“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” late President Ronald Reagan famously said, “the Democratic Party left me.” While Reagan’s departure was in 1962, more and more Americans today could echo his sentiments. For example, the #WalkAway (from the Democrats) campaign was founded by disaffected liberal Brandon Straka in 2018. Six years later, though, has that walk turned into a run?
We could thus wonder with news that there’s been a 103-percent increase in voters leaving the Democratic Party in swing state Pennsylvania.
This just reflects, however, a nationwide trend. In fact, “Why I left the Democratic Party” has become a relatively common headline. Ex-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who’d been a Democrat for more than 20 years, penned a piece of that kind in 2022. She was later joined by North Carolina state Representative Tricia Cotham and Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, just to cite two examples. Why, even liberal pundit Ana Kasparian, co-host of radically left-wing news show The Young Turks, ditched the Democrats this year.
Journey From Rationalization to Reason
As for Pennsylvania, mother Beth Ann Rosica likely reflects many in her state’s Democrat exodus. And she joined Fox & Friends First in August to explain her departure. As Fox News related:
“I think the economy is huge, and I also think a lot of the school issues for parents across the state of Pennsylvania, it’s just been horrific watching what’s happened to our kids academically, socially, emotionally,” Rosica told co-host Carley Shimkus.
Note, many parents have become outraged in recent years over the radical left-wing ideology permeating our schools. Demonizing the Founders and our country is common in education now, with a resultant steep decline in young people’s patriotism. Racially divisive pedagogy — teaching about “white privilege” and critical-race theory, for example — is also prevalent. Then there are the sexual devolutionary ideas, depraved “sex education” and the child abuse known as the “transgender” agenda.
Returning to Fox, it continued:
“All of these failed policies have just really resulted in academic losses.”
Rosica said many parents are “fed up and disgusted with what’s happened here over the last two and a half years” with surging inflation and gas prices.
…”As a former Democrat for 34 years prior to the pandemic, I too thought that the Democratic Party was really focused on the people that they pretend to support,” Rosica said.
She explained how she has dedicated her career to helping families in underprivileged communities get the resources they need to be successful, a narrative the Democratic Party always claimed to support.
“What I saw through the pandemic was that the Democratic Party basically abandoned all of those people,” Rosica said. “And so that was why I left the party, or as I like to say, the party really left me….”
The Tale of the Tape
Rosica concluded saying, “I think that a lot more people are really starting to see” what she has. That’s no joke, either. Just consider what Newsweek writes about the her fellow Keystone State residents:
The data reports a notable shift in party registrations, showing that Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party has experienced a 103 percent increase in members leaving the party this year, compared with last year.
In 2023, 19,321 Pennsylvania voters changed their registration from Democrat to “other,” and 36,341 switched from Democrat to Republican. Overall, 55,662 registered Democrats in the state left the party.
This year, the state-released data shows that 51,937 registered Democrats changed their affiliation to “other,” and 61,126 switched to Republican, for a total of 113,063 leaving the party.
On the other hand, Republicans have seen a significant but smaller number of members leave the party, with 29,038 registered Republicans changing their affiliation — 13,196 to “other” and 15,842 to Democrat — in 2023. This year, 48,702 Republicans switched parties, with 24,046 changing to “other” and 24,656 becoming Democrats, around a 67 percent increase in Republicans leaving the party.
And many of these people who are voting with their feet, so to speak, are voting their pocketbook, too. As The Economic Times points out:
The reasons most voters point out for abandoning the Democrats are primarily dissatisfaction with the party’s stance on economic issues, inflation, and policy direction. The highest defections take place in the state’s suburban and rural areas, where more and more former Democratic voters get worried about government spending and regulatory measures. This happens at an opportune time as Pennsylvania remains a battleground for the 2024 presidential election.
Bleeding Voters Everywhere
Democrats aren’t just losing rural and suburban white voters, either. As KNX News Radio reported last week, “A New York Times/Siena College poll shows that the share of likely Black voters backing the Democratic candidate for president has fallen to 78% — down from 90% in 2020.”
Conventional wisdom holds that, if this manifests itself in the actual vote, the Democrats will be routed. The idea? They rely on getting close to or more than 90 percent of the black vote to achieve victory.
Moreover, as The Daily Signal reported Monday:
According to the most recent NBC/Telemundo poll, Harris leads former President Donald Trump with Hispanic voters by 14 percentage points. However, that is the smallest margin for a Democrat in over a decade.
Every other presidential Democratic candidate since 2012 had an advantage of at least 36 points and, eventually, went on to win the Hispanic vote by similarly significant margins.
Given this, is it any wonder the Democrats are importing illegal aliens to replace Americans? If you can’t get the people to change the government (to your liking), change the people.
But then there’s the matter of changing the vote. For while the above realities should bode well for the GOP November 5, it fails to account for a significant factor: vote fraud. After all, especially today, losing hundreds of thousands of voters and losing hundreds of thousands of “votes” are not synonymous.
