Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:25 pm
The bleeding is bad, y’all.
So bad.
So bad that a leading Hispanic Texas Republican who worked for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is doing everything in his power to rebuke Donald Trump, including rejecting Libertarian Gary Johnson in favor of Democrat Hillary Clinton, in order to send a strong message to his former Party.
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“I want to make sure that I do everything I can to see that Trump doesn’t get elected,” Lionel Sosa told The Texas Tribune. “I’m doing this because I don’t think he’s a good representative of the Republican Party. It’s not the Republican Party I know.”
Sosa was named by Time as one of the top 25 most influential Hispanics in America in 2005. His advertising agency Sosa & Associates was the largest Hispanic advertising agency in the U.S. and helped power Bush and Reagan with Hispanic voters.
In June, Sosa wrote in a San Antonio Express-News op-ed that he would leave the Republican Party if Trump were their nominee, “A thousand points of light has been replaced by a thousand points of anger. In place of compassionate conservatism, our nominee promotes callousness, extremism and racism. And instead of a unifier, the party now cheers the ultimate “us against them†proponent. Divisiveness incarnate.”
Libertarian Gary Johnson’s campaign hired Sosa in August as co-chair of Hispanic outreach, but Sosa decided that a vote for Johnson isn’t a strong enough statement against Trump.
That might seem like an odd alliance but Libertarians benefit from the misguided notion that they perpetuate in their own description of their platform that they are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. In theory, they are all about individual freedom but they are against using government to protect that freedom, so the only people who are “free” are those who are already protected — that is, white men. The social equality that Democrats fight for on behalf of minorities is not a shared platform with Libertarians. Small government means government isn’t going to protect minorities from discrimination or work to fix inequalities within our justice system.
When a Reagan and Bush Republican born to a Democratic family leaves the party and votes for Hillary Clinton, it’s a good sign that the Republican Party’s troubles are deep. While Sosa hoped that this was a one-off, extremism and hate has been driving the Republican Party in the House since 2010, and certainly Sarah Palin’s dog whistle politics were beloved by the base in 2008. The signs were all there and the party knew they needed to change, but they were unwilling to give up the benefit of hate today for a principle tomorrow.
If Hillary Clinton keeps playing her cards right, she will build on the liberal shift ushered in by President Obama, until the values of Democrats become the respected position of the adults in government that Republicans have held for decades.
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