Democrats Turning to Trump?

Democrats in Pennsylvania are changing parties in response to Donald Trump's presidency- at an unprecedented rate. As the Duluth News Tribune reports:

A retired middle school principal was so moved by Donald Trump that he switched his Democratic Party registration so he can vote for him in Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary.

So did the daughter of a steelworker, who twice voted for President Barack Obama but says she is “over” the Democrats’ political correctness.

And a husband-wife team of Trump volunteers — she’s a laid-off airport worker, he’s a laid-off truck driver — were Democrats for 30 years, until recently.

“We always voted Democrat,” said Laurie McGinnis, as her husband Ricky hung a Trump banner outside their South Greensburg home. “But not any more.”

Some of these newly minted Pennsylvania Republicans are formalizing a process that began with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, when conservative-leaning Democrats began shifting away from the party in the faded industrial state.

Others moved abruptly, inspired by Trump and fed up with a party they say no longer speaks their language.

Together the result is one of the most sizable shifts of partisan allegiance ever in Pennsylvania: 61,500 Democrats have become Republicans so far this year, part of a 145,000 jump in Republican registrations since the fall 2015 election, according to state figures analyzed by both parties. It’s more new Republicans than in the previous four years combined.


This makes sense. Democrats long ago abandoned working class white voters in more moderate states like Pennsylvania, trading them for illegal immigrants and environmental activists who were averse to their economic interests and the social radicals whose rejected their middle class, traditional values. Although unions still throw their support behind Democrats, their rank and file have less and less to gain from an increasingly extreme Democratic party platform.

Enter Trump. The Republican frontrunner has adopted the economic nationalism of Pat Buchanan, and traditional labor Democrats, and promised to bring jobs back to the beleaguered Rust Belt any which way he can. Whether it's real or imagined, he's convinced these voters that he is sympathetic to their plight in a way that Hillary Clinton, unlike her husband, never could. As Trump becomes more inevitable, it's quite possible that voters in beleaguered areas of the country like Michigan and Ohio will follow voters in Michigan. If that happens, Hillary Clinton is toast.

Source: American Action News