Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson has been elaborating on his decision to leave the Democratic Party and become a Republican, discussing how the left fails to take public safety or responsible taxpayer spending seriously.
He explained in a new interview with CBS News Texas that he started seriously contemplating switching parties when the “Defund the Police” movement embroiled not only Dallas but the entire nation after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
“I started to see where the left actually is and where the Democratic Party actually is and where progressives actually are on issues of safety,” he said. “It became very clear to me that I was in the wrong party and that there really is no conservative wing of the Democratic Party left — certainly not on that issue. And so, I switched.”
He explained that he joined the Democratic Party when he first voted at the age of 18. This year, Johnson turned 48.
“I’m not the same guy 30 years later,” he told the news outlet.
In response to critics who claim he betrayed Dallas voters’ trust by switching parties, Johnson noted that municipal elections in Dallas are non-partisan.
“It doesn’t even make sense to me. The voters in Dallas vote for a mayor on a non-partisan basis,” he said. “When a high-profile member of a party leaves, you have to say something, and I suppose it’s something they came up with — that he betrayed the voters. … It’s on its face ridiculous.”
He added that he ran his mayoral campaigns billing himself as a “problem-solver” who worked with both sides of the political aisle.
Johnson said he decided to formally announce his decision to switch parties because he planned on voting in the upcoming Republican primary, which would have been public information. He declined to share who he plans to vote for.
“There’s zero chance I was going to create some news story for some enterprising reporter that I voted in a Republican primary and thought I could get away with it,” he said. “It was going to become public that I switched. … That was my news to break, not somebody else’s.”
Johnson announced his party switch in September, just days after the Dallas City Council passed a record-high budget of $4.63 billion and a $120 million increase in residents’ property tax burden.
The mayor supported a proposal by Council Member Cara Mendelsohn (District 12) to adopt a “no-new-revenue” tax rate and budget that would see the City operate on the same amount of taxpayer money it did the previous year. However, the majority of council members voted against the measure.
Johnson maintained in his recent interview that City spending must be reined in and that the property tax burden on Dallas homeowners is still too high.
“Here’s the fundamental question that the City Council seems to struggle with answering, at least some members of it; I have a few that are with me on this. Is it not possible that we could run the City of Dallas government next year on the same amount of money that we ran it on last year, or even less possibly?” he said.
“There is significant inefficiency and significant numbers of things that we do that, frankly, somebody else could do better and at lower cost and more efficiently,” he added.
Johnson also noted that spending more on the City’s park system and reducing violent crime continue to be two of his top priorities moving forward.