Posted on 08/30/2024 7:54:12 AM PDT by lowbridge
State Rep. Shawn Thierry, a Houston Democrat who was defeated in her primary earlier this year, announced Friday she is switching to the Republican Party.
Thierry was ousted by primary challenger Lauren Ashley Simmons in the May runoff after she sided with Republicans last year on a handful of bills opposed by the LGBTQ+ community, including a measure barring gender-transitioning care for minors. She delivered an emotional speech from the House floor explaining why she broke with her party, remarks that went viral.
In a statement, Thierry said she switched parties because the Democratic Party “has veered so far left, so deep into the progressive abyss, that it now champions policies that I cannot, in good conscience, support.”
“I am leaving the left because the left has abandoned Democrats who feel betrayed by a party that has lost its way, lost its commitment to hard working families,” Thierry said.
Thierry was announced earlier this month as the director of political strategy for the U.S. wing of Genspect, an international anti-trans policy group. Founded in 2021 by an Irish psychotherapist, the group is part of a broader network of organizations that oppose gender-transitioning care for minors, and its members have testified in favor of bills across the world that would ban or limit the practice.
The partisan balance in the lower chamber now stands at 87 Republicans and 63 Democrats. Thierry’s term will expire before the Legislature reconvenes in Austin for its next regular session in January, however, and Simmons is heavily favored to win the solidly Democratic seat in November.
(Excerpt) Read more at texastribune.org ...
If she is a Conservative Republican, I am happy to have her aboard. If she is a RINO, she should stay in the Democrat party where she belongs.
I am suspecting moderate dim that wants a life in politics and will switch sides and relocate to get elected in a moderate district. Odd that it took her getting defeated to come to this revelation. If not, then I stand corrected.
It’s a vote. Trump needs every vote he can get. Stupid democrats have increased registration by 175 percent since Harris announced. That’s quite a few additional votes. Republicans in the same time, added 19 percent. Such a good job Lara Trump is doing. Ugh.
She is an actual moderate by Democrat standards — Texas has a few of those, a species which is just about extinct in most places.
Thierry represented a D+30, 82% non-White lunatic leftist district in the vicinity of the University of Houston and Rice University, but failed to produce a radical-lunatic voting record while in the TX State House from 2017-2024, so it’s not surprising that she would be ousted by some nutjob who fits the district better.
Thierry was defeated in the May primary runoff by almost a 2:1 margin after coming in second in the initial March primary by about 5 points. She was also outspent by the liberal establishment by almost a 2:1 margin. This was the first even remotely tough election she had ever faced.
“Trump needs every vote he can get.”
If you mean legislative vote, this has nothing to do with Trump (unless she has endorsed him, FWTW) or Washington DC.
Thierry is not a member of Congress, she was just a Texas state legislator from a hideously bad district which finally got sick of the fact that she wasn’t a 100% liberal nutbucket, and her political career is now over unless she packs up and moves elsewhere and tries again some other year.
It sounds to me that this one issue is the straw that broke the camels back for her. She’s probably still on board with the entire platform of the DNC otherwise. All this does is dilute Republicans with poison.
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