I didn’t officially leave until 2008 even though I had effectively left by 1996 I guess. I’m still not a Dem, but I might as well be one. Last Republican I voted for was Chris Christy for Governor for his 2nd term. (Not the first, but he did a really good job with Superstorm Sandy and some other stuff).
I actually campaigned for Obama both runs.
Also as a Moderator, I support this statement.
Okay. Dropped.
Personally, I’m much less concerned with the labels one chooses to use for themselves, than with how someone votes. If someone is going to vote for the right folks and the right issues, and consoles themself to be able to do that by saying “but I’m not a Democrat”, then that’s fine by me.
Those are the hardest decisions to make. I respect those who make them.
I’ve been an independent for years after having registered first as a Republican (I was a Bob Dole fan for a while) and later as a Democrat, because I have issues with both parties (albeit not equivalent ones - to paraphrase the late PJ O’Rourke, the Dems are at least wrong within normal human parameters). Rejecting the GOP doesn’t require a default jump to the Democrats.
I mean, at present I tend to vote pretty much straight Democratic because as little as I think of some of their candidates, the current GOP crop is so, so much worse. But that’s a “vote for the least bad option” approach, really.
Someday, maybe I’ll understand why regular people (not politicians or party apparatchiks) identify so strongly with a party, but I don’t today. I’m a registered Democrat because I have to be to vote in primaries in NJ, and I’d rather vote in Dem than GOP primaries.
Democratic Party positions much more closely align with my own, so I pretty much vote straight ticket. Like the OP, I think the Republican Party is broken, so I’ll even vote for Democrats for local positions, even though the very local Republicans don’t align well with the national party (and, often just become Republicans to be on the ballot, because the local Democratic machine chooses their own).
But, if the Democrats were broken like the GOP currently is, I’d drop them like a hot potato. I’m not a Democrat, I vote Democratic because I agree with most of their positions and the other party is a mess.
My family wasn’t very political, so maybe that’s why I don’t feel any real allegiance to either party.
There’s a strong sense of belonging that us clothed monkeys crave. We want a clan, a team, a great big extended family that welcomes us and that loves us for who we are and that picks the termites out of our fur without judging.
I read Cat’s Cradle at fifteen, and it poisoned that clannishness, that love-of-granfalloons, in me forever, for better or worse.
I recommend it to everyone.
I think it might have had the same effect on me!
Overall didn’t take for me, but maybe it did. I never voted a straight party line and never campaigned for “my party” after my first election and I did drop “my party”.
Doing as much of this as possible (while still maintaining sanity) and donating to/working for rational candidates are the best alternatives, apart from running for office oneself. The only other possibility is sitting back and waiting for the GOP to implode decisively, which is happening to some extent but is limited by the Democrats’ own but lesser tendencies toward self-destruction. From the ruins, Republicans might construct an effective party with both original and improved standards.
I’d love to have decent moderate or center-right Republicans to consider voting for as options instead of the occasional Democratic loser, like the loon who somehow won the party nomination to run for our Congressional seat in 2022 despite a history of filing lawsuits against politicians from both parties claiming that they “rigged” primaries against him, denying that Russia invaded Ukraine (which he alleged was run by Nazis) and calling for Biden to be impeached for risking WW III.*
*Responding to a comment by our Democratic governor that he needed help, this guy felt obliged to respond, saying “I don’t have any mental illness”, which was reassuring, sort of.
One of my Junior High School teachers read the class Vonnegut once a week or so. VERY subversive for small town central USA in the '70’s.
What he did was instill in me a love for reading. And my first choice was of course Vonnegut. Not sure if this was deliberate on his part, or he just didn’t have a lesson plan for the day 
He was a pretty cool dude. Every Jr. High needs a teacher like that.
I don’t think anyone considering an exit should feel like they are leaving the Republican party. It’s the party that has left you.
If the modern GOP were similar to how they were in my father’s day, I might have considered switching to them, as I favor a strong military and fiscal conservatism. But my dad, a law enforcement officer, is probably spinning in his grave to see what has become of his party, and would probably have approved of modern Democratic ideals. He was an objective person, logical and not tribal, so I try to emulate him when I make political choices.
That is what I always say. This is not the Republican Party I joined. Especially as so much of it is the Dixiecrats that jumped ship.
The moderate Republicans are gone from the national stage, the rational conservatives like McCain are mostly gone. Forget about the Green or Rockafeller Republicans. The current nuts would hunt them for sport.
One advantage of my country’s (Israel’s) crazy multiparty system is that you can change your political allegiance incrementally. You start with one party, and then you move to one slightly less right wing, then to another more centrist party, then to center left… enough time passes, and you’ve moved from right to left without even noticing it. And yes, I’m speaking from experience.
Haha! Or, you stay in place while the Overton window shifts to the right.
When was your father’s day? Despite their rhetoric, Republicans haven’t been actual fiscal conservatives since some time before Reagan.
It was a mix bag under Reagan, there were still plenty of fiscal conservatives in the party, but their voices started get squeezed out from that point.
How do you associate that with the GOP?
(Not Trump’s GOP— how do you associate that with the GOP of the ‘70s/80s/90s and onwards?)
They like to talk about it a lot, they never actually do it. Trump increased the deficit, Obama inherited the banking crisis and still reduced it. Bush was a huge spender, Clinton reduced it, Bush was a huge spender. Reagan was a huge spender.
How can anyone after ~50 years still associate the GOP with “fiscal conservative”? They never were.
They will cut taxes for their donors by running up the deficit. That is what they do.
Look up 2 Santa’s:
it is official GOP policy since the ‘70s.
A great political satire once said “the less you plan to do about something, the more you must talk about it.”
Republicans talk a lot about fiscal conservatism. You have to actually pay attention to notice they do nothing about it.
I’ve long maintained that there are two major political parties in the U.S., the Hypocrites and the Ineffectuals, which prefer to go by blander names.