Maybe Republicans Who Switch Parties Should Wait A Bit Before Becoming Democratic Party Leaders

I'm Glad When Republicans Become Progressives, The Way Elizabeth Warren Did

The other day, I posted something at Threads about an Alabama Republican who voted for Trump twice, now running for the Senate… as a Democrat. It generated over a thousand “likes” and over 500 comments, many of them either about never trusting a Republican or about welcoming Republicans into the Democratic Party. Some of the comments in the latter group were very aggressive, almso steeped in typical “any blue will do” ignorance. 

What’s important to understand isn’t which team’s uniform someone decides to don at one time or another. Corrupt California conservative Democrat Joe Baca (Blue Dog) served as a Democrat in Congress for 6 terms, switched to the GOP— citing his “core Christian values” and pro-corporate beliefs as the primary reasons for the change. But Baca’s switch was a tactical move to gain more financial and political support for future electoral bids, given how he had alienated the Democratic base and had to deal with the competitive nature of California’s top-two primary system. He lost primary runoff to a more progressive Democrat. The self-serving switch alienated both Democrats, who viewed him as disloyal, and Republicans, who distrusted his long Democratic history. Losing his electoral bids as a  Republican, three years later, he returned to the Democratic Party, stating, “In my heart, I’ve always been a Democrat with a 100 percent voting record for labor.” But he lost more races as a Democrat. Eventually he was elected to the Rialto city council and last year won the mayor’s race. The small city has around 100,000 inhabitants. Similarly, another conservative Californian, Matthew Martinez, ws originally a Republican but served in the state legislature and then Congress as a right-wing Democrat, from 1980 to 2000, when he was defeated by a progressive Democrat in the primary. In the lame duck session, he voted with the GOP on just about everything and a few months later switched parties.

Most of the time party switchers flip because of their own careers, not because of a change in core values or even policy differences. NY Republican Michael Forbes flipped in 1999 in the middle of a session and was defeated in the Democratic primary the following year. Conservative Republican Tom O’Halleran wasn’t conservative enough for his Arizona constituents and he re-branded himself a conservative Democrat after losing a GOP primary. He served in Congress as a Blue Dog, often voting with his old party on important issues. He was defeated in 2022 by neo-Nazi Eli Crane.

Some Republicans switch and suck as Democrats (Hillary Clinton and Charlie Crist are examples) but sometimes a Republican actually sees the light and becomes an outstanding Democrat. This is rare but Elizabeth Warren (MA), Lincoln Chafee (RI) and Jim Jeffords (VT) are good examples. After Arlen Specter (PA) and Michael Bloomberg (NY) switched from the GOP, they didn’t shed their core conservative outlooks.

Basketball star Charles Barkley was an active and outspoken Republican who nearly ran for governor of Alabama in 1998. In 2006 in left the GOP saying Republicans had “lost their minds,” switched to the Democratic Party, backed Obama but then backed John Kasich in the 2016 GOP presidential primary.

Anyway, as is inevitable, here we are again. The moribund Florida Democratic Party jumped for joy when Republican-turned-independent David Jolly, formerly a conservative congressman from St. Petersburg, offered to run for governor as a Democrat. The Florida Democratic Party— neck and neck with the Ohio Democratic Party, is the worst in the country. The party establishment is lost and irredeemable, unaware of what a Democrat even is, destroyed by years of domination by garbage politicians like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Allen Boyd, Jim Davis, Stepahnie Murphy, Jared Moskowitz, Gwen Graham, Al Lawson, Charlie Crist, Bill Nelson, Patrick Murphy…

Yesterday, Jill Lawrence gave a very sympathetic overview of Jolly’s purple campaign. Purple isn’t blue and we’re not talking about a random voter. We’re talking about the party’s top-of-the-ticket standard bearer. So sad! “Jolly, 52,” she wrote, “has been on a decade-long political journey. He was a Republican during his three terms in the House of Representatives, then a disaffected Never Trump Republican, then an independent aligned with Democrats. Finally, last month, he became a registered Democrat.” She didn’t find it relevant to note how conservative he was as a Member of Congress and what legislation he voted for and against. He was not just anti-Choice but authored a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. Is he still anti-Choice? He voted against Obamacare every time he had an opportunity to and also voted against all common sense restrictions on assault weapons. In Congress he was a Climate skeptic even as his own constituents were suffering from the effects of Climate Change.

Lawrence, though, was excited to tell her readers that “his words are a balm to a party in dire need of it. ‘I am coming into the Democratic party right now because I believe in its strength,’ Jolly told me Wednesday on the phone. Republicans, he said, have failed to provide an economy for all people, to ensure government is delivering services to those who need them, and to ‘lift up and embrace the diversity of our communities and culture.’ He called those fundamental Democratic values and the reasons he is excited to officially join the party. Anything else? ‘We get to accept science, and math, and public health. It’s pretty incredible, right?’”

And then right into the lesser of evils narrative that animates the Democratic Party and its she wrote, “in many ways has pioneered the worst aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency, from hostility to immigrants and voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights, to attacks on corporations like Disney; from policing libraries and colleges, to installing a discredited anti-vaxxer as Florida surgeon general. DeSantis is term-limited and 2026 will be his final year in office, but Florida Democrats are not exactly greeting the opportunity with unity. Even as Jolly was signing on with them, the Democratic leader in the state Senate, Jason Pizzo, said the party was ‘dead’ and became an unaffiliated voter— one who might run for governor next year as an independent. One Democrat summed it up this way, Politico reported: ‘A goddamn shitshow.’”

But not as much of a shitshow as DeSantis and his Mafia family wife’s corruption scandal— breathtaking even for Florida, where there are virtually no scandal-free elected officials.

Like many politicians, Jolly, she noted, “sees Trump’s overreach, instability and damaging policies as creating a change environment that will be the backdrop for state races next year, allowing candidates to prioritize state concerns and connect them to the national picture when they want. The top agenda items at Florida2026.com, Jolly’s pre-campaign testing ground, are addressing the unaffordability of property insurance and homes, saving underfunded public schools, and fixing an unsustainable school voucher program. The rest, like those, strike me as ranging from unobjectionable to wildly popular from a Democratic standpoint [and are the opposite of Jolly’s own voting record]— codifying the Roe v. Wade abortion framework, improving access to state universities, strengthening the economy and state ethics laws, accepting climate science, reducing gun violence, restoring veterans services, and creating ‘a Florida for all’ where everyone is ‘valued, respected, and welcomed.’”

Now, in his own trial run for an executive job in his new party, Jolly is going where he wants and saying what he wants. He’s held a dozen town halls with a dozen more planned, in all parts of Florida, red and blue.

He’s explaining to evangelical and other faith communities why he thinks Democratic values are more in line with “biblical thinking.” He’s talking to North Florida agriculture communities about why DeSantis and Trump immigration policies are “tightening labor and driving up costs for them.”

And he is talking, a lot, about crime, especially the dishonest GOP conflation of immigration with crime. This serves a double purpose— to remind voters about that $10 million DeSantis family Medicaid scandal, and to drive home that they’ve been “told a lie about immigrant crime,” because research shows immigrants are much less likely than native-born Americans to commit violent and property crimes.

“I say if you’re native born, an immigrant or a Tallahassee politician, if you break the law, we’re coming for you. That means if you steal $10 million from the Medicaid program, we’re going to investigate you,” Jolly tells me. His listeners get it, no names needed.

The immigration-crime decoupling is a pillar of his probable run and, if it succeeds, a model for Democrats all over. “If we can take the crime issue back… not only have we reset the policy issues in a more accurate framing for voters, but we also shame Republicans for what they’ve done. These threads of xenophobia and true anti-immigrant sentiment, we expose,” Jolly says.

“Many Republicans might defend those sentiments, but we’ll let that contrast speak for itself,” he adds. “We’ll be the party that fights crime but not communities. And they can be the party that continues to fight communities. And I’m great with that contrast.”

Now Jolly just has to prove that most Floridians are great with it, too. That’s a steep climb, given the state’s recent political history and Republican imperviousness to shaming. But the premise is moral and reality-based, and I’d love to see it tested on voters who maybe, possibly, are ready for something new.

Karen hasn't bothered to switch parties yet

For the any blue will do crowd: a story from Nebraska. Jane Raybould is state Senator representing Lincoln. She’s very prominent in the state Democratic Party. She comes from a very wealthy family and she was selected to run for Lieutenant Governor is 2014 and subsequently ran for the U.S. Senate against Deb Fischer in 2018. Fischer clobbered her 403,151 (57.7%) to 269,917 (38.6%). Just as way of comparison, when progressive independent Dan Osborn challenged Fischer in the next reelection cycle, Osborn, who actually stands for things that excite people and isn’t just a lesser or two evils candidate, performed a lot better than Raybould. Fischer beat him but it was 499,124 (53.2%) to 436,493 (46.5%). Anyway, Raybould is still in the state Senate doing her thing. And most recently her thing was giving the GOP the one vote they needed to pass “a bill that significantly weakens a voter-backed measure requiring employers to offer paid sick leave,” reported Margery Beck. Hers was the deciding vote to end the filibuster of members supporting the working class— and, despite her being a putative Democrat, no one has ever accused Jane Raybould of supporting the working class. “Raybould, whose family owns several grocery store chains in the state, was also the main sponsor of another bill that sought to restrict a voter-backed minimum wage law,’ although that failed by one vote, Raybould again, obviously voting with the GOP. The paid sick leave referendum had passed in a 3 to 1 landslide last November. Something like Jane Raybould’s vote could never happen with the “any blue will do” zombies.