Why This Lifelong Democrat Is Voting for Donald Trump

Breitbart News’ Matthew Boyle recently stumbled across what might otherwise be reported by the mainstream media as an anomaly in the American political landscape: a Democrat who is voting for Donald Trump.

What he found instead is perhaps a growing movement in which so-called “Trumpocrats” are dropping the Democratic party en masse because of Hillary Clinton’s hard left turn since the primary. And they’re organized enough to have their own Super PAC.

Boyle wrote:

Christian Rickers, the Virginia-based executive director of the Trumpocrats PAC—a Super PAC designed to help his like-minded lifelong Democrats abandon the sinking Democratic ship due to Hillary Clinton’s nomination and join the Trump movement—walked Breitbart News through why he is leading the effort among Democrats who support Trump for president.

Rickers’ argument centers on trade policy, and Trump’s ardent opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that Clinton supported publicly more than 40 times but now claims she opposes. He points back to Bill Clinton’s backing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from his time as president, and Rickers says Democrats everywhere should be terrified of how much further Hillary Clinton would go if she’s elected president.

He also provided direct quotes from Rickers, including:

I’m a lifelong Democrat, really since I was a little kid, and I still am a Democrat. But the Clintons—for instance, where I am from, my hometown, when I was a kid we had 15 manufacturing plants and we now have one. Nobody does anything there anymore, and that’s the same thing happening in a lot of small towns across the country really. The Clintons are really the cause of this, the cause of manufacturing going overseas with NAFTA and the trade deals and all of that. Donald Trump, he says a lot of crazy [expletive], but the one thing that he does say, that he really does want to do something about that and that he wants to protect our people with better trade policies and new trade policies.

The Trumpocrats PAC is actually operating under the official name American Uprising PAC, which Rickers launched in July. It is not due to make another financial disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission until Sept. 30—and those numbers aren’t likely to be reported until just before the Nov. 8 election—but it started out with $20,000 cash on hand.

The PAC has a website, TrumpocratsPAC.com, which features a number of testimonial videos and campaign videos intended to recruit Democrats to vote for Trump. The group has also posted dozens of stories in the mainstream media in which lifelong Democrats have said they are planning to vote for the New York businessman.

Boyle’s report identifies the core reason for the Trumpocrats’ existence:

If Hillary Clinton is elected, and not Donald Trump, Rickers says that income inequality—and particularly the “gap” between “the rich and the poor” will get worse. Clinton’s refusal to focus on issues that matter to middle class Americans of all political stripes—including Democrats—is why Rickers is calling on Democrats nationwide to join him in a push to elect Donald Trump president of the United States. Rickers said:

Otherwise, the gap is going to continue to increase between the rich and the poor because a lot of people don’t have the ability now to rise up whether they’re underemployed or facing hard times. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is talking about Planned Parenthood or whatever—which is all great, but that’s not what we need. We need people to be self-sufficient and feed their families. Trump speaks to that, and there are people all across this country who are fed up with it—obviously, that’s what this election is kind of all about. You have party registrations switching by the tens of thousands in Ohio and Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and there’s a lot of people—they don’t want to be Republicans, but they don’t like either party anymore. We’re going to give them a place or organize out of, you know? A home, if you will.

[Fellow Trumpocrat David “Mudcat”] Saunders said in the Fox interview that his party “used to stand for working people,” but “Hillary Clinton’s record—NAFTA, SHAFTA, favored nation status for China, Glass-Steagall, I mean we could go on and on and on—she’s not been a friend of rural America and rural America knows that and it’s shining in the primaries and caucuses. It’s a huge ABC feeling out here, Anybody But Clinton.”