Ana Navarro just went viral with op-ed explaining why she’s voting blue for the first time in a state election

GOP strategist and NeverTrump Republican Ana Navarro stunned her readers this afternoon when she revealed that for the first time in her life, she will be voting for a Democrat for Florida’s Governor.

The McCain acolyte and Contra apologist penned an op-ed for CNN.com explaining her decision to side with Democrat Andrew Gillum over the Trump-backed Ron DeSantis and how hard it was for her as a lifelong conservative to do so.

I am a lifelong Republican. Since I began voting, I have always voted for Republicans running in state races in Florida. This year, I filled out my ballot for Democrat Andrew Gillum. And on Thursday, I finally put it in the mail.

Ron DeSantis, a Republican, ran a primary campaign in which he portrayed himself as Donald Trump’s Mini-Me. His signature issue during the primary was building a wall, which is weird because, well, Florida is not a border state. It’s a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides.

I don’t want a Trump echo chamber for governor in Florida. I want a governor who puts the interest of the state above loyalty to a president of his party.

While she has her reservations about Gillum, like how she’s scared of “progressives” because she’s a centrist and somehow still believes that raising corporate taxes is going to hurt the economy, and has to break ranks with friends and even her fiancee in order to do the right thing, she knows that voting for Gillum is the right thing to do, because DeSantis represents everything she despises about Donald Trump:

I hoped that after the primary, DeSantis would distance himself from Trump. But instead, he doubled down. The race has been tinged with accusations of racism against DeSantis from day one. DeSantis now says he supports Trump’s latest proposal of ending birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship is granted by the 14th Amendment. Trump will be in Florida twice to headline rallies for DeSantis in the closing days of the campaign. These two are tied at the hip.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the racist, anti-immigration ad Trump posted on Twitter the same night he came to Florida to hold a rally. Trump won the 2016 campaign through a divide-and-conquer strategy. In his campaign announcement a year earlier, Trump said Mexicans were “bringing crime, they’re rapists.” He has not stopped blowing dog whistles and fabricating culture wars since.

His response to Charlottesville, the Muslim ban, the National Anthem controversy … the list is endless. It disgusts me that, not even a week after a madman who may have been triggered by the hysteria surrounding migrants killed 11 Jews in a house of worship in Pittsburgh, Trump is back to his old playbook of demonizing immigrants.

She’s absolutely right in her assessment of the 2018 elections — that they’re going to be a referendum on Donald Trump and his disgusting brand of xenophobic conspiracies and populist delusions. It is absolutely imperative that we take a stand for American values and vote out the Republicans that enable and support his white supremacist agenda.

Read the whole op-ed here.

 

 

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.