A New Hampshire Democrat changes parties

Recently, I’ve made the decision to leave the Democratic Party, and I write, respectfully, to provide residents in Enfield, Lebanon and Hanover the reasons for my doing so.

When I was growing up, Democrats were the party of the middle class and working families, such as the one to which I belonged. I was raised, primarily, by a single mother and among our homes we included trailers and trailer parks. My mother worked hard for her money, and I knew at the time that any tax dollars taken from her pocket to support those perceived to be worse off economically, impacted her ability to put food on the table.

Now, of course, the class divide has only become sharper. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas; the family wage has been replaced by the minimum wage. Despite calls from national leaders to return to bread-and-butter issues, however, New Hampshire Democrats continue to focus on such issues as gender identity and support for undocumented immigrants. Remember the days when President Bill Clinton and African American Congresswoman Barbara Jordan called for tighter borders? They did this because they recognized the need to fill American jobs with American workers; the working class was their base.

I’ve been a Democrat most of my adult life, and this was a difficult decision for me. I believe that the party is bankrupt of ideas, and in the absence of good ideas, I see a focus on what Sen. Elissa Slotkin has recently called “niche” issues. I don’t know if the Democratic party will ever return to its roots, but election results for the last decade indicate that voters are running out of patience.

Wendy Piper

Enfield

Democrats respond

Wendy Piper has not been paying attention. In explaining her decision to change her party affiliation to Republican, she proves that she is not informed about her newly chosen party’s agenda. Nor is she aware of the ways in which the state’s new budget, enacted by a Republican trifecta, fails the people of New Hampshire.

Piper appears to be concerned with the growing class divide, yet she is choosing the party that eliminated taxes on the wealthiest Granite Staters and that raised the property taxes of those least able to pay. She seems to be concerned that hard-earned money is being taken from taxpayers’ pockets in order to “support those perceived to be worse off economically,” and yet she supports the Republican system of Education Freedom Accounts, in which hard-earned money is taken from taxpayers’ pockets in order to pay wealthy families’ private school tuition.

Piper credits Republican leadership for the state of child health in New Hampshire, so she obviously did not notice Republican attempts to make childhood vaccines harder to access, nor Republican cuts to health care for children.

Additionally, Piper is mistaken in her belief that it is the Democrats who focus on gender identity and immigration. In fact, it was Republicans who needlessly introduced and passed gratuitously cruel bills limiting the rights of trans youth and immigrants. One bill, for example, forbids trans youth, their parents, and their doctors from freely making health care decisions; another takes away drivers’ licenses from legally admitted migrants whose asylum cases are pending.

Piper’s letter is riddled with contradictions that make it impossible to know her true values, other than political ambition.

This letter was signed by seven Democratic members of the Grafton County delegation. The commission’s chairman, Rep. George Sykes, D-Lebanon, wished to remain neutral.