Political party destroyed? More Democrats are switching to GOP

OPINION:

The grand jury’s indictment of former President Donald Trump on 34 counts of business fraud has led more than one national pundit to once again predict the looming demise of the GOP.

They could not be more wrong. As Mark Twain might have said, the rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated. Where the Republicans are strong, they are very strong and growing stronger. The Democrats, meanwhile, are in disarray, which the largely liberal national punditocracy fails to account for in its myopic take on politics in America because its vision starts and ends inside the Beltway.

Out in America, things are very different. On Tuesday, Louisiana state Rep. Jeremy LaCombe announced he was leaving the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party, making him the second Democrat in as many months to do so in the state Legislature.

In late March, a similar move by state Rep. Francis Thompson enlarged the majority GOP caucus in Louisiana’s State House by just enough to create a veto-proof Republican majority.

A rational person might conclude the Lacombe and Thompson switches are votes of no confidence in President Biden, the direction of the national Democratic Party, and in Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, one of increasingly few Democrats to occupy the office of governor anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Maybe. Or it’s because the Democrats, who are not in lockstep with the interest groups who control the party behind the scenes, are being run out of the party, and not for the first time.

Generation after generation, the modern Democratic Party has been in the throes of a purge that’s pushed it further and further left. In the 1960s, the peaceniks pushed out the hawks over Vietnam. Then it was those who opposed abortion and people who held orthodox, traditional views on issues tied to faith. The late Bob Casey, then governor of Pennsylvania, which at the time was the nation’s fourth-largest state, was denied the opportunity to speak at the Democratic National Convention, he said, because he was out of step with the rest of the party on the issue of abortion.

Now it’s the Democrats who stand against radical leftist education reform who end up with targets on their backs. North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham said as much when she announced at the beginning of April that she, too, was crossing the line.

Ms. Cotham is no mere rank-and-file legislator. She’s Democratic Party royalty. Previously a legislator from 2007 to 2016, her mother is a Mecklenburg County commissioner and a former member of the Democratic National Committee. Her ex-husband was the state Democratic Party chairman. Her decision to cross the aisle, as she said when announcing her intention to do so, was not one made easily or hastily.

Yet make it she did, and not because her party has grown too liberal. She switched, she said, because her colleagues had grown intolerant of her support for school choice where, unlike her colleagues who dance to the tune called by the North Carolina teachers lobby, she marches to her own beat.

“One size fits all in education is wrong,” Ms. Cotham has said, adding that she believed legislators in her party “didn’t want to talk about children. They had talking points from adults and adult organizations.” It takes courage to speak truth to power like that, and Ms. Cotham’s colleagues rewarded her candor by shunning her and calling her “a traitor,” she said, adding that liberal groups had even contacted her children in what she said was an attempt to bully them and intimidate her.

There were other things, too, like being told she shouldn’t use the American flag or the prayer emoji in her social media communications. It was all too much, she said. “The party has become unrecognizable to me and so many others. When did Democrats become so afraid of independent thought?” 

It’s a good question, one that deserves an answer that will never come. Meanwhile, by joining the Republican Party, Ms. Cotham provided the crucial vote to give the GOP a supermajority in the state Legislature — meaning the North Carolina House and Senate can by themselves override the veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of any legislation — including a bill to finally give parents and children the money they need to have real educational alternatives to failing public schools.

The reporters and analysts focused on the GOP’s potential implosion over Mr. Trump’s 2024 run for the White House missed this story. Too bad too. It’s an important one that shows it’s the Democrats who are coming apart.