Take a look at an ad being pumped out in advance of a referendum in Ohio. This comes from something called the Progress Action Fund, and it’s about as low as politics in America can go:

Wow, these Republicans are really terrible; they’ll steal condoms out of your nightstand to stop you from getting laid, right? How do we vote to stop them? (RELATED: Voting On Issue One: Ohio Is Fighting to Keep Abortion Out of the Constitution)

The referendum the ad talks about isn’t about condoms, as it turns out. It isn’t about sex at all. It’s about this:

It’s official: Ohio will hold an August election to ask voters whether it should be harder to amend the state constitution.

House Republicans passed a resolution 62-37 Wednesday that, if approved by voters, would require 60% of voters to enact new constitutional amendments instead of a simple majority. The vote capped off a tumultuous few weeks for GOP lawmakers, who wrestled with the issue and risked missing a key election deadline.

Five Republican House members voted against the resolution. The Senate concurred late Wednesday on the House changes.

Supporters of the resolution were pushing for an August election to get ahead of a potential November ballot question that would enshrine abortion access in Ohio.

Ohio’s Democrats want to put birth control and wholesale abortion access in the state Constitution. Which they might be able to do in November, when there’s another referendum.

And Ohio, like lots of states, puts item after item in front of the voters that were supposed to have been resolved by state legislators. That’s what we pay them for. Ohio isn’t the only state in which efforts are being made to relieve voters of the burden of a million constitutional amendments to vote on every year.

The way these things work, particularly when the referenda are held on an off-year or off-cycle election year, is that you’ll have very low-turnout elections around these various ballot measures — and, very often, it’ll be whatever special interests are most affected by the person who spends a ton of money to mobilize that interest’s constituents while nobody else cares.

So they win the referendum, and they end up with items in the state Constitution that most people really don’t want, thanks to what’s essentially a stacked deck. (READ MORE: Trans Individuals Seek Euthanasia After ‘Gender-Affirming Care’)

Eventually, the state Constitution gets so junked up with useless items like “protecting the right to birth control” that it leads to lots of litigation over constitutional interpretation — particularly as you have things like technological changes that create ambiguities — and it’ll turn into a mess. It’s much easier to pass or repeal statutes to handle such things.

In this case, the ad isn’t about the Aug. 8 referendum on a 60 percent support threshold to change the Ohio Constitution. It’s about November. But they want to make it easier to put wholesale abortion access into the Ohio Constitution because it’s highly unlikely they could get 60 percent support for that from the Buckeye State’s voters.

So you just lie. You demagogue the issue, and you call the Republicans names.

Did you notice that the ad talks about “congressmen?” Not state legislators — congressmen. Congress has absolutely nothing to do with the referenda in Ohio either this month or in November.

You’d say that’s just sloppy, but it isn’t. It’s deliberate. The lying is deliberate because a straightforward message wouldn’t sell.

You’ll never see a Democrat group put out an ad that says, “Hey, we really want to pass abortion on demand as a constitutional right, and we want to pass it with 50.1 percent of the vote rather than 60.1 percent of the vote, so vote against this proposition on the ballot on Tuesday.”

No. Instead, it’s: “Republicans are coming for your condoms, so vote against this unrelated thing!”

I’m almost grateful that the couple in the ad are both white — if the bad Republican politician who wants to watch them is going to be white, that is. One supposes that the Progress Action Fund probably kicked around the idea of an interracial couple in order to meet the woke standard of the advertising industry but thought that would be a little too much. (READ MORE: Trump’s Inferno)

Which would be a scarce mercy, to be sure. There are no limits to the manipulative dreck we’re subjected to.

Our politics has become so grotesquely emotionalist and irrational that everything is over the top, everything is a lie, and everything is a grift.

And that semi-pornographic ad, the girl’s quite fetching physique notwithstanding, is about as graphic an example as you’ll find. Hopefully, it doesn’t work, if for no other reason than that the market must punish these bad-faith actors in order to reverse this demoralizing new normal.