Georgia Dem lawmaker switches to GOP

Yet another state legislator has switched parties from Democrat to Republican, this time in Georgia. A Representative from a district in Atlanta said the Democrat Party “abandoned” her for supporting school choice in the House.

First North Carolina, then Georgia

Rep. Mesha Mainor (D-56th-Atlanta) announced at noon yesterday that she was re-registering as a Republican.

The main sticking point, according to Mainor, was her breaking with her Party to support a school choice bill. She said the Democratic Party “demanded every Democrat vote … for the teacher’s union.” Her refusal to support defunding of police proved another sticking point, as she explained to Fox News. Nevertheless, “education and the importance of school choice” remain today her “key focus.”

When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me. They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.

She then pointed out that more than 90 percent of black voters have historically supported the Democratic Party. And, she says, blacks have little to show for their historical support.

In fact she’s not the first Georgia legislator to switch parties. Vernon Jones did that in 2021. When he did, he said much the same as Rep. Mainor is now saying. Specifically, he cited “defunding of the police, higher taxes on working families, and job-killing Socialist policies” as the impulses for him to switch Parties. Finally he blamed a “toxic combination of radical leftists and liberal elites in San Francisco and Hollywood” for the state of the Democratic Party today.

Last year Jones made headlines by suggesting alternative lifestyle adherents need no civil rights protections, because “they can change.”

And in North Caroina, Rep. Tricia Cotham of Charlotte made the same decision. That decision also helped North Carolina change from an abortion tourist trap into an abortion “restricting” State.

Feeling abandoned

For her part, Rep. Mainor pledged to help expand the Republican majority in the State House of Representatives. She spoke of “not just preaching to the choir but growing the congregation.”