Why I Broke Up with the Democratic Party in 2020

Grand Ole Evan
Dec 16, 2020
11 min read

Updated: Jan 12, 2021

Read why, after extensive independent research, I decided to leave a party I once called home.

But his tweets! His rhetoric!

Trust me, I am aware. As are most Republicans. Trump’s more heated and controversial rhetoric can indeed be unsavory. So why would any reasonable person vote red?

A lot of this simply has to do with placing a greater value on outcomes rather than rhetoric.

Can rhetoric be harmful? Sure. However, rhetoric alone is not what should ultimately dictate your beliefs about politics – outcomes are. You cannot determine a politician's true motives, through rhetoric or any other means. You can only determine the outcomes they produce. You aren’t voting for a friend; you’re voting for a policymaker who crafts regulation and leverages narratives to achieve an outcome.

It is therefore futile to fixate on rhetoric to try and divine whether a politician is a "good" or "bad" person to determine whether you should vote for them. There are plenty of solutions that sound harsh, but produce good outcomes. Conversely, lots of things look and sound good on the surface, but are rotten on the inside and therefore produce bad outcomes.

Outcomes should be the deciding factor when choosing a party or an individual candidate. We should therefore be wary of politicians who lure voters with rosy rhetoric when there is little evidence that their rhetoric can be translated into a positive outcome.

And the Democratic Party, for as long as I can remember, has always been more prone to employ rosy rhetoric and benevolent-sounding policies to garner support, even if that rhetoric and those policies have little to no basis in reality. This year, the nasty habit has become especially egregious to the extent that nearly every major part of the party’s platform seems more concerned with what sounds good to others rather than what does good for others.

The most salient example of this tendency is the Democratic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A party which frames itself as the benevolent champion of the working class has stood firmly in favor of some of the most harmful things working-class people have faced this year: government-forced shutdowns, restrictions on capacity, and other burdensome regulations imposed to curb the spread of the virus. All for the sake of rosy rhetoric: that the Democratic Party is the “responsible” party that “cares” about the wellbeing of its constituents. A review of the evidence easily undermines the veracity of such a claim.

Small businesses and the people who work within them have already faced an onslaught of severe financial hardship as a result of COVID-19 – government restrictions on business activity therefore can present a cure that is worse than the virus itself. The number of active business owners in the U.S. plummeted by 3.3 million or 22% from February to April 2020 alone. [1] This was the largest drop in active business owners on record, and losses to business activity affected nearly all industries. [1] Black businesses were hit especially hard, experiencing a 41% drop in business activity. [1] Latino business activity fell by 32%. [1] Asian business activity fell by 26%. [1] Immigrant business activity fell by 36%. [1] Female business owners were also disproportionately affected with a 25% drop in activity. [1]

One survey of 5,800 small businesses conducted between March 28, 2020 and April 4, 2020 found that, on average, businesses reported having reduced their active employment by 39% since January. [2] Additionally, roughly 100,000 U.S. businesses permanently closed between March and September of this year. [3] Given that 48% of the country’s private workforce is employed by small businesses, [4] these figures should have merited great concern given the picture they painted regarding the health of the country’s small business ecosystem.

It is important to note that the virus also does indeed merit serious concern, with the CDC reporting over 16.5 million cases and 306,000 U.S. deaths attributed to COVID-19 as of December 18, 2020. [5] However, the level of concern and the severity of the response from the Democratic Party merits scrutiny, given what occurs when you place the deaths from COVID-19 into perspective. The CDC has reported estimated survival rates from COVID-19 of 99.997% (roughly 1 in 33,333) for those aged 0-19 years, 99.98% for those aged 20-49 years, 99.5% for those aged 50-69 years, and 94.6% for those aged 70 years and older. [6]

And yet in spite of the survival rates, even with the future of small business in America at stake, and with all of the worrisome trends across race, gender, and immigrant status, the Democratic Party continues to propagate a narrative that forced government shutdowns and limited capacity regulations are the “responsible” and “ethical” thing to do, even in places where hospital capacities do not indicate that they are necessary. And the assumed moral superiority and infallibility that has come to characterize the party means that dissenters to the mantra of shutdowns often must withstand harsh accusations of selfishness, recklessness, and disregard for the nation’s health care workers.

To be clear, the virus and the country’s response to it has, against all reason, become highly politicized by both Republicans and Democrats. Many Republicans have stood in firm opposition to even moderate proposals to curb the spread of the virus, such as implementing mask mandates when hospitals serving a given community are near or at capacity. Republican skepticism of masks is relatively unfounded, given the current body of evidence. Although a widely-cited Danish study suggested mask use is ineffective in preventing the spread of the virus, [7] the CDC cites numerous studies from around the globe which suggest the opposite is true. [8]

Criticisms of selfishness, recklessness, and disregard for the nation’s healthcare workers may therefore indeed have merit in instances where Republicans take hard stances against even moderate proposals to reduce infection rates: after all, there have been zero reported deaths as a result of wearing a mask, but there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths reported as a result of being infected with COVID-19. [5] Additionally, as of December 2020, a New York Times analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services revealed that hospitals serving more than 100 million Americans (roughly 1 in 3) had fewer than 15% of intensive care beds still available. [9] Even worse, 1 in 10 Americans lived in an area where intensive care beds were either completely full, or fewer than 5% of beds were still available. [9] Especially in instances where hospital capacity is such an issue, pragmatism is a better approach than politics.

However, the politicization of the virus by Republicans, though flawed, is at least in line with the core principles the party stands for: liberty and limited government. Republicans are against using government mandate to stifle business activity and the liberty of individuals to act according to their own evaluations of risk. The party’s response to COVID-19, while sometimes too steeped in ideology, is at least ideologically consistent.

In contrast, the Democratic Party’s response encourages outcomes in direct opposition to the outcomes the party claims to fight for. The party painting itself as the champion of the everyday American has encouraged forced shutdowns of small businesses, and even blocked a Republican proposal for $300 billion in COVID-19 relief for schools, testing, unemployment insurance, and the Paycheck Protection Program shortly before the presidential election. [10] The party who claims to fight for minority groups has jeopardized the country’s small business ecosystem, even as hundreds of thousands of minority business owners lost their livelihoods. [1] All because, as stated earlier, the party has become more concerned than ever with what sounds good to others rather than what does good for others.

Another example of the Democratic Party’s performative benevolence is the proposal to “cancel student debt.” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has advised Joe Biden to forgive up to $50,000 in federal student-loan debt for every graduate – a move that disproportionately favors the Democrats’ growing base of educated elites and offers little potential benefit to working class, blue collar Americans. [11] While Senator Elizabeth Warren claims forgiving student debt would be “the single biggest stimulus we could add to the economy,” a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama wrote that such debt forgiveness “likely has a multiplier close to zero.” [11] On top of this, Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, wrote that forgiving student debt is “possibly the least effective stimulus imaginable on a dollar-for-dollar basis,” because “normal stimulus measures try to put money in people’s pockets so that they can spend it. But student debt forgiveness does not do this. It’s like giving out $1+ trillion that is then immediately garnished by creditors, leaving households with no extra liquid cash to spend.” [11]

The policy proposal would also be enormously expensive – especially if the Democrats were to spend up to $1.6 trillion in taxpayer dollars to cancel all student debt, as proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders – and it would deliver economic benefits to upper class, educated elites who do not need them. [11] To put that price tag into perspective, this would mean spending more to help college-educated Americans than the total estimated 2018 federal welfare budget of $851 billion earmarked for unemployment, housing assistance, family and children assistance, workers compensation and Medicaid combined. [22] All while leaving working-class Americans, who the Democratic Party repeatedly plasters on the face of their campaigning efforts, out in the cold.

How can this be? How could the party painted as the champion of the underdog suggest we spend such a massive sum of taxpayer dollars on some of the nation’s most privileged, while other Americans continue to suffer? It is simple – again, these are policies playing into the Democratic tendency to do what sounds good rather than what does good in order to win votes.

The Democratic Party is playing to its growing base of educated elites, paying more attention to what political strategy will garner the most votes rather than what will bring the most benefit to the country. Unconvinced? In 2016, Chuck Schumer boasted, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” [11]

It is not only the ideological inconsistency and impracticality of the Democrat platform this year that has contributed to the party’s decline, but also the collective refusal to acknowledge any victories achieved under the Trump administration, even if those victories served to advance traditionally progressive causes.

Racial wealth gaps were falling during the economic expansion that occurred under the Trump administration prior to a pandemic that shook the global economy. [12] According to the Federal Reserve, median wealth rose for all race and ethnicity groups from 2016-2019. [12] Growth rates were faster for Black and Hispanic families, with their wealth rising 33% and 65%, respectively, as compared to white families, whose wealth rose 3% over the same period. [12]

Federal Reserve data also suggests that income inequality was on the decline during this period. Between 2016 and 2019, median family income rose by 5%, while mean family income decreased by 3%. [13] This trend suggests a narrowing in the income distribution over this period, particularly as the decrease in mean income was primarily driven by families in the top 1% of the income distribution. [13]

The report from the Federal Reserve also details several other, more nuanced indicators associated with a decline in income inequality. The homeownership rate increased during the period to 64.9%, a reversal of the declining trend between 2004 and 2016. [13] Ownership of corporate equities also increased, driven by families in the lower half of the income distribution. [13] All of this, while “families at the top of the income and wealth distributions experienced very little, if any, growth in median and mean net worth between 2016 and 2019 after experiencing large gains between 2013 and 2016” under the Obama administration. [13]

In another victory towards a more equitable country, Donald Trump signed into law the First Step Act, the first criminal justice reform bill passed in nearly a decade. [14] The law consisted of both sentencing reform to shorten federal prison sentences and prison reform to improve the conditions in federal prison. [14] According to the Justice Department, as of May 2020, 3,000 people had already been resentenced to shorter prison terms. [14] The sentencing reforms mean that every year, an estimated 2,000 people will receive prison sentences 20% shorter than they otherwise would. [14] One year after the First Step Act was signed, around 5,000 people had already been released from prison. [14] Over 2,000 people have received sentence reductions that average nearly 6 years, with black inmates comprising 91% of those receiving reductions. [15]

On the front of foreign relations and American interventionism, Trump has been the first president since Jimmy Carter not to enter U.S. troops into a new conflict, and the administration announced it will reduce the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500 by January 15, 2021. [16] To put this into perspective, as of January 2020 the U.S. had a total of roughly 20,000 troops stationed in these countries. [16]

These progressive victories have gone relatively uncelebrated, instead being overshadowed by a constant onslaught of unconditional criticisms of the Trump administration by the institutions that are meant to inform the American public: the mainstream media and academia. Both institutions have come to serve as unconditional servants not of the truth – but of the Democratic Party.

A high-level review of data easily confirms just how cemented the backing of the Democratic Party by the mainstream media and academia truly is. In 2016, federal campaign finance filings indicated that 96% of political donations from journalists, reporters, news editors, and television news anchors went to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. [17] A 2018 study of 8,688 tenure track Ph.D-holding professors from 51 of the 60 top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report found that, among professors registered with a major U.S. party, the mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio indicated that for every 1 Republican professor, there were 10.4 Democratic professors. [18] Even more disturbing, this same study found that 78.2% of academic departments sampled were either 0% Republican, or had a proportion of Republicans that did not statistically differ from 0. [18] STEM departments had lower Democrat-to-Republican ratios, indicating a (relatively) more politically balanced composition of professors. [18] Samples of engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and physics departments yielded ratios of 1.6, 5.2, 5.6, and 6.2, respectively. [18] Among the 1,612 humanities professors sampled, the ratio was 31.9 – that is, there were 31.9 Democrat professors for every Republican one (expressed as a rate: 3% Republican). [18] The most egregious ratio in the study came from the sample of professors in interdisciplinary studies, where there were 108 registered Democrats, and 0 registered Republicans. [18]

Despite the overwhelming bias of the institutions that inform the American public, and their unrelenting criticisms of the Trump administration, exit polls showed impressive increases in minority support for Trump as compared to his performance in the 2016 election. [19] Support among black men jumped from 13% to 19% (from roughly 1 in 10 to 1 in 5), black women from 4% to 9% (from roughly 1 in 20 to 1 in 10), Latino men from 32% to 36% (roughly 1 in 3 in both elections), and Latino women from 25% to 30% (from roughly 1 in 4 to 1 in 3). [19] Additionally, 52% of American Indian, Native American, or Alaskan Natives voted for Trump in the 2020 election, along with 59% of Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders and 35% of Muslims. [20] Other minority voters for Trump in the 2020 election included 27% of lesbian, gay, bi, or transgender voters. [21]

These results indicate that many Americans rejected the voting prescriptions handed down to them by the nation’s elite. Media narratives of a heroic Democratic Party fighting against a malevolent Trump administration could not overshadow the reality that they saw with their own eyes: harmful Democrat-induced shutdowns that cost thousands of Americans their livelihoods, expensive policy proposals catered towards an increasingly elite Democratic voter composition, and the total disregard for any progress made under the Trump administration – a Democratic imperative over the last 4 years which stood only to maintain partisan divides and stifle the possibility of compromise and progress.

This is not to say that these voters saw a perfect party in the GOP. So long as political factions are comprised of flawed humans, those factions will have flaws. It is for that reason that “choosing a side” doesn’t consist of finding the perfect party - it consists of measuring the extent and pervasiveness of flaws within a party, the extent and pervasiveness of virtue within a party, and making a final decision on the net outcome of that analysis. And that analysis, at least for these voters, yielded a Republican result.

These voters, who conducted that analysis independent of the voting prescriptions given to them, understood a crucial truth that should govern every voter’s political decisions: that the vote is sacred, and it should not be dictated by social trends, celebrities, news outlets, pundits, elites, or – perhaps worst of all - an unconditional loyalty to a political party. One’s unconditional loyalty should belong to no party or person; one’s unconditional loyalty should belong exclusively to the truth. And the greater agent of truth in this election cycle is - based on clear and convincing evidence - the Republican Party.