CV NEWS FEED // Republican Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson explained that his Christian faith played a role in his decision to switch his party registration from Democratic to Republican.
“It’s way more complicated than ‘there’s this one thing that happened,’ and I just said I’m out of here,” Johnson told Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, and co-host Ben Ferguson during an episode of the “Verdict” podcast that aired Monday. “It’s an evolution for me, and just kind of coming to accept who I have always been and why I’ve struggled as a Democrat the whole time.”
Johnson served in the Texas State Legislature for nine years and was elected and re-elected Mayor of Dallas all under the banner of the Democratic Party.
Cruz commented: “As an elected Democrat there’s an ecosphere around you.” Before Johnson’s stunning party switch, Cruz pointed out, the mayor had a robust network of Democratic “donors … volunteers … [and] supporters.”
Ferguson asked the mayor: “Was it the issues that made you think about becoming a Republican?”
Johnson replied: “The issues were … a policy manifestation of problems I’ve been having with the Democratic Party because of who I am as a person for a long time.”
“I was born in West Dallas – very poor community – to working-class parents who never went to college,” Johnson went on. He noted that his parents “got married right out of high school” and are “still married to this day.”
He explained that he grew up as one of four children in a “very, very faith-oriented” family and community. The mayor was raised in the Church of Christ and remains a practicing member of the Christian denomination. “The Church was hugely important to us,” he said.
Johnson added that growing up he “spent more time in church than really anyplace else.” He also pointed out his close relationship with his devout grandparents.
“My family wasn’t political at all,” he said. “I’m not even sure we had a real awareness of what was going on around us politically.”
As a child, he was taught a “strong sense of right [and] wrong,” he recalled. “This is how you treat people. This is how you behave. You follow the law. You obey the law. You work hard. An honest day’s work, an honest day’s pay. “
“That was always in the background,” Johnson said.
“I think I was always politically in a weird posture with the Democratic Party,” he continued. “At its core … you sort of inherit the Democratic Party as a cultural heirloom when you’re African American. It sort of gets handed to you as part of who you are.”
But in the aftermath of his decision to leave the party late last year, he said,
I had more phone calls with people distraught about this party switch than I ever would have gotten if I had told people that I was actually leaving the church. There’s no question about it. There’s no doubt about it. I will say that loudly and on the record.
I had more panicked phone calls from people genuinely concerned about what I was doing and how I could do this than I would have gotten if I’d said I just don’t think I’m into this Jesus thing anymore … I don’t think I would have had anywhere near the same reaction.
>> DALLAS MAYOR SWITCHES PARTIES, JOINS GOP <<
“It’s that cultural,” Johnson said of being a Democrat in the black community.
He explained that, given his values, it was “inevitable there was going to be a problem” with his continued Democratic Party membership.
“At the Democratic Party’s core,” he explained,
is a belief that how things turn out for you in this country are largely determined by things that are outside of your control, the race you’re born, the neighborhood you’re born in, it just kind of excuses away your failures and excuses away your successes to something that’s out of your control.
“If you’re successful and you’re [a white male], it’s because of course you are,” Johnson said, describing what he called the “overarching political philosophy” of the Democratic Party. “And if you’re unsuccessful as an African American, it’s [because] the deck was stacked against you.”
“I just wasn’t a person who ever believed that,” the mayor said. “That wasn’t how I was raised.”
He noted that as a successful black man from a poor family, he is “living proof” that victim mentality is wrong: “The story of my life and the justification that my [former] party wanted me to put out there … just never really matched.”
>> POLLS: BIDEN STRUGGLING WITH BLACK AND HISPANIC VOTERS <<
In a September 22 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal announcing his decision to join the Republican Party, Johnson wrote: “The future of America’s great urban centers depends on the willingness of the nation’s mayors to champion law and order and practice fiscal conservatism.”
“Our cities desperately need the genuine commitment to these principles (as opposed to the inconsistent, poll-driven commitment of many Democrats) that has long been a defining characteristic of the GOP,” he added.
Polls show that Johnson is not the only minority voter becoming disillusioned with the modern Democratic Party.
An NBC poll conducted late last month saw incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden receiving historically low support from both black and Hispanic voters for a member of his party.
As CatholicVote reported on February 5:
[Republican former President Donald] Trump is leading Hispanic voters by one point, according to the most recent NBC poll. If this trend holds, he will be the first known Republican presidential candidate in history to win the Hispanic/Latino vote.
In comparison, Trump lost the Hispanic vote to Biden by 21 points in 2020, per the Pew Research Center. However, this was a substantially smaller margin than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton carried the Hispanics over Trump by 38 points.
…
Among black voters, Biden is leading Trump by 59 points. If this holds, it would be the worst showing among black voters by a Democratic presidential candidate since the 1960s.
In 2020, Biden won the black vote over Trump by 84 points. Similarly, black Americans voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 85 points.
