Artur Davis Finally Making His Ideological Switch To The Dark Side Partisan And Official?

Oops... too late

In October I asked a very straightforward question here, When will Artur Davis officially join the Republican Party? Basically, we've been watching Davis, first as a conservative, corporate-oriented shill inside Congress and later as a disgraceful excuse for a Democratic primary candidate for governor of Alabama (he lost 10 of the 12 counties that made up his own congressional district), morph into a Republican for years. Before the primary he went from a moderate 70.82 ProgressivePunch lifetime voting score to a dismal and horribly reactionary 31.58. The guy is a clown, and he was thoroughly rejected by the voters who knew him best. His vote against the health care reform bill was probably the last straw for those folks.

Friday the Washington Post's Aaron Blake reported that Davis is now talking openly about jumping the fence-- just the way conservative Alabama Democrat Parker Griffith did. Griffith was promptly rejected by Republicans, defeated for reelection and banished from public life. He's eyeing his old congressional seat, now held by another worthless corporate Democrat, Terri Sewell, who's just a tad less conservative than Davis.

Former Democratic congressman Artur Davis, who has been a thorn in the side of Democrats in the aftermath of his loss in the 2010 Alabama gubernatorial primary, is a man without a political party.

In an interview with The Fix, Davis openly speculated about running for office as an independent or even a Republican. In both cases, he suggested his decision not to make the switch has as much to do with the difficulties involved as any desire he has to remain a Democrat.

...“While there have been Democrats who have switched down there, the Republican Party has refused to accept them,” Davis said. “Do I agree with the agenda items in the Alabama Republican Party? Some I agree with, and some I don’t. [The state GOP-drafted] immigration law is not something I would have written.”

Davis said he doesn’t identify with a political party in his current role as an increasingly vocal pundit. He caused a splash recently by speaking out in favor of a voter ID law. Given that the Democratic Party regards such laws as an attempt to disenfranchise black voters, having an African-American former Democratic congressman espouse that view wasn’t exactly helpful to the party’s cause.

This week, he wrote a piece for the conservative National Review Online suggesting Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-Neb.) retirement was due to “an exclusively liberal” Democratic Party.

Davis’s criticism of his party ramped up in the 2010 primary, when he carved out a more moderate persona. He wound up losing badly to the state’s agriculture commissioner, Ron Sparks, by 25 points. Sparks went on to defeat in the general election, and bad blood lingers between the two.

Davis has also recently contributed money to the campaigns of two Republicans, former congresswoman Heather Wilson, who is running for Senate in New Mexico, and Mississippi Gov.-elect Phil Bryant.

Davis was always a darling of the DCCC, the exact kind of principle-less conservative they recruit and nourish. But don't worry about them; they've found dozens more just like him-- from Marty Chavez in New Mexico, Rob Wallace in Oklahoma, Brendan Mullen in Indiana, Ted Vick in South Carolina and Clark Hall in Arkansas to Brad Schneider in Illinois, Terry Bellamy in North Carolina and Leonard Bembry in Florida, each as much of a real Democrat as Artur Davis. Send a message to the Democratic Party.