How I stopped being a Republican

the defining statement of my early childhood

One of my big regrets in life is that I failed to vote for President Barack Obama twice. It’s difficult to convey to anyone who was not alive during that time just how different the political climate was in the 90s. I’m old enough to remember people driving around during the Clinton Administration with “Don’t blame me I voted for Bush” bumper stickers and I remember the trenches were indeed trenches then but without the extreme polarization and apocalyptic fear mongering. Still, the general consensus was “Republican born, Republican bred, and one day I’ll be Republican dead.” 

I was born into a Republican house ergo I was a Republican. Yes, we were Republican because we were Christians, but it had less to do with Christian Nationalism (though the seeds were there) and more to do with Republicans being the anti-abortion party. It never crossed my mind to vote for a Democrat. Never once in my home school curriculum, church sermons, or general discussions about voting was being a Democrat floated as a viable option. We weren’t even sure Catholics were Christians, but we tolerated them because they were Republicans.

The 2008 election was the first I was old enough to vote in. I had recently discovered NPR and had it on any time I was in my car driving back and forth to Bible college. It was the first time I had heard anyone have a discussion about policy; I was nineteen. Any time I heard discussions about elections it was in a “as Christians we vote for the candidate who aligns with our values” way and was reinforced by the presence of Republican politicians who frequented our church and homeschool conventions. There obviously was a lot of talk about Obama on NPR in 2008. I heard people discuss how qualified and eloquent he was and I have distinct memories of openly scoffing at these statements. Obama was a Democrat, how could he possibly be eloquent, much less qualified? I listened to him give a speech once just to see what all the fuss was about and I still die a little on the inside when I think about self-righteously telling a friend that I didn’t think he was that great of a speaker. The truth is I listened so I could better condemn him. I never heard what he said. 

Here is the thing I think is often misunderstood about being in an ideological enclave: the door is already shut. I hear statements from time to time along the lines of “if we could just share the facts with people they wouldn’t vote for Trump” or “maybe if we had a better way to tell them how their voting against their best interests”, but an inability to hear an opposing argument is not a logic barrier, it’s an emotional barrier. We have facts on facts on facts about how Republicans are systematically disenfranchising large swaths of Americans who consistently vote Republican. Why? Because these are emotional decisions made from a place of fear by people who have already decided that Democrats are the problem. Logic doesn’t really work here. 

How do I know? That is exactly how I once felt.

I heard the NPR arguments for President Obama. I heard all the facts of his potential presidency and presupposed that these were lies because I had been groomed to believe that they were lies. This, of course, is the same ideological priming that Trump would capitalize on during his campaign. I didn’t have ears to hear what was being said. I voted for McCain in 2008 because I believed as the Republican candidate he was the best candidate. I voted for Romney in 2012 because I was still entrenched in a community that expected me to–and explicitly told me I must–vote Republican. 

My first Democratic presidential vote was for Elizabeth Warren in the 2016 primaries. “Whoa, Autumn,” you may be thinking, “that’s a huge swing to go from voting for McCain in 2008 and then Romney in 2012 to Warren in 2016. What happened?”

Doubt. 

Sometime in 2010, my then pastor yelled at a student who asked a legitimate theology question and then expelled him from the Bible college we attended at the time. This was the turning point. This person who I had trusted implicitly since I was a kid was no longer trustworthy. He had told me that we had the absolute, unshakable truth, so why was he so afraid of questions? Why lash out and silence him instead of having a discussion? I didn’t know what to do with these thoughts, so I doubled down, working harder to be more devout, more acceptable, as a way to assuage the doubt that now rattled around in the back of my head.

We already had the narrative structures in 2008 that the Republicans took to the extreme in 2016: immigrants steal jobs, abortions are murder, government is bad. I knew these narratives intimately and believed them at face value. As I got more real-world experience, I began to realize that the talking points didn’t match up to reality. I was hearing that abortion was the “killing of the unborn” but then saw that abortion rates were on a downward trend (until recently) thanks to improved sex-education initiatives. I was hearing that immigrants were destroying our towns, but then saw that the majority of crimes committed were by “regular people”, not immigrants, and that crime wasn’t as rampant as I was led to believe. I was hearing that government was bad, and especially big government, but then I realized other countries had governments that provided healthcare and time off and other things as a right and that it was a good thing.

Once I had ears to hear, it wasn’t difficult to listen. The card houses erected for me to live in fell with little resistance. I read everything I could get my hands on about Civil Rights, intersectional feminism, Communism and Socialism (which were one and the same where I came from), Redlining, late-stage capitalism, and more, discovering a whole world had been kept from me. I started actually listening to NPR. No longer hemmed in by biases, I began to realize the utopia I was told would only happen one day in Heaven was more possible here than I was led to believe. I didn’t have to wait for Jesus to return to support initiatives and policies that alleviate hunger, poverty, and war: people, I discovered, had been thinking about these issues for hundreds of years and had some really good solutions to giving everyone a better life. 

It finally clicked. All these Bible passages in my head suddenly made sense. Jesus makes it very clear that to follow him you are supposed to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit those in prison and give away your wealth and share what you have with others – but all the “good” people I knew were actively supporting a political party that was actively trying to do the opposite. They were supporting a party that was against raising the minimum wage, against raising taxes on corporations, against giving healthcare to people, and against policies that make it easier to feed, clothe, and educate children. 

That’s how I came to vote for Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s why I voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and am voting for Kamala Harris in 2024. I’m not saying that Democrats are the golden ticket. Heaven knows that the party has failed this country in so many ways, but the world they say they want to build is much closer to the world I want to live in. 

There’s no doubt people are struggling. What makes me sad is that the people who would benefit the most from a social safety net are actively voting against it because they’re afraid that if they let go of what little they have, what they get in return will be even less, even though that’s just not true. Or they’re afraid that someone else will get what’s “rightfully theirs”, which is just hateful. Yes, it would be different, but it wouldn’t necessarily be worse. It could be better.