After three years of listening to my viewpoints and attending a liberal arts college, my best friend has finally done it. Today he informed me that he has decided to change his voter registration to "D" from "R."
My friend is from conservative rural Western Pennsylvania. His family is completely Republican, and his politics, as I found out my first year here, were fairly far to the right. He was very conservative on social issues, and in the aftermath of the 2002 midterm elections, he was certainly beaming. But with each year, my friend's apprehension about the Republican Party grew.
More below...
During the 2004 campaign, my friend supported and voted for President Bush, claiming that he was nervous about Bush's positions, but that there was no way Kerry could do better. Of course, at the same time, I was President of our College Democrats chapter, and while I coordinated our chapter's election programming and campaign activities, I never once pressured him to leave the Republican Party. I do think, though, that he got a chance to see the view from the other side (especially since our other good friend was the Vice President).
After Bush's win, my friend was initially content, but then became seriously skeptical of the administration's priorities with the emergence of the campaign to reform Social Security and this summer's face-off over Senate rules. He began to become interested in the issue of poverty, and he realized how much the Republican Party has done to stifle that discussion. With the emergence of a new potential scandal every few weeks, and with the administration's poor response to Hurricane Katrina, my friend became even more of a RINO. He began to tell people he was moderate, and that while he was a registered Republican, he held many centrist stances on issues.
Today he told me that he had to switch his registration. He could no longer call himself a Republican, because he felt that he could no longer explain why he was one. He told me that he likes the idea of working for the "common good," and that he's finally realized the Republican Party does not even know what that is.
I think my friend's conversion represents something that will be happening across the country in the near future. Those Republicans that have a conscience will realize, if they already haven't, that while the Democratic Party still has some work to do, they're moving in the right direction -- the opposite direction of their current party.
While this diary contains no groundbreaking material, I think it reflects just how large our opportunity is in 2006. We have Republicans moving to our party that haven't even been pressured to do so. Just wait until the campaign gets under way...