The Switcher
At 64, Barbara Clark is 17 years clean from her drug addiction, closer to her faith and children than ever, and far removed from her role as the director of Ohio’s chapter of ACORN — once one of the nation’s largest social justice organizations of low and moderate-income families. Back in 2008, Clark led the charge in getting people to vote for Barack Obama.
The Columbus, Ohio, native said her support for Obama that year was simple: First, he was a black man going for the highest office in the land, and secondly, “he talked about hope and change. And me working in the community as an outreach person, we needed hope and change.”
Clark supported his re-election in 2012 with the group AFL-CIO’s Working America, another progressive get-out-the-vote organization. In 2016, she did not volunteer for Hillary Clinton, but she did vote for her.
For her whole life, Clark said, she thought the Democratic Party reflected the needs of the entire community. But then she said she had a political awakening: “I looked around my community and thought, ‘This is what we get?’ There has got to be something more, because hope and change never made it here.”
Her decision to switch from Democrat to Republican turned out to be easier than she imagined.
“Me being from a black community, I just went along [with] what everybody else said: ‘You’re supposed to be a Democrat.’ But when I started thinking, ‘What does the Democrat Party get me?’, it’s the same thing every election: ‘We’re going to fix schools, we’re going to fix prisons, we’re going to fix jobs, and we’re going to make sure you’ll be able to start your own businesses.’
“We never got it.”
Clark didn’t just switch parties, she actually worked for the Trump campaign in 2020. While her state rewarded Republicans with more seats in the state legislature and gave Trump a healthy 9 percentage point victory this year, his overall loss was hard for Clark to accept. But her newfound conservatism isn’t going anywhere.
“I believe that I will be Republican the rest of my life,” she said.