Democratic lawmaker immediately defects to GOP after winning re-election

Following her reelection as a Democrat, Florida state representative Susan Valdés declared on Monday that she is switching to the Republican Party.

Representing a district in the Tampa area, Valdés is a Cuban-American congressman who was brought up by immigrants in New York.

“I have spent my adult life fighting to give a voice to the people of my West Tampa home,” she stated. “I have done so as a Democrat partly out of habit, I come from a family of Democrats, and partly because I believed the Democrats were the party most concerned with the working families I represent.”

In her statement, Valdés did not specifically indicate why she had left Democrats. She lost a bid to be the chair of the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee, nevertheless, just a week prior.

In addition, she was among the few Democrats who voted in favor of a large-scale school voucher program that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was pushing last year.

This was also cited as a precipitating issue by Georgia state representative Mesha Mainor, who lost the election after defecting last month, and North Carolina state representative Tricia Cotham, who also famously defected to the GOP last year, giving the party a supermajority in the legislature that they narrowly lost this year.

School voucher systems, which are marketed as providing parents with the “choice” to transfer their tax dollars to private education, have been criticized for continuously worsening educational outcomes while benefiting a select few affluent parents who are already not enrolled in the public school system.