Ted Deutch Quotes
I have been talking to a lot of people who don't normally vote Democratic - independents and Republicans. They have been voting for Democrats because they think it's important to change the direction America is going.
Deutch, Ted. "Remarks on the Campaign Trail." South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 2 Nov. 2010.
When the Republican Party was first founded, they had a disproportionate share of educated people. This was generally true until the Great Depression and the Hoover administration. After the Republican “Southern Strategy in the 1960s, the “solid” Democratic South became Republicans and drove the party far to the right. The party leaders began to scorn intellectuals and scientists. By 2000, a large majority of the most educated Americans were voting Democratic rejecting the extremism of the then Republican Party.
Prior to Johnson’s civil rights efforts, the South virtually always voted for Democrats in all elections. The only political competition was for the Democratic Party Primaries. The term “Solid South” meant that it was solid for the Democratic Party. But after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the racist whites who used to be Democrats switched and joined the genuine traditional conservative and created a Republican Southern majority that was as solid for the GOP as the Democrats had ever enjoyed.
On why he joined the Republican party:
This quotation is very surprising to most people who are not familiar with the history of the struggle regarding abortion in America. In the early days of the family planning movement and when abortion rights were first advocated in America, the proponents were almost all Republicans. At the time, the Republican Party consisted of economic conservatives and social liberals—“Rockefeller Republicans they would later be called. At the same time the Democratic Party was aligned very differently. The Southern Conservatives and fundamentalist Protestants of the Bible Belt were all Democrats. Most Roman Catholics were Democrats. Intellectuals at the time tended to side with the Democrats on economic issues and with the Republicans on social issues. In the 1960s the Republicans went after the racist resentment in the South over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Southern Democrats of the Solid South switched to the Republican Party, and many liberal republicans, reacting to their party now being the party of the the anti equality racists, became Republicans. The Southern Democrats then pushed out the moderate Republicans who were the social liberals.
Theodore Eliot Deutch is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Florida's 22nd congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he first entered Congress in 2010 after a special election following the resignation of Robert Wexler. Deutch represented Florida's 19th congressional district until 2013 and Florida's 21st congressional district from 2013 to 2017.
