Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the leading presidential candidates running under the Democratic banner used to be a GOP voter. Political news website Politico, went about checking Senator Warren’s previous records of registration, and interviewing the senator, her friends and former classmates to ascertain that this piece of trivia is true.
Apparently, her years as a Republican voter were at a time when the good senator had not yet developed a political inclination whatsoever. In Politico’s interview with Ms. Warren, she acknowledged the information to be true and that it was not until she became a Harvard law professor that she decided to change political party from Republican to Democrat.
Based on the records found by Politico in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts where she spent most of her mid-adult life, her years as a Republican voter ended sometime in 1996 when she was 47 years old.
In those years, which covered six (6) presidential elections, Ms. Warren recalls that she voted for only one Republican presidential candidate, Gerald Ford, who ran for the presidency in 1976. Being a former GOP voter was something Ms. Warren hardly mentioned at all, not even in her books. She explains that it was because she still did not think much of politics in those times.
Why Senator Elizabeth Warren Changed Party Affiliation
In a 2014 interview by TV host and political commentator George Stephanopoulos, Ms. Warren said she decided to leave the Republican Party because its political agenda was tilting in favor of Wall Street. She explained back then that she supported the GOP with the perception that it was conservative in its approach to economic and financial matters; but she later came to feel that the party had moved to a different playing field.
Ms. Warren stated further that before she decided to champion the cause of the liberals, she was an independent. She later joined the Democratic Party when it was clear that the Republicans were standing up for the big financial companies that were just pounding on the middle class American families.
Her views as a politician are supported by Politico’s review of her early scholarship, and from information gathered from interviews with the Senator’s more than 20 colleagues and friends who knew her since her high school years, through her academic profession.
They attested that Senator Warren’s conservatism centered mainly on economic policies and not on social issues; views that she now carries in her presidential campaign slogan, urging American voters to “Join the Fight.”