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“ ‘How could I look at those three kids and tell them I’m proud to support Donald Trump? I can’t. I won’t.’ ”
That’s Michael Taylor, mayor of Sterling Heights, Mich., pointing to his family in a tweet this week as reasons why he was about to cast his first-ever vote for a Democrat.
“I think Joe Biden is the candidate who can unify all of the Democrats,” Taylor, a Republican son of Republican parents, told the Chicago Tribune. “He’s the candidate who can appeal to moderates and Republicans like me who don’t want to see four more years of President Trump.”
His comments came before voters headed to the polls on Tuesday in Michigan, as well as in Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington. Biden currently has 664 delegates to Bernie Sanders’s 573, according to a tracker by the Wall Street Journal. It takes 1,991 to win the nomination on the first ballot at this summer’s Democratic convention.
Taylor, until now, has proven to be a devoted conservative. According to the Tribune, he tangled with liberal students in high school as the author of a right-leaning column for his campus. He later became a member of the Tea Party and ultimately cast his vote for Donald Trump in 2016.
“I think what you saw in 2016 was people saying, ‘We’re sick of these places on the coasts, New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. … dictating to us what’s going to happen,” he explained. “We’ve got some political power, we’ve got some political might and we’re going to flex it,.”
Taylor, now 36, took office in 2014 at the age of 31, replacing South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg as the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100,000 people. He recalled to the Tribune why Trump earned his vote in 2016.
“I remember thinking this Trump thing is insane, but when it was down to him and Hillary, I kind of said, ‘Well, you are a Republican, and yeah he’s nuts, but maybe he’ll get better and you know he’s going to lower taxes,” he said. “I slowly talked myself into it. ‘He can’t seriously be this deranged once he gets in there,’ and he’s even more deranged now than I thought then. So, I take the blame.”
