Party Switcher

Via Ed Cone, it looks like my red state just got a touch bluer:

State Rep. Russell Capps of Raleigh will be getting a most unusual Democratic challenger next year — the president of the Wake County Republican Mens Club.

Chris Mintz, a Raleigh financial planner, is not only resigning as club president, but is changing his registration to Democrat.

Mintz, 30, said he decided to leave the Republican Party because he thinks it is too focused on social issues rather than on economic issues. He also said the GOP is becoming less tolerant of different viewpoints.

"The Republican Party appears to be going further and further to the right," Mintz said. "It's really not the party for me any longer. I'm not bitter. I have a lot of friends who are Republicans."

"I think we are ignoring issues that are important — like education, economic development and health care," he said.

A few or more years ago, when I lived in South Carolina as the Republican Party was growing in strength, it was common to hear some former Democrats explain their switch this way: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me." That was usually a coded way to express opposition to civil rights, an issue which represented, unfortunately, a real problem for many people after the Democratic Party's embrace of it in the 1960s. But today, perhaps, we're seeing the mirror image of that old trend, as some people are starting to realize that a Republican Party increasingly obsessed with god, guns, and gays has left them.