Here’s an alarming suggestion among Democrats in Kentucky: pretend to be a Republican in order to win a GOP-leaning district.

There’s a growing trend among the members of the Democratic party in the United States. As they fall all over each other trying to prove how far to the radical left each one is, many of Kentucky’s Democratic politicians seem to have forgotten who their neighbors are. As Kentucky’s Democrats in Frankfort… 

• conflate Viagra prescriptions with the killing of an unborn child, 
• invite neighbors to share over coffee just how anxious, depressed, and pissed off they are over Texas abortion law,
• ignore the voices of the 82% of JCPS teachers who want armed SROs on campus in favor of a single anecdote,
• claim that police make an event dangerous just by showing up, and
• grandstand about “period poverty,” which apparently means that a dime’s worth of taxes on a box of tampons means a woman can’t afford them, while simultaneously trading “women” for “people who menstruate”…

It’s never been more clear: the Democratic party has lost touch with the majority of Kentucky. That statement isn’t unfounded or unprovable. Even as Andy Beshear narrowly took the governor’s office in 2019, the following year the Republicans expanded their supermajority to 75% of the legislature in what the AP termed an “election thrashing.” It happened in a bloodbath so fast it saw the Democratic party’s “nearly century-long control of the House” vanish into a powerless minority in the span of four years.

The death knell started in 2015, when Democratic representatives Gooch and Butler switched parties. Just last year, Larue County turned red, and so did Greenup and Mercer, while the Republican Party gained over 113,000 voters and the Democratic Party lost over 44,000 just in the two years since Beshear got elected. Clearly, drag queen story hour and people shouting, “Peace, peace” in the streets are not distracting us from our children getting shot or our private property vanishing in broad daylight.

Then, in February of ‘22, the Lexington Herald-Leader published an op-ed by Teri Carter, a woman running for magistrate in Anderson County. Before registering to run for magistrate as a Republican, Ms. Carter was a registered Democrat.

At first glance I expected to read that this woman had realized what many Kentucky Democrats clearly have: the Democratic party had become unrecognizable to her. Surely her switch was because she couldn’t align herself with the party that obsesses over making sure women can kill an unborn child to the moment of birth for no reason or any reason, over supporting rioters in our streets over the businesses they vandalize, over making sure that we know what everyone’s preferred pronouns are and no one ever misuses them.

No, none of that was the reason. Ms. Carter readily admitted in her op-ed piece that she is “a progressive Democrat, running as a Republican.” The only reason given is that she couldn’t win as a Democrat.

Now, this is a novel approach: your district is heavily leaning to the other party, so instead of evaluating your positions and trying to make a difference where you can, you switch party registrations without changing any of your policies. In other words, you try to trick the majority party into thinking you are one of them.

The Highlands and its surrounding neighborhoods have been represented by Democrats who have cruised to victory election after election for decades. So, should I switch parties, become a Democrat to have a better chance? No: winning this election, or any election, isn’t worth trying to trick people by lying about which party most closely aligns with my personal policy positions.

Ms. Carter claims that her motivation is that “normal people who want to serve their communities should not be afraid to run.” I have two responses. First, switching parties for no reason other than to win is not normal. Second, I’m not afraid to run.