Last updated on February 1st, 2019 at 12:15 pm
Republican state officials around the country are flipping to the Democratic Party as they are being chased out of the GOP by Trump‘s extremism.
Over the past two months, as lawmakers were sworn in and this year’s statehouse sessions got underway, Republicans in California, Kansas and New Jersey switched their party affiliations to become Democrats. They cited various reasons, but the party-switchers have one thing in common: They say the GOP under President Donald Trump has become too extreme.
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The latest party-flip came this week in New Jersey. Republican state Sen. Dawn Marie Addiego, who represented a suburban Philadelphia district in southern New Jersey for nearly a decade, left the GOP, the minority party in both houses of the Legislature.
Republicans Who No Longer Recognize Their Own Party Are Fleeing Trump
One of the great things about the Democratic Party that used to exist ideologically in the Republican Party is diversity. There used to be different kinds of Republicans in the GOP, and even though the press loves to target the diversity of ideas in the Democratic Party, the Democrats have become the true big tent. Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a far-right shell of extremist views that are the tentpoles of Trumpism.
The result is that Republicans who aren’t extremists, and who believe in things like democracy and not stealing healthcare from the poor are finding that there is no place for them in Trump‘s party.
The Republican Party is shrinking under Trump
Trump has accelerated the demographic problems in the Republican Party. The Republicans have been unable to attract younger voters. The demographic decline began at the end of the George W. Bush presidency and had only grown in the decade since. The backbone of the Republican Party is white rural voters over age 50, specifically men.
As the Brookings Institute wrote in 2018, “A political party that can’t attract young people, especially in a generation that is as big as the Millennial generation—America’s largest demographic group—is not a party with a very bright future. So although Trump, while focusing on the base, has made the Republican Party his, come November it may not be as much of an advantage.”
Trump is a fossil representing a bygone era whose howls don’t echo strength, but the death rattle of a dying political party.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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