by WorldTribune Staff, April 5, 2018
A former North Carolina Democrat, who was a Charlotte LGBTQ activist and once helped manage a Planned Parenthood office, has switched parties and now describes himself as an “avid Trump supporter,” a report said.
Ty Turner, who as recently as 2015 was a member of the North Carolina Democratic Party’s executive committee, is now the GOP candidate in NC House District 88, the Raleigh News & Observer reported on April 4.
Turner, 37, is running for the seat held by Democrat Mary Belk.
Turner said he realized he was a Republican in 2015 during a political boot camp in suburban Maryland sponsored by the nonpartisan Congressional Black Caucus Institute.
“I went in as a Democrat. From that point the wheels were starting to turn. … The (Institute) enlightened me that there is another side.”
Turner told the News & Observer that he has come to believe that African-Americans have to start holding the Democratic Party “accountable for 54 years of inaction” since passage of the Civil Rights Act and voting legislation.
He calls black voters who regularly vote for Democrats “direct deposit Democrats” and says the GOP more closely aligns with his values.
In remarks at the Wake Forest, NC Republican Club on April 9, Turner said however that he had a message for Republicans: “Please stop with the defense.”
The facts are on our side, he said of the GOP, and “facts have no feelings.”
Turner said though he worked for Planned Parenthood he’s long been anti-abortion, but he believes abortion is a woman’s decision. “The key is I should not make a decision what a female does with her body,” he says. “That’s up to her and God.”
In 2016 Turner was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. He told one reporter there that, “The Democratic Party left me. I’m not a rubber stamp. … It was moving far left. It took God out of its platform.”
The News & Observer noted that Turner was once quoted as saying he had begun “to see Republicans take the role of ‘the haves’ and they don’t want ‘the have nots’ to have anything.”
“That statement was made out of my ignorance of what the Republican Party was until I got into the party,” Turner said. “That’s not the case.”
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