
he said in a statement posted to Ottawa Impact’s website.
“There are consequences to abandoning truth and abdicating freedom.”
Justin Roebuck, Ottawa County’s clerk
and a self-described conservative Republican,
had sought to remain neutral in his local party’s civil war.
He defended the integrity of the voting system that he oversaw
but tried to win over the skeptics and election deniers in his party
with good humor and civility.
On Wednesday evening he invited about 50 of the county’s Republican leaders
to a “unity” party at a brewery in Holland,
Ottawa County’s largest city.
The gathering brought together all flavors of Ottawa Republicans.
Josh Brugger, who won the GOP primary for relatively moderate Grand Haven’s commission seat,
described the previous night’s results as
a “multi-partisan” victory over Trumpism.