WASHINGTON – A political shift is beginning to take hold across the U.S. as tens of thousands of suburban swing voters who helped fuel the Democratic Party’s gains in recent years are becoming Republicans.
More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by The Associated Press. The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Joe Biden replaced former President Donald Trump.

But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump's Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Ben Smith, who lives in suburban Larimer County, Colorado, north of Denver, said he reluctantly registered as a Republican earlier in the year after becoming increasingly concerned about the Democrats' support in some localities for mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, the party's inability to quell violent crime and its frequent focus on racial justice.

“It’s more so a rejection of the left than embracing the right,” said Smith, a 37-year-old professional counselor whose transition away from the Democratic Party began five or six years ago when he registered as a libertarian.

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I ping-pong between the front of the rally and the back, the rhetoric and the action. Ashli’s mother tells the crowd to be proud Americans. “Be proud white Americans!” She goes on to list other races she feels should be proud Americans, too, but she’s hard to hear over Kelli and Freedom shrieking.

Toward the back, a livestreamer named Julius is providing commentary. “She’s right,” he tells his camera. “ ‘Slavery, slavery, slavery,’ ” he says, imitating his imagination of the nerdy voice of a leftist. “No one got time for all a that.” Julius is Black; he’s wearing a Saviors T-shirt, with bleached-white Lady Liberty.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEFF SHARLET.
Julius is not alone as a man of color in this crowd—there’s Jorge Riley, and a Black Second Amendment speaker. I meet nearly as many self-identified Latino people as white ones. Nearly all want it known that “patriots” are more diverse than liberals think. This is true. And yet the crowd cheers for “proud white Americans” not because they are blind but because they want to be—to believe in what historian Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, calls the “promise of whiteness” offered to people of color willing to collaborate with white supremacy. This bait and switch—the mythical promise of whiteness is unfulfillable—may be the next American contribution to fascism. Purification projects have become impractical for a nation in which the rightist ascendency can contend for the loyalty of a third of Latinx voters. Now, white supremacy welcomes all. Or at least a sufficient veneer of “all” to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and “kung flu” and “Black crime” and “replacement theory” somehow don’t add up to the R-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in “reverse,” against white people. Such victims feel themselves drawn together not by whiteness but by that of which it is made: their belief in a strongman—Trump—and their desire for an iron-fisted God, and their love of the way guns make them feel inside, and their grief over COVID-19, and their denial of COVID-19, and their loathing of “systemic” as descriptive of that which they can’t see, can’t hold in their hands and weigh, and their certainty that children are being taken, stolen, if not in body then in spirit, “indoctrinated” to “hate themselves.” They are drawn together by their love of “fairness,” which is how it used to be, they’re certain they remember, or, if they’re too young, they’ve been told. And yet, “slavery, slavery, slavery,” murmurs the past. “It gets to be too much, sometimes,” Julius laments.

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BREAKING: Uvalde ISD Chief Pete Arredondo was officially sworn in as a city council member today, Mayor Don McLaughlin confirms in a statement. This comes hours after DPS said he is not responding to a request for a followup interview.