Kurt Bardella

Opinion contributor

My professional success has been a direct byproduct of Republican wins and Democratic losses. In the first congressional election I worked on back in 2006, I knew that if my Republican candidate won, that meant a life-changing opportunity for me: to leave San Diego and come to Washington. He did, and I did, too. In 2010, when Republicans won back a majority in the House of Representatives, my boss became a powerful chairman of a high-profile committee.

For years, it didn’t occur to me to think about the ideology behind these victories. To me, it was sport. Us vs. them. My team against theirs. The more points we scored and the more wins we racked up, the more our narrative prevailed and the more power we gained. It was tribal.

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After eight months of President Trump, I see just how shortsighted — and dangerous — that approach to politics was.

I’ve worked across the ideological spectrum of the GOP — with Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, arguably the most moderate Republican in the Senate, and for Rep. Darrell Issa of California when he was chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. I was the principal spokesperson for the committee when we conducted a series of aggressive investigations of President Obama’s administration. I was also a media consultant for Breitbart News from 2014 to 2016. I and several colleagues quit amid the controversy surrounding Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Corey Lewandowski, who had grabbed then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields.

My point: I’ve had an up-close look at the party and party-aligned organizations from just about every angle you can imagine. Breitbart’s shabby treatment of its own reporter as a sop to Trump — with whom the news outlet was closely aligned — was a major wake-up call. But it took the reality of the Trump administration to force me to confront some of the ugly realities about the GOP that, for years, I completely ignored because that was my team.

The president and many Republicans in Congress refuse to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, for instance, yet Trump expressed no skepticism before staring at the recent solar eclipse at an exact moment in time forecast by scientists decades ago.

Trump has advocated for law enforcement to use excessive force, ignoring the escalating tensions and violence between public safety officers and the communities in which police have unnecessarily claimed lives.

Republicans were quick to denounce Trump’s response to the protests in Charlottesville, Va., but they conveniently ignore the role they’ve played in furthering the racial divide in this country. From voter suppression campaigns to racially disparate sentencing guidelines, Republicans, long before Trump, have pressed ahead with a policy agenda that systemically attacks people of color.

While some Republicans have stepped up to criticize Trump’s pardoning of a racist former sheriff in Arizona, most GOP policymakers have long promoted an immigration policy and worldview that enabled Joe Arpaio to feel emboldened to flagrantly violate the law and racially profile Hispanics.

Even Trump’s inhumane decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which temporarily protects 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought here as children, stems from a worldview held by many conservative Republicans such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rep. Steve King of Iowa.

I still agree with Republicans on the need for tax reform, a strong national defense, vigorous oversight of the federal government, and addressing waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars. But the inescapable truth is this is no longer my party.

I can imagine that it’s infuriating for some Democrats to read this. They’re thinking: You created all the conditions for Trump, but now you want to disown him? It’s the reaction I saw when Julius Krein wrote his op-ed admitting that his support from Trump was a mistake. And I understand — I wasn’t a Trump guy, but that’s the pushback I got after quitting Breitbart. Oh, so now you don’t want anything to do with it.

But resetting your political compass isn’t easy. My advice — my ask — for liberals, progressives and Democrats in general is that you help encourage that type of self-examination by not reflexively putting it down. Rather than asking why it took someone so long to arrive at a specific conclusion in the first place, maybe the thing to do is welcome them.

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Don’t assume that everyone who voted for this president is a dupe or a racist. I’m sure a lot of people who voted for Trump have buyers’ remorse, but that doesn’t discount the root of why they voted for him in the first place. There was something lacking in the vision and message that the Democratic Party presented.

It would be easy to dismiss the Trump movement as a bunch of uninformed, "alt-right," gun-toting rednecks who think the wrong side won the Civil War, but I promise you if that’s the Democrats' takeaway from this election, they’ll never win another one again.

Right now, the Republican Party has been hijacked by its extreme base — leaving a number of people, just like me, with no place to go. This is a unique opportunity for the Democratic Party to fill that void, but it can only happen if Democrats make an honest effort. Politics is about ideas and policies, yes. But to win on those ideas, you have to win elections, and you do that by addition, not subtraction.

Kurt Bardella, president of Endeavor Strategies, is a former spokesman for Breitbart News, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Olympia Snowe. Follow him on Twitter: @kurtbardella

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