Only four months after winning re-election as a longtime Democrat, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson announced that he was defecting to the Republican party. Before assuming office, Johnson served nearly a decade in the Texas Legislature as a Democrat — making his decision to switch parties all the more shocking.
On Friday, Johnson announced his decision in an 0p-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “Today I am changing my party affiliation,” wrote Johnson. “Next spring, I will be voting in the Republican primary. When my career in elected office ends in 2027 on the inauguration of my successor as mayor, I will leave office as a Republican.”
In his op-ed, Johnson says that he won 98.7% of the vote in his re-election. Although it’s worth noting that was when he was running as a registered Democrat in a county that President Joe Biden overwhelmingly carried. The mayoral position is technically non-partisan, but it’s hard to argue that running as a registered Democrat in a deep-blue county didn’t have some impact on the vote.
Johnson criticized Democratic leadership, arguing that Democratic mayors (of which he was one until a few hours ago) have allowed cities to crumble into “disarray” and lawlessness. Johnson also pats himself on the back for standing up against the defund the police movement.
Johnson paints a picture of Democratic Mayors that is wholly incongruent with the state of play in blue cities. New York City’s Democratic Mayor, Eric Adams, is literally a former cop. And D.C.’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser has fought tooth and nail to prevent criminal justice reforms from going into effect.
He isn’t the only southern Democrat to defect to the Republican party in a dramatic fashion. In July, Georgia State Representative Mesha Mainor announced that she was switching to the Republican. Mainor, who served in a deep-blue Atlanta district, defended her decision by arguing that she was pushed out of the Democratic party. Mainor was criticized by Georgia Democrats but welcomed with open arms by folks like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who applauded her decision to move parties.
As for Johnson, there will surely be a ton of backlash, but maybe, like Mainor, he’ll make some friends in his new party.
Yeah, it’s not the Democrats who focus so much on trans people. It’s republicans that are passing laws to try to ban their existence and wellbeing.
It’s bizarre that there’s people acting like Democrats are all about identity politics when it’s the core piece of the GOP’s platform to the point that they barely seem to have any policies beyond it (and the occasional “reduces taxes on the rich and corporations – it’ll trickle down, we promise!”
The mainstream position on people with medical stuff is that they go to their doctors and get the treatment their doctors recommend. In the case of transgender folks, that treatment is transition.
The shithead position on people with medical stuff is that the governor gets to tell them to kill themselves instead.
Yeah. It’s frustrating seeing the right act like their view is somehow scientifically correct or whatever, when it’s actually against medical consensus.
They love to make claims about how they’re all about “facts don’t care about your feelings”, which they’ll back up with stuff they learned in 6th grade science while pretending college level science doesn’t exist lol.
Sixth-grade genetics and kindergarten explanations of gender turn out to not really be up to describing the real world, no.